How to Decide Upon a Niche for Your Internet Marketing

Internet marketers frequently talk about the importance of a niche market -- that small segment of a market to which your marketing efforts will be directed. The question is: What exactly constitutes a niche market?

We can probably agree that Internet marketing is not a niche because it covers a wide spectrum of marketing tools as well as target markets from bloggers to multi-level marketing people to brick-and-mortar stores promoting online and everything in between.

Then we can probably agree that book marketing online is a subset of Internet marketing, but is it a niche market? After all, book marketing covers fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, children's, adult, Young Adult, etc.

Let's drill down further to Young Adult book marketing. And in that subset under fiction there's romantic vampire stories, mysteries, teen problems, fantasy, science fiction, etc. And in fantasy, for example, we can drill down to past, contemporary, future, alternate history, our world, etc.

You can drill down further to get to smaller niches. But is there a point when you've drilled down too far -- where you've limited the potential growth of your prospective brand?

Let's take an imaginary scenario:

You're interested in promoting a natural juice drink that is good for all ages. But you decide to market it only as a drink for young children. You establish your brand around this narrowly defined niche and all your efforts are focused on children.

Later you may want to introduce the brand to the teen, adult and senior markets and your current brand is too narrowly defined as children only. You have to start over at square one with establishing a new brand.

Now let's imagine an alternate universe:

You establish a brand of a natural fruit drink that is beneficial for health (no age limit applied to these benefits). You roll out this brand slowly by first introducing it to the children's nutritional market -- BUT YOU DO NOT PROMOTE IT AS ONLY FOR CHILDREN. You promote the brand as very beneficial -- and you target children.

Now you put step two into effect by rolling out the same product to the teen market. Again, you promote the health benefits without putting an age limitation on the benefits. And then you repeat this rollout with the adult and senior markets. Each time you do not have to establish a new brand.

Can we now definite what is the niche market in this example? Is it natural juice drinks? Is it natural juice drinks only for young children?

Do you see how natural juice drinks can be a niche market with subsets for the different age categories?

This is why it is very important that, when Internet marketers tell you to go after niche markets, you understand there are niche markets and then there are niche markets. You want to be careful not to box yourself into such a small niche that you have to start all over if you want to do brand extensions.

A good niche market is one with room to grow. Before you launch the first product or service in your niche market, make sure you've settled on a brand definition of that niche market with which you can live successfully for a very long time.