Niche Marketing and its Power

There is an old adage, “When everybody’s your customer, nobody’s your customer,” and it is absolutely true and very important. 

Only giant companies have the resources necessary to market a product or service to everybody who can buy it, and it is a terrible mistake for small companies and entrepreneurs to market “broad.”

When I ask somebody about their market and they say “Chicago”, I know they are in trouble. Even “all the high-income homeowners in Chicago” is too big. The very best favor most marketers can do for themselves is to narrow, narrow, and then narrow some more of their focus.

Here are some criteria to consider:

Size itself
Ability to reach the market affordably
A known responsive market
Affinity with the market
Ability to reach the market efficiently
A market with a reason to be responsive NOW
Understanding of the market (Empathy)

Let’s talk about Precision Target Marketing.

Much money is lost hitting targets that don’t matter.

Smart resource allocation can transform a practice or sales career almost overnight. You must use your dollars and hours wisely.

In marketing, DISCRIMINATE is a good word. You must discriminate. This means excluding the majority of people and delivering your marketing message to a carefully selected minority.

I call them High Probability Prospects.

Let’s take an example. Let’s assume you sell landscaping services, fishponds, and ornamental plants. You transform ordinary backyard into beautiful gardens. And you want to sell your services in the neighborhood where you live. The “sloppiest” thing you could do would be to run around and put an advertising door hanger on every doorknob. Cheap, but still wasteful.

The smart thing would be, first, to separate the homeowners form the renters. Next, break out the homeowners by value or income. Then, direct all your resources at these precisely chosen, ideal prospects.

My dear friend Gary Halbert once said, “If I offer to set you up in the fast food biz, with a hamburger joint and you can have any one special advantage you want, what will it be?

Something special — a clown, great burgers, or a big ad budget?

None of that. Gary just says “A starving crowd.”

The proof of this is the food wagons that come around to factory parking lots. They usually sell bad, overpriced food, and they are besieged with swarms of eager customers every place they go.

Why? Because they go to where the starving crowd is waiting. 

What is a “Starving Crowd”?

It can be a market in chaos, in trauma, in transition. It can be a market where everybody is in pain, like insurance salespeople who are hamstrung by over-sensitive parent company enforced restriction on advertising and sales practices, faced with declining commissions. Or it could be a group of people who are especially, hyper-passionate about their particular interest.  Golfers are this type of rabid buyers.

In one way or another, it should be a group of buyers with an aggravation that gives them sleepless nights, ulcers, and rage, that you can solve, and/or a burning desire for something you can provide.

Identifying such a market and building the right offer for it is a far, far superior means of doing business than in developing an offer, then looking around in bewilderment for who might respond to it. So my advice is to find that “Starving Crowd.”


Also, please check out my new training program, the Build Your Practice Fast Academy and let me know what you think. This program can help you transform your practice/agency and learn from my years of experience and success, in which I created over 6 million clients.