Finding A Niche Market for Your Drop Servicing Business

So in your first step to setting up your drop servicing agency you’re going to need to define an area of the market to focus on so you that you can start finding your niche.

Finding and choosing a niche will not only make finding clients easier, but will also improve the conversion rate of closing those client to paying customers.

‘Finding a niche’ is a bit of a weird topic because it’s part science, part art and possibly part luck too.

A quick search on Google will bring up a million and 1 search results, and probably confuse you in the process. So, in this guide I want to walk you through, what exactly a niche is, how to go about finding one and validating that niche idea.

So, let’s get cracking…

Finding Your Niche: What The Hell Is a ‘Niche’ Anyway?

 

"The Riches Are In The Niches"

A pretty famous quote from…I have absolutely no idea 🙂 But, I can attest that there is certainly a LOT of money by going niche. 

A niche market is a specialized section of a market. It’s the sub category (or the sub-sub category… etc) of a bigger market. 

But, from my own experience of working online over the past 10 years, I can confirm that it is far easier to make money in a niche than it is to target a mass market

Now, it’s important to note that a niche can be defined into 2 main categories: 

  • It can focus on a specific demographic (age, race, ethnicity, location, income, education, employment)
    • It can focus on psychographics (Behaviours, beliefs, philosophies, interests, lifestyle

    Under these two categories we can dig further down into our niche. 

    Niche Example

    Let’s take sports for example. This is a mass market. There are so many different markets within the braod term of ‘sports’. So, let’s niche it down:

    • Sports – Amateur Sports

    Now we’ve niched it down further. Let’s go a little deeper…

    • Sports – Amateur Sports – Coaching

    Now we’ve found a better niche market. But we can still further niche this down…

    • Sports – Amateur Sports – Coaching – Tennis – Tennis Coaching for Youth

     

    As you’ll see in the example above, I’ve gone an niched it down by another 2 categories.

    Tennis coaching for youth players is a viable market to compete in. (provided we can come to the market with similar or ideally better value than what’s already on offer)

    We could even niche this further to ‘tennis coaching youth players + Location’ or instead of location, we could focus on a particular age group like under 14’s for example.

    This is what you are doing when you ‘niche down’. So, with that clear how do you apply this niching down process for your drop servicing business? 

    Finding Your Niche: For Your Drop Servicing Business

     

     

    Well, first of all there’s a few approaches you can take with this. The first two require you to ask the following questions, are you:

    1. Going to start with the service you want to offer?
    2. Or are you going to start with an audience you want to provide for?

    Here’s what I mean…

    Let’s take the first approach:

    Starting With a Service. 

    This approach tends to the direction many skilled freelancers take as they already have the skills and experience needed to fulfil the work. 

    The service we might want to offer could Graphic Design. Maybe we already have skills and experience in this nice. Now, we already know this is too big of market. Yes, their probably millions of people that need graphic design work but if you were to compete in this market as whole, you’d lose before you’d even started.

    So let’s niche this down…

    • Graphic Design – Motion Graphic Design – Advertising – Video Sales Letters

    So in this example. I’ve niched it down to the point that we no who our audience is – people and businesses looking to sell a product or service. Because these would be exactly the kinds of people who would use video sales letters (VSL’s)

    If we were to go through with this idea, we could be offering motion graphic design advertising videos, for businesses looking to sell a product or service online. As the mind explores this idea we could also offer motion graphic design videos for youtubers looking to explain complex topics.

    Now let’s do the same thing, but this time approach it from… 

    Starting With An Audience 

    On on the other hand however, we could start with a specific industry in mind. Again, people who have experience with a certain industry might take this option as they already have the necessary ‘inside’ knowledge about the needs of that market. 

    • Local Businesses – Fitness Businesses – MMA Fitness Businesses – Lead Generation – Social Media Marketing – Paid Advertising on Instagram

    In this example, we picked a large audience first, then niched it down.

    MMA Fitness gyms (and any type of fitness facility while we’re at it) want more leads for their sales teams to close into paying customers.

    A great way to do this would be through social media marketing – specifically paid advertising.

    So in this example we are offering; Paid advertising services to MMA fitness facilities. AGain, we could (and probably should) niche this down further to targeted MMA fitness centres in specific locations.

    That’s two approaches you can take when looking for a niche. They are usually the first (and only) steps most people take in finding a niche market.

    But, they aren’t the only way approach it….

    Let’s just quickly recap what we’ve gone through…

     

    RECAP: 

    • 2 possible approaches to finding your niche: service first and audience first approach
    • Each approach requires you to ‘niche down’ but finding a sub niche within the larger market that came before it
    • You’ll know when you’re coming across possible opportunities when you start getting really specific results using things such as: specific problems, age groups, locations, tools (instagram for example) and specific demographic results and / or psychographic tendencies. 

    Finding Your Niche: The Mix and Match Approach

     

    Another approach I’m really starting to see good results with is what I call the mix and match approach.

    This is where you take two or more seemingly unrelated markets and put them together. So here’s an example away from drop servicing.

    Market #1: Cat Lovers

    Market 2: Coffee Lovers

     

    = Coffee lovers who also love cats.

    So now we’ve got two ‘unrelated’ markets and stuck them together. Now we need to add a product.

    We could offer ‘meme-style’ print on demand t shirts for Coffee drinking cat lovers. Now while this might sound kind of ridiculous, a lot of people have made some good money in this niche market.

    Now admittedly, this would be a more complicated service to outsource, so, let’s take this example and apply it to our drop servicing agency….

     

    Market #1: Musicians

    Market #2: Graphic Designers

    In this example, we’ve chosen musicians and graphic designers. While again this might sound ridiculous if you take a moment to understand the psychographic of your audience you’ll notice that both endeavours are rather creatively driven.

    Musicians may want album covers completed. They may want flyers for events they’re hosting. They may even want some visual media content created. A lot of the time, early in their career musicians tend to create this art themselves. But, as they progress through their career and start seeing some success they outsource this work to other people.

    What services could you offer within your drop servicing agency to musicians who may or may not be doing their own graphic design but need the service to promote their music?

    You could even niche this down further by offering album cover art for music producers…just an idea 😉

    Recap: The Mix & Match Method

    • Pick two unrelated audiences
    • Do a little bit of research on each audience to understand what they want and need
    • List a few services these 2 markets might need
    • Brainstorm possible drop servicing ideas from your results

    Finding Your Niche: B2C Strategy

    Right, so I’m going to give a bit of advice here, so listen up.

    As drop servicing becomes a bit more mainstream and popular among ‘fly in overnight’ entrepreneurs the B2B (that is, business 2 business) strategy will become more saturated.

    The first thing that people are going to do is think about how they can supply digital marketing services to businesses.

    And that’ll work great for some. In fact, it works great for me right now. I have a few business clients who need specific tasks and projects completed. And I drop the service onto someone else and the profit I make is the difference between what I charge the client and how much I pay the freelancer.

    But, why not look at heading straight to the consumer?

    A B2C (business 2 consumer) strategy focuses on providing a drop servicing service to individuals as opposed. To businesses.

    Whatever way you look at it there will also be more consumers than businesses, so why don’t we see if we can find a niche to target them?

    Again, there are different ways to approach this, and it almost becomes a little harder to do because the original ‘consumer market’ is massive.

    Finding a Niche Using Fiverr.com

    So, what we could do here is head over to Fiverr and have a look at some of their services. We’ll choose a category, say ‘Music and Audio’.

    From here we have a whole of services on offer. Just by looking quickly at this list, we could possibly offer mixing and mastering services to musicians.

    This strategy kind of overlaps the other approaches, but I wanted specifically highlight it to open your mind up away from just supplying a service to businesses. They aren’t the only market looking for digital services.

    Finding Your Niche: Offer Services To Yourself…

     

    Another strategy that not only saves a HUGE amount of time, stress and whatever else, is to offer services to yourself.

    Huh?

    Hold on let me explain…

    Look into places and areas where you have been a customer. If you’ve needed or wanted something before, there’s a good chance someone else will have done as well.

    I did this with my last business that was sold in November. It was much easier to ‘speak’ to my audience, easier to sell to them and as a consequence of knowing them so well (as I was one of them at one point) I could dominate the niche pretty easily.

    So where have you been a customer for online work and can you offer those services to someone else?

    Remember to Broaden Your Horizons

    This doesn’t just have to be done with Fiverr either. For example, I know a few Drop Servicing Agencies that aren’t even using Fiverr.

     They have clients that need work completing and outsource this work on Upwork. Some even find the work on Upwork, and then drop that work on someone else – again, on Upwork.

    So don’t let your mind be consigned to Fiverr and Fiverr only.

     

    Finding Your Niche: Validating Your Ideas

    So going through this from a few defect directions, you should start to have a growing list of niche markets you could possibly operate in.

    The more you do this, the more second nature it becomes. I am always looking at different niche markets. Even when I’m not working I’m looking to see if I can find markets to operate in.

    It’s now time to validate those ideas. There are different tools and resources you can use to validate your ideas.

    Essentially what you’re looking to do is work out and confirm whether there is enough interest, money and transactions available for you to have your slice of the pie.

    Now one person’s validation might be different from others. $500 per month would be a great side hustle for one person while, nothing less than $3k would do for another. So keep that in mind.

        1) Is There a Big Enough Audience?

        There are a few ways to get an indication of how large your audience is and whether or not there’s enough interest there to work with. I’d recommend using tools such as;

        • Google suggest for keywords you audience might use
        • Google related searches for the same purpose
        • Ubersuggest for keyword research
        • Youtube to find if there’s any how-to or tutorials videos
        • Forums
        • Fiverr Gigs – how many reviews do they have? Are the positive
        • Upwork Job Search for the same reason
        • Book search on Amazon

        2) Does This Audience Spend Money:

        • Are there competitors in the niche?
        • Are their google ads displayed when you search for specific keywords
        • If so, what are those advertisers selling?
        • How many reviews and confirmed orders does the fiverr gig get?

        3) Is This Service Or Interest In Demand?

        • Google Trends
        • Ubersuggest keyword tool
        • Fiverr Gig

        How Are You Going Reach Your Target Audience?

        This leads us into our next post nicely. But it’s well worth considering as you research your niche.

        Your service and market your targeting might require you to go in person to sell your services. Others can be targeted online through, Paid Ads, SEO and Freelancing Platforms.

        And also, I’ve mentioned briefly before you could even contact these people through their social channels, onsite contact forms, emails and over the phone to offer your service.

        You’ll need to keep this in mind when validating your niche.

         

        Drop Servicing: Finding Your Niche. Ideas and Tips

         

        So that’s the end of this part of the process. By no you should either have a niche market defined or at least have a few ideas and be researching them

        Again, you’ll get better at this as you go along. You might even know your market already – and that’s great.

         

        Once you’ve got your market or possible markets in mind it’s time to move onto…

        Find Your Supplier…

        See you there!