How to Find Your Niche Market

When it comes to finding your niche, I’m sure you’ve heard enough about finding your passion and knowing what you are good at.

If you’re looking for some practical strategies that you can use to find your business niche, read on. This article provides a simple list of basic human desires and a list of market segments that you can match to find your perfect niche.

What is a niche?

A business niche is a specialized or focused area within a broader market consisting of a group of individuals with specific needs. Companies that develop specific solutions for these target groups serve a niche market, which is differentiated from the general market. By delivering specific products and services to meet specific needs, companies can differentiate themselves from the competition.

How to find a niche – your answer lies in the human psyche

Most pundits will advise you to find your passion and leverage what you’re good at in order to find your niche. That may very well work for some aspiring entrepreneurs, but why not start with what already works and then take it from there?

There are established market segments based on what humans love, enjoy, and need. In broad strokes, it comes down to universal human needs like love, social acceptance, safety, material wealth, sensory pleasures, self-knowledge, self-actualization, meaning, and adventure. It’s these fundamental needs that lie behind participation in games, social media, shopping, club memberships, and all other human endeavors.

Before you hone in on your niche, take a broad look at the human condition. In this way, you’ll be able to differentiate between a novel product idea that you find personally exciting and one that people want, even if they don’t realize it.

Apple is a point in case. No one realized they wanted a computer in their pockets until Steve Jobs showed them what the iPhone can do.

Evergreen market segments based on human needs

Love and Connection:

Most people have a lifelong desire to find romantic love. In fact, in many societies, those who don’t manage to find a life partner are regarded as failures.

How the market meets the human need for love and romance

In modern society, it’s difficult to meet members of the opposite sex. Businesses that bring single people together will always have takers. Dating and matchmaking services are common businesses in this market segment.

Dating and relationships are as stressful as they are exciting. Most couples run into problems at some point, which is a golden opportunity for entrepreneurs to offer coaching, books on relationships, romantic hampers, romantic getaways, dating apps, and more.

The Professional Wingman is a business in this market segment. The company offers custom, long-term coaching packages to help people meet, attract, and date other singles. The programs help men and women develop the social skills and confidence they need to make lasting connections.

And of course, we have a host of dating apps that hook users up with potential partners. You have Tinder for one-night stands, dating apps for serious relationships, and apps for specific demographics.

Social Acceptance:

Humans have a deep-seated need to be liked by others and have friends. Friendships are a big part of living a happy life and creating good memories.

How the market currently meets the need for social acceptance and friendship

Social media has almost become the go-to place to make friends. From Facebook and Instagram to Snapchat and TikTok, there are plenty of social media platforms that put people in contact with potential friends.

And just like dating apps have helped people with romance, friendship apps are helping people to make friends. Meetup was an early entry into this space linking people with shared interests. There are loads more, all with a different focus.

The need for friendships also ties into self-help topics, like how to make friends, how to accept yourself, how to be a good friend, etc. This all presents fertile ground for entrepreneurs who want to provide coaching, do podcasts, and write books.

Material Wealth:

To be wealthy or at least financially secure is a universal human need. Society has always admired those who know how to make money. The wealthy has also traditionally had power over others.

How entrepreneurs meet the need to make money

The internet abounds with websites handing out advice on how to make money. From flipping houses and baking bread to cutting hair, people are always looking for ways to make more money.

Everyone wants to find ways to bring in some extra cash and most people have a side hustle. Businesses that help people make money are plentiful. In fact, some of the most lucrative websites that generate large amounts of money are those offering financial advice.

An example of a niche business in this sector is Money Saving Mom Blog, which is a financial advice blog for moms. The site has 940K followers on Facebook.

Entertainment:

People are constantly looking for ways to enjoy themselves. Think parties, bars, comedy clubs, dancing, theater, movies, and streaming services. And think about the world’s obsession with celebrities and the entertainment fodder their lives provide.

Making money through the entertainment industry

This is a humongous market sector. Radio and TV shows, talent contests, movies, the music industry, tabloids about celebrities, newspapers, various websites, e-sports, and global sports events. Online gaming is also huge. Audiences run the whole gambit from beer-sipping sports-mad punters to opera-goers and all manner of alternative cultures.

In entertainment, a million niches are waiting to be discovered.

Physical beauty:

Society places great importance on physical appearance. Everyone longs to be attractive. Physical attractiveness slots in with the need to find a romantic partner, so this is an enormous market niche with countless sub-niches.

The beauty, weight loss, and fitness industries

A slim figure is something a lot of people desire. It seems half the world is always on a diet. Because diets seldom work, there’s always room for a new one that promises to help you shed the pounds.

Hand in hand with diets are fitness and healthy eating. The world has woken up to the need to get moving and eat a healthy, balanced diet. Diets, nutrition, and fitness needs offer countless opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Self-actualization and Personal Fulfillment:

Many people struggle with themselves, feeling that they don’t fit in, that their lives don’t work out. They see others living seemingly fulfilling lives and want to find a way to do that too. They want to understand why things are the way they are and how to make sense of it all.

The birth of the self-help industry

Go to any city library and you’ll find a number of shelves dedicated to self-help books. Self-help books have given people answers to complex issues affecting their lives, relationships, their purpose, the meaning of life, and more. These books are perennial bestsellers because they tend to be authentic, stemming from insights the writer came to through their own struggles. As long as life keeps presenting challenges, there will be topics for self-help books.

A point in case is Gala Darling’s book Radical Self-Love: A Guide to Loving Yourself and Living Your Dreams. It became a #1 bestseller, leading to The Self Love Bootcamp, teaching women to build self-esteem and confidence.  

This is not a complete list. It just serves to illustrate a point: that basic human needs are the basis for countless business opportunities. These are proven niches where products and services sell.

The trick is to find ways to refine a market based on factors like demographics (age, gender, income level, education), location, interests, and behavior. Such a niche market solves a specific problem for a specific group of people.

Catering to a niche market allows you to focus on solving a specific problem that large market competitors tend to ignore, leaving your endeavors catering to a specific niche largely unchallenged.

Using tech to find your niche

Google Trends is a great tool for finding a niche. The search tool shows the popularity of a search term in Google. When you type in a search term, you are presented with a graph that clearly shows whether the topic is rising or declining.

You can choose to look at the trend’s behavior over the “Past 12 months” or “2004 to present”. Choose the latter time frame to give you a better indication of the performance of the search term.

This tactic can give you an indication of the demand in the market, whether it is rising, exploding, or evergreen. Google Trends also allows you to look at Related Topics, which is great for discovering product and topic ideas related to your chosen niche. Take note of topics and keywords that have been showing an upward trend.

Harness the power of autocomplete to really niche down. Think about it – these days when people want to find information, they go straight to Google and type in their question just as it comes to them. You can learn a huge amount by just typing in a keyword and seeing what Google throws at you.

You can type in a specific question, and Google will show you tons more questions asked by real people with real problems, helping you discover your target audience’s most common searches and pain points.

How do you know that you have pinpointed a winning niche?

The answer to this question centers on your target audience. Your potential audience must meet the following criteria to qualify as a viable niche market.

• You know who they are. When you’ve come up with your business idea, it should be very clear who your customers will be. If you can’t identify your potential customers, it’s not a viable business idea.
• They are within easy reach. If your potential customers are on the other side of the world, your business might struggle to be profitable. You must be able to reach and serve your customers easily.
• They are underserved or neglected. You don’t want to enter a market that is already saturated and where you will be faced with too much competition. If your business supports an underserved or neglected segment, you stand a better chance of success.
• They represent a large potential market. It stands to reason that you need many customers if you want to make real money from selling your products or services. An exclusive niche may be great for helping your business stand out, but if the customer base is too exclusive, it may be too small to give you a return on your investment.

Finding a niche in the healthcare market

The growing prevalence of chronic lifestyle diseases and people adopting healthier habits, as a result, have created enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Apart from starting a business that focuses on one’s medical specialty, there are also business opportunities in niches like fitness, personal care, nutrition, healthy cooking, and wellness.

In addition, the market for wearable medical devices is still growing. According to a new market study by Global Industry Analysts Inc., (GIA), medical wearables are exploding with new and compelling approaches to improve patient care.

In short, the healthcare market is rife with opportunities.

According to ClickBank, four of the top ten profitable marketing niches in 2022 are in healthcare. They are:

1. Dietary supplements
2. Diets and weight loss
3. Dental Health
4. Women’s Health

Needless to say, these are all evergreen niches, so you’ll have to drill down in order to find a niche where you can stand out.

Finding health and wellness niche trends

Once again, the Google Trends tool is handy for gauging trends in the health and wellness niche over time.

You can use “Topics” to determine the level of interest in a niche. Then you can type your niche idea into Google. Google will immediately suggest some sub-niches.

If you type in “diets”, Google will not only give you lists of diets; the search engine will also provide a list of questions people usually ask. If you click on one of those questions, Google will come up with more suggestions. If you keep clicking, you’ll eventually find a sub-niche that may suit your purpose and, in the process, you’ll find out exactly what people are looking for.

Final thoughts

Spending time to find a niche in your chosen field makes sound business sense. With thousands of businesses competing in every market, many of them large corporations, entrepreneurs have to find a way to stand out and be noticed. One way to do this is to identify a niche market.

Within the many established evergreen markets, countless niches and sub-niches are waiting to be discovered. Tools like Google Trends is a practical tool for finding trends in different market segments, including health and wellness.