This is an edited transcript form a previous YouTube video and podcast.
If you owned a 1960s red classic Ferrari and it was in a pretty bad state and you knew that you wanted to restore it to show room condition. Would you rather take it to a) a regular auto body repair shop that repairs just any kind of car or b) an auto repair shop that specializes in restoring 1960s red classic Ferraris to show room condition? Which would you rather go to?
In this blog post I want to talk to you about why choosing a niche is more important than ever. Why choosing a niche will save your business (and if anything help grow your business), as well as how to get over that fear of choosing a niche that you think might be too small. Also why businesses that don’t choose a niche are going to die and suffer
I’ve got some free training here on how to choose the perfect niche for your funnel business. Even if you’ve tried to find a niche before I want to show you the mind numbingly dull secret behind choosing the perfect niche and what Ryan Deiss does to find a profitable niche.
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I want to explain how important choosing the right niche is for your business. And the common household kitchen in my opinion, is a really good place to demonstrate the exact problem that a lot of businesses are facing.
If you’re struggling to attract new customers and leads to your business, or if you’re tired of chasing them and want to have them come to you because you’re magnetically attracting them.
Or if you’re struggling to differentiate yourself against all the other website designers or marketing service businesses (or any other business competition), or maybe you’re just struggling to differentiate why businesses should work with you, and why customers should hand you money, it’s probably because you’re not defining your niche or the specific audience that you can help, strongly enough.
Most people are still setting up and running their business with the same thinking that we had 30 years ago or 50 years ago. When we had small businesses that long ago, there were a certain set of rules that determined whether your business would be successful or not.
The rules have changed but people are still setting up businesses as if they’re in the 1960s or 1970s and 1980s, without realizing just how important the rules are, that have changed.
30 years ago, it made sense to have a general shop. If I was selling kitchen equipment, it made sense to have all the different things that you could get for a kitchen, in one location.
It made sense to be a generalist, because if you were to specific, you would have to have a lot of customers in a very small geographic area who wanted something specific.
So if you go for a general area like kitchen store, or just a hardware store, you’re more likely to find success because you’re attracting a lot of people in a small area to come and get all the things that most people need.
It wouldn’t have made sense 30 – 50 years ago, to create a specialist store that only sold knives or only sold hammers. You couldn’t have had a shop that just sold one speciality such as knives and been successful because people would have to travel to get to you and your store.
And if people are only going to travel 20 miles away, how many people just want to store within a certain area that just sold knives? Yes, in very densely populated areas, this might have worked. But the reality is most people don’t live in densely populated populated areas. And even those that do, wouldn’t have gone to just one place to buy one product.
When we’ve got items like knives, and we set up a business on the internet, there is so much specificity to what people want and what we can sell, that we can set up a business that just sells knives because the Internet has changed the way that people do business.
People respect and are searching for specificity. Just like the 1960s Ferrari example that I gave at the start of the post. If people are looking for knives or looking for a particular type of knife, it makes sense to set up a business that just sells knives. Interestingly, even now, just having a knife shop isn’t specialist enough, you would even have to go deeper and further into that niche and find a micro market of even 1000 people.
In an earlier video, I talked about expert status and how you have to stick to a message and a key concept and a topic and repeat it over and over and over. And the way that you achieve expert status is by doing that.
Let’s say we decided to set up a knife shop a bit like Flint And Flame. A knife manufacturer who I think are great, I’ve got a bunch of their knives. They sell a very specific type of knife and they set a very specific price point as well as a specific type of customer. The “pro-mateurs”, like professional amateurs or like really high quality amateurs, people who would respect a particular type of knife with a particular type of balance. For example, I love my fluted sashimi knife.
As opposed to Victorinox, who make fantastic knives. But they’re designed for professional chefs who are working to look on a budget. Who also need something that’s going to withstand kitchen punishment.
This is the core concept of the niche. The niche is not defined by the product that you go after, but it’s something that you create and you become.
If you want to become the world’s greatest marketing funnel builder for SaaS business that have Android applications. And you want to help them convert free users into paying users. That’s a very specific need and a specific niche.
It doesn’t make sense to be a generalist anymore. Because I can find a niche with the vast amount of information that’s available on the internet and find an expert who’s only going to work on this particular area.
When you go after a very small, hyper specific niche, and you stick to your message over and over and over and you keep telling people “this is who you help. This is the problem you can solve. This is the solution you can get”, you’ll start attracting clients, as opposed to trying to chase clients.
A lot of businesses in today’s high streets and traditional business areas, are really struggling today, because they refuse to play by the rules of the game today. Instead, they want to stay as a generalist rather than adapting to their audience and defining who they’re going to help.
Just like Ryan Deiss says, “businesses are defined by the markets they serve, not the products they sell”, and instead of changing with the times and realizing just how important niching down your market is, they stay general and they will die.
You shouldn’t be afraid of finding a market that’s too small. In Seth Golden’s book, “This Is Marketing”, he talks about these micro markets of 1000 people that are far more sustainable now, because of the vast reach of the internet.
We can find 1000 people who we connect with better than anybody else. And now we’ve developed this true fandom this true relationship with them, as opposed to staying as a generalist and losing those customers. Don’t be afraid of finding a micro market, be afraid of staying as a generalist, because general audiences attract general pay.
If you want to stop competing on price, like when customers say “yeah, well, I could get the same kind of thing on Wix or I could do it myself”.
If you want to stop that, you need to find a niche. No one ever argues with the leader or the expert within a niche who’s created that area. Because it’s so specific that only you are one willing to say “yeah, I can help with that”. The massive advantage that you can bring your marketing funnel business is to go after a niche. You shouldn’t be afraid of finding a small market you should be afraid of staying as a generalist because that will kill your business.
I’ve got some free training in the description down below on how to choose the perfect niche for your funnel business. Even if you’ve tried to find a niche before I want to show you the mind numbingly dull secret behind choosing the perfect niche. And what Ryan Deiss does to find a profitable niche
Has that helped with your ideas around finding a niche and why it’s so important and why it’s not enough to be a generalist anymore? Let me know in the comments below is this helped or if there was anything that particularly made sense to you.
