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How to Define Your Niche Market

July 25, 2007 by Liz

Yes! YES!

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Let’s take a minute to go back over the foundation — two key understandings frame and support a well-defined niche market.

  • What businesslike thing do you love doing?
  • Who is your prototype ideal customer?

A business that cannot answer those two questions specifically and explicity will define a loose, untargeted niche market. The end result will be an unclear offer — probably too broad — to customers they don’t know.

If you can’t describe what you do and who your customer is in one simple sentence each, keep working on those questions above.

When you know them like you know yourself . . .

A niche market is the group that your prototype ideal customer represents. That’s why it’s critical that we define the prototype customer as well as we possibly can. Because now we’re going to extrapolate up.

You might think it’s a waste of time to prototype the ideal customer in the first place. STOP RIGHT THERE.

What gets lost by skipping that step is the information we acquire by deeply thinking about how one human in our customer group will respond. The loss is detail most folks won’t take time to think through in one step.

Yu can get details without the context of an individual human reference, but skip that step, you are stealing deep knowledge from yourself. If I tell you, if you read it, even when a real customer relates the buying experience, it is not the same as thinking through one customer’s identity yourself.

It’s you, you’re investing in.

It’s survival. If we don’t know our customers as well as ourselves, sooner or later, we will fail. I don’t need a coach to tell me how to do that. Neither do you.

How to Define Your Niche Market

Look at that ideal prototype customer. Find the group that he or she represents. Use the ideal customer to find that group’s needs, wants, and values. You know how to do that as sure as you know what things are everybody things and what things are your best friend’s idiosyncracies.

  • What is your ideal customer’s age group? Define an age range narrow enough to keep within a set of tastes and values. Spanning a 10-year age difference might work for undertakers, but probably will not for the needs of college students or new home buyers.
  • How is your ideal customer exactly like every member of the group? What needs does the group have in common? What do they all desire? How can you use your previous success — what you’ve already provided — to serve the larger group?
  • What is the group’s biggest worry? Is it the same as the ideal customer’s? What other issues does the group have?
  • What are the major ways that the group interacts? How do they communicate with each other? What secrets do they keep
  • What are the major ways that the group solves problems and finds answers?
  • How does this group define a good day? How do they define a bad one? What other groups do they get along with? What groups do they work with that they don’t understand?
  • What problem can you take off their desk? How can you save them time, money, or pain?

Picture the group in a meeting room. Have you accounted for everyone there? What part of the group will love your product or service as much as you do?

That’s your niche. That’s the customer you want to serve.

Next: The Four-Part Definition of a Business

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Is your business stuck? Check out the Start-up Strategy Package. Work with Liz!!

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss’ Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

Filed Under: Inside-Out Thinking, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, ideal-customer, Inside-Out Thinking, Liz-Strauss, Liz-Strauss-Inside-Out-Thinking-to-Building-a-Solid-Bus

A Model to Describe One Ideal Customer

July 24, 2007 by Liz

Get Specific

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Our ideal customers — those folks who love that businesslike thing we love doing, that we do to serve them — they are the foundation of our business. Pick one of them.

One? But the marketing guy said . . .

Yep. One — only one. Get specific. Get up close. Make it a real person. Crawl inside his or her head.

From one real human being with whom you have had a success, we can extrapolate many facets of what will and will not work for a business. Think of the one you choose as your prototype ideal customer. Use this model to get closer to whom that customer is.

A Model to Describe One Ideal Customer

Use these questions to make sure you are specific because we’re building a model.

  • What job or group does this person represent? (designers, new mothers, undertakers, college students, used car buyers)
  • What is this one person’s biggest worry, threat, thing that wakes him or her up at 2 in the morning?
  • How does this one person see him- or herself? What is the value that this one person thinks that he or she brings to the world?
  • What problem did you solve for this person? How long did it take? How would you value what you provided? How would he or she value it?

Answer these questions. Then write, record, or tell a friend a description of your prototype ideal customer. You’re ready to explore what he or she needs, desires, and wants.

We learn as writers that individual readers share common interests. We learn as marketers to meet each individual where he or she stands. I learned as a publisher that a well-defined prototype is exact and as explicit as possible. A strong prototype is like a single stone in the water — we can extrapolate it in rings to larger and larger views.

Who is your prototype customer? C’mon describe one for me.

Next: How to define your niche market, moving from one to a group.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Is your business stuck? Check out the Start-up Strategy Package. Work with Liz!!

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss’ Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

Filed Under: Customer Think, Inside-Out Thinking, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, ideal-customer, Inside-Out Thinking, Liz-Strauss, Liz-Strauss-Inside-Out-Thinking-to-Building-a-Solid-Bus

The Ideal Customer Test

July 23, 2007 by Liz

Pick One

inside-out thinking

Who is your customer? Before you answer, if you are going to say “small business owners,” STOP. You can’t build a business foundation trying to read 25 million minds at once. Small business owners is not a niche it’s a population.

In my presentation at SOBCon07, I had a single slide that said

Choose your customers.

I didn’t spend nearly enough time talking about those three words.

The key to a successful business is truly connecting with the ideal customers for the service or product we offer. The process starts by doing what we love, because doing what we love makes good business sense. The next step is to find the folks who love what we do.

How do we do that?

Look to your past successes. Who has come to you in the past for what you love doing and then loved what you provided?

Make a list of the people who have already loved what businesslike thing you love doing for them. Now you have some idea of who your ideal customer might be. Use this model to see who on that list passes the Ideal Customer Test.

Ideal Customer Test

  • The ideal customer is part of a group. You don’t really want customers who are loners. Let someone else sell to the hermits and the recluses.
  • The ideal customer’s group is relational. They don’t have to sing kum-ba-yah by the campfire. Lawyers are relational. They talk to each other and ask what works. Even corporate clients check out the competition and do horse trading.
  • The ideal customer wants to be better . . . to keep up with the folks at the front of the group.
  • The ideal customer has money and the potential to make more.
  • YOUR ideal customer looks a lot like YOU.

It’s true none of us are a field test or focus group, BUT, pay attention to that last point. If you are looking for the folks who love what you do . . .

Your ideal customer is likely to think, act, and respond like you, because it’s human nature to think people who think like we do are brilliantly smart.

That’s how our customers look like us.
That’s why they love what we do.

Skeptical — huh?
Try it this way It’s unlikely that an information geek is going to feel comfortable working with me. I’m just not linear. I’d send him to my friend. Greg Balanko-Dickson the Remote Control CEO. He’s a self-proclaimed information geek. The chart at the top of his blog shows the difference immediately. Greg does what he loves and the information geek would love what he does.

Do what you love in service to those who love what you do. —Steve Farber

Who loves what you do?

Next: Questions to Describe Your Ideal Customer

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Is your business stuck? Check out the Start-up Strategy Package. Work with Liz!!

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss’ Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

Filed Under: Customer Think, Inside-Out Thinking, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, ideal-customer, Inside-Out Thinking, Liz-Strauss, Liz-Strauss-Inside-Out-Thinking-to-Building-a-Solid-Bus

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