Dividing Up Your Niche the Normal Way

When it comes to market niches, marketers have a word for what we've called "mixing" in earlier tasks. They call it "segmenting."

Segmenting a market niche means to divide it up into smaller--and more profitable--niches.

Here's an example. Suppose your market niche is backpacking. That's a great topic by itself. But suppose you segmented it into backpacking for women, backpacking for children and backpacking for fishermen. You'd have three markets instead of one. Your web site's content would be written especially for the smaller segments and therefore would be more interesting to them. Your visitors would be more likely to tell their friends about your site. They'd be more likely to buy those pack frames you offer that are specifically designed for a woman's body or for a child's or for a fisherman who wants to bring back his catch of rainbow trout. Because your sites and your products cater to specialized audiences the people in those audiences feel you're loyal to them so you get more loyalty back.

By dividing up or segmenting your niche, you can:

• Create a product that meets a narrow market's needs better.
• Make members of your niche feel that your product is designed just for them so it solves their problem better.
• Sell a lot more of your product at higher prices, which means more income for you.

In earlier 20 minute tasks, you focused on you and the niches to which you belong. You also segmented those niches by combining two or more of them. But market segmenting is something that good marketers have done for decades and, in addition to the mixing you've done, there are some normal, standard ways to segment that you ought to try.

Your 20 Minute Task

For this 20 minute task, start by choosing a market niche that you starred during one of the previous 20 minute tasks.

Consumer niche

If it's a "consumer" niche, where you would sell products and services directly to individuals, try dividing your niche up by:

• Geography. Could you do it by postal code? By city or state or country?
• Gender: male and female.
• Age: child, teen, young adult, middle aged, elderly.
• Education: high school, college, graduate school.
• Social class: lower, working, middle, upper
• Income: less than $50,000, $50,000 or more
• Stage in family life cycle: newlyweds, parents of young children, empty nesters
• Marital status: single, married, widowed, divorced, married multiple times
• Ethnicity: White (not hispanic), black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic.
• Religion: Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jew, Mormon
• Life style: conservative, exciting, trendy, economical
• Attitudes and beliefs: environmentalist, security conscious, liberal, conservative, etc.
• Interests: sports, books, shopping, stamp collecting, etc.

Business niche

If it's a "business" niche, where you would sell products and services to other businesses, apply these methods to your niche to segment it.

• Businesses only buy to increase revenue, decrease expenses or maintain the status quo. So put each of those purposes with your niche. Suppose your site sells software. Can you segment your customers into ones who are trying to increase revenues and others that are trying to decrease expenses? If you can, you'll have two markets.
• Can you divide the business into vertical markets? A vertical market is one that deals with one industry, such as accounting or computing. Say, for example, that your passion is business computing. Could you have a site about business computing for accountants and a different one for lawyers? You may write similar content for each one, but the accounting site would use examples and have special products and information for accountants while the other would do the same for lawyers.
• One way to divide up businesses into vertical markets is to look at the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) or the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. These codes break up industries into fairly small groups so you can segment your niche. (You'll be looking at them more when you make further plans for your business.)
• You can segment by functional groups within a company, such as purchasing, accounting, sales, human resources, and so on. Can you divide your niche into sub-niches on these different elements?
• You can segment by position in the supply chain: manufacturers, wholesalers, transporters, retailers, etc.

Whether you're segmenting a consumer or business niche, write down the combinations that make sense. Find as many reasonable segments in your 20 minutes as you can. Then file your results in your Market Niches folder.