How To Pick The Perfect Niche For Your Brand

Finding a potential brand to go all-in on can be a daunting task. It seems like everything’s been done to death and saturated. I’ve had over a dozen brand ideas that I thought would be home runs but ended up fizzling out. With much trial and error, here is a step-by-step on how I pick what brand niches I decide to go into.

Ideally, you want to pick something that you have at least some interest in. Although not 100% necessary, it will be a lot easier to get into the head of the avatar of your ideal customer and you’ll be able to speak their language which means your marketing speak will resonate with them (and you’ll get more sales).

The best way I’ve found for picking a niche is to intersect 2 different passions together to create your own Blue Ocean Strategy (must read book if you haven’t already). If you can find a niche that has some overlap with another niche, you can create an uncontested or low competition share of the market you are targeting. For example holstrength.com is an intersection between Christianity and gym apparel. There’s a lot of Christians that are passionate about their faith and within that demographic, there’s lots of people who are dedicated gym goers. Mesh the 2 niches together and you have a super passionate demographic who would love to wear gym clothing displaying their faith to the world.

A good exercise is to write a list of 10-20 interests you’re into. From that list, would any of them have any overlap in which you could create a brand from? Woodcarving and pilates probably wouldn’t work (little overlap). But dogs and couture fashion? Maybe that could work. I’m just spitballing here but I think that since there are a lot of dog owners who are into high fashion, there would be a market for couture outfits for their pets. People are fervently passionate about their dogs and there’s definitely a subset of people who are into high fashion. Maybe not a lot, but you can charge a higher premium because you are catering to a demographic with lots of disposable income.

Are there any existing competitors for your newly formed sub niche? Do some market research with Google and see what names come up. Use similarweb.com and look at how much traffic they’re bringing in. A good rule of thumb is that 1 visitor equals $1. Here we can see that Hol Strength is getting around 150-200k visitors per month. That equates to 6 figures a month in revenue. Not too shabby.

Also take a look at the list of similar sites so you can get a good feel for the landscape of who your competitors would be. Would you be able to outperform them in some way? Some competition is a good thing, as it tells us that there is a market for what we want to sell. You just need to find a way to out-execute them in some way, whether it be through product innovation, branding, marketing, and so on.

Most entrepreneurs try to build their brand around a specific product idea they have. But it’s actually best to build their brand around a passionate community and go from there. Find your people and then create your product based on their wants and needs. A good way to do market research is with the following:

• Subreddits

• Facebook groups

• Amazon reviews (look for patterns in criticisms with existing products and make it better)

• Competitors

Do your due diligence in the beginning as it will save you a lot of time and wasted dollars. It’s worth it.

Hope this helps in helping you come up with an idea for your own brand. Stay tuned for the next newsletter where I’ll talk about validating your brand idea.