When you first start your business you may have picked a committed three or four pronged approach and business plan and several areas of targets to meet. Over time however, you may realise that some of the targets are harder to meet than others. When this happens you have two ways to deal with it. One, you bring in more experienced personnel and/or inject more capital into upskilling your current team or cut your losses and decide to niche.
I do realise though It's never that cut or dried. Sometimes you need to project just how much time and money you afford to stick out your current plan. If you are actually still making some money and can perhaps push your business plan another few months you might have chance to bridge the gap in your coffers. If however, you have already reached your limit, it might be time to niche.
Most businesses start with a plan to dominate an area or two and over time they realise that they're better off niching in one area specifically. It's exactly what happened to me as it happens! Scaling down your audience can be hard though and a little scary if you're concerned that your piece of the market might be small initially (obviously it will be).
Having a niched audience can however be a good thing too. Your audience will be more focused, more likely to purchase and also more likely to refer as well. So how do you niche your business from a more generalised stand point?
What are Your Goals/Dreams?
If your goal is to provide beauty care products to a wide range of people from young to old - then that takes into account lots of different skins types, skin conditions and limitations as well as different price points.
By scaling down you can afford to keep only a certain amount of stock for your niche, with less waste and reduce your buying, storage and promotion. You'll also have maybe better.
You don't need to change your goal or dreams too dramatically, they just need to be more focused and targeted.
Who is your Customer?
Reducing your audience means you can spend less time and money trying to reach everyone. Now you need to market smarter.
To do this you need to create Customer Avatars or Customer Profiles that match your new niche. Now you need to think about what exact problem you're solving for them. Also consider what else is going on in their lives that may help them make a decision to purchase. For example. Instead of the above example, you're now targeting parents of children under the age of 10 for beauty products.
With this in mind, you might want to use images of women with young children in your marketing and perhaps have them carrying a child on their hip as they come back from a shopping trip or maybe giving their kids a kiss once returning from work (men can be stay-at-home too). Using a phrase like "We know you're busy taking care or your kids or at work, but it all starts with looking after yourself. Use our cold cream once a day to freshen up and revitalise and show the world you're on top of everything!"
Calls to Action
These will most likely change just like your target audience has changed. Now you can laser focus on a smaller amount of products, with the aforementioned audience. In my experience business owners think the only time to do a call to action is when you're doing a paid ad but that just isn't the case. You can ask people at any stage to do something, as long as whatever it is is beneficial to them, they'll likely do it!
For example, calls to action are not only Lead Magnets or special offers, they can be How To's, Learn more etc. Serving your audience is always a positive way to make them click.
Price Point
You can definitely manage your pricing better when you niche as well. Mainly because you have such a good understanding of who your audience is and what benefits you give them, this way you can offer much greater value.
You may also want to look at offering a range of prices within your field of expertise as well, like a Bronze, Silver and Gold cover for example or for products maybe different size and or delivery options.
Upselling
When you niche there is always the chance that you could be potentially closing the door on some profitable areas to your business. To this end, rather than stopping what previously worked why not still offer it but with less emphasis and promotional push than you did before?
What I have seen successfully work before is you niche and then offer only VIP or certain level paid members / clients the same offer. You might want to get someone else who has niched in this missing field and collaborate directly with them to provide this missing element as well. Just a side note, if you're looking at doing this, make sure you have a formal partnership agreement in place to make sure everyone knows they are getting out of this arrangement!
Brand & Marketing
Well I had to mention this didn't I! Remember when you niche you will also need to look at your Brand Persona again. It may not need a massive overhaul but its worth looking at annually anyway.
With this in mind, the way you post, to whom you post to etc will change and it might be worth doing a rebrand or perhaps updating your logo in order to help people understand you have actually made a change. Unfortunately our audience doesn't read the text of our posts every time, so make sure you do a soft launch at least IF you are going to be changing your Brand Persona and niching down significantly.
There was one such brand I remember about 4 years ago who did this and they changed pretty much everything about the customer, brand logo, colours and persona. Not every change needs to be so significant but you still need to formally "announce" it.
If it's time you niched and want some feedback on how it can work for you, then do not hesitate to contact me and we can breathe some fresh life into your business.