Overflowing with creative ideas, but can’t decide which ones are essential for your new
print-on-demand business? Then you've come to the right place! In this
video, I'll tell you how to focus your ideas by finding a niche market for your online
store. What is a niche?
A niche is a specialized market that attracts a specific audience. With a niche-oriented
business you are able to meet the demand of a smaller section of the population whose
interests aren’t addressed by mainstream providers.
Why sell to a specific niche?
From a pragmatic point of view if you start with a niche store you’ll be able to create
much stronger branding. This will play an important role in the long
run. With an established brand, you can build a loyal customer base and expand your product
catalog with products that match your brand's personality.
To give you a better understanding, I’ll show you stories of two different stores and
then go through the key points that connect them.
First up, we have Joe Kim from PAL Campaign. He founded his company back in 2008 and this
is how it all started:
A worker at my church was going to a conference, and this was the time when church t-shirts
for conferences were really bad. Many people could argue they're still pretty
bad. So she knew I was in art school and asked me if I could design a t-shirt. I reluctantly
said yes. Then after the conference, I heard that the group was bombarded by other groups
saying “Where did you get that t-shirt? How can I order one?” And then the students
started wearing the shirts on weekends, parties, and over and over again. So the shirts weren’t
just relegated to the pajama drawer. And I knew there was a market for well-designed
Christian t-shirts. I think it’s really important for new (store) owners to find a
specific niche that they’re a part of or really passionate about, to be successful
with Printful or any business for that matter.
For our second example we have a brand called Classic Dads and here’s what co-creator
Daniel Stone has to say about it.
I think what sets us apart from our competition, is the variety of products and also the original
content that we create. Our designs, we have a lot of dad-isms and
dad-attitude designs, and we get our inspiration from our dads and “dad” father figures
we had growing up. So Classic Dad has developed a pretty active
and lively community. We didn’t really plan for, it just kind of organically and naturally
happened. We have a great Instagram and Facebook presence, we spend a lot of time curating
the content. There’s a debate of what type of shirt does
your typical dad want and who is your typical dad. The new dads want the trim, more athletic
fit. And then we have a lot of older dads, and the older dads kinda want the comfort
and the room to stretch around and be able to wear the shirt while they’re watching
a football game, or grilling at home.
Despite how different these two stores may appear, here's what both of them have in common:
an idea behind their brand that resonates with an existing community
confidence in the individuality of their content a belief that they represent this idea better
that anyone on the market by providing high-quality products
Most importantly, both of them have their own niche. What truly separates one niche
from another is the people who buy these products. How do you find your niche market?
Look at it from an existential perspective. Before you open a store that sells products,
give it a reason to exist. As Simon Sinek wrote in his book “Start
with Why”: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Find a reason
why you're doing this besides to make a profit. A profit is an outcome; you need a deeper
why. Put yourself in your customers' shoes and think about it from their perspective:
”What would motivate me to buy this specific product?”
The content on your store should be united by a single idea that relates a like-minded
community that would buy from you just to support that idea. So here’s how you can
approach this. Identify personal interests
You should pick a niche that relates to your passions and personal experiences, like you’ve
seen on the example of PAL campaign and Classic Dad.
There’s no golden rule that will guarantee success, you’ll just have to try. Just remember
that if your target audience is everyone, then your niche isn't defined enough. If it's
too small, then you won't have that many customers or sales.
Identify your competitors Next, find out what’s already happening
on the market. You might find that nobody else out there caters to your niche, which
could be a golden opportunity for you. Or you might find that your target market is
already a little crowded. Don’t be afraid of competition. Not only
does it validate the profitability of your niche, but it leads to innovation as well.
New ideas will resonate with your customers and drive them to you.
Competition does mean that you'll have to work harder to give people a reason to choose
you. It might be product quality, outstanding customer service, or the number of products
you offer—whatever it is customers in your niche care about the most. Which brings me
to the next stage. Perform an SEO analysis of your niche
SEO is the process of making your website rank higher in Google in order to bring in
visitors. Take advantage of our marketing tools page and pinpoint what is it that people
are searching for online. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush will help you find the data behind
Google searches.
You need to start by identifying the main keywords that are relevant to your niche.
Come up with a list of words that you would use to search for that specific niche. After
that run an SEO analysis on each of them. I’ll show you how it looks in Ahrefs in
a moment.
One of the most important metrics that evaluates profitability and audience interest in your
niche is search volume. This is an estimated number of searches for a particular keyword
in a given timeframe. A high search volume means that there’s a lot of interest in
your niche, but there's also a lot of competition. That’s why you should also to pay attention
to keyword difficulty, that describes how difficult it would be to rank for a keyword
or search query. The higher the difficulty, the bigger the
competition to get in the top 10 search results for that keyword.
Let’s look at this keyword “1980s” as an example.
As you can see it has high search volume, which indicated its popularity in online searches.
Next to the search volume, you can also see the keyword difficulty. This means that there
are a lot of other sources that rank for this keyword, so if you want your store to show
up you'll have to invest a lot in advertising.
The top 3 Google results receive 75.1% of all clicks per search and for a starting business
it’s going to be hard to compete.
When starting out, it’s best to focus on keywords with low difficulty and high search
volume. If I am planning to open a store that is inspired by 80’s aesthetic, I can narrow
it down to something like “synthwave art” that would still fall under that category.
Let’s compare the results. The keyword difficulty plummets, however the search volume is relatively
high. This will be an ideal keyword to target for my niche.
SEO will be the greatest foundation to build your store on, so it’s best that you familiarize
with it at an early stage. That’s why I recommend visiting our blog and going through
our SEO beginner’s guide to better understand it.
Come up with a solution to your niche audience’s problem
Lastly, once you’ve narrowed down your interests to a profitable niche with enough online interest
and little competition, start looking at what your potential customers need.
Browse public forums like Quora, Reddit, or specific Facebook groups and look at what
problems people in your niche experience that can be solved with your unique product.
Always remember to approach the niche-searching process with this in mind: It’s not the
product or service, it’s the people who use it that defines a niche.
Act in your audience’s best interests. Keep tabs on your market and find new ways to interact
with your audience to remain their one-stop-shop in the long term.
I hope this video will help you put your thoughts together to find the right niche for you.
Now you just need to experiment with your niche and products that might appeal to them.
And the good news? With Printful you can test new concepts without investing in massive
amounts of inventory. There's nothing stopping you, so go for it!