One of the flaws of identifying a niche by doing pure demographics is painting all customers with the same brush.

My suggestion for identifying a niche is to first segment by demographics and then segment by usage.

Lets say you are a company which provides backup and disaster recovery services. There are a whole lot of companies who can put on their brochures that they provide backup and DR services.

All it needs is a company which has some backup software and access to the cloud platforms to say that you could provide a DR solution.

So how can you differentiate your company’s offerings.

How about offering DR to users of ERPs in zones which are prone to hurricane activity. You could talk about how you are geared to move complete IT operations of your customers to another site in case a hurricane strikes.

Your messaging then becomes very specific to those kind of customers. You then look at what all are the possible options that the customer has to achieve the same objectives. Something similar to what Clayton Christensen speaks about the job of the Milkshake

Based on this you further fine tune your niche and accordingly build your messaging and your go-to-market plan.

This was a B2B example from IT. Tomorrow we will take an example from the consumer side.

Till then.

Carpe Diem!!!