What is an Ecommerce Niche?
An ecommerce niche is a distinct segment within any given market and often an area that is overlooked by other businesses. Examples of niches include handmade items, trendy t-shirts, eco-friendly products, beauty products, gadgets, or other products. By narrowing down how you look at a market, you are able to find areas and sections that haven’t been tapped into.
When you find these niches you can build a business that has a good chance of succeeding — you aren’t necessarily going to be going up against the big boys, and you can find and profit from the areas that others have neglected.
2 Ways to Find Customers For Your Niche
So now you know what an ecommerce niche is you need to make sure that you know where your customers are. Where are they talking to people with similar interests? Where do they hang out online?
Luckily there are several approaches that you can take here to locate your potential customers and people that can become your brand advocates – even if it is on a small scale.
1. Find social media groups that have an interest.
Content marketing on social media will go a long way for your niche ecommerce business.
If you have been smart enough to base your online store around something that you are passionate about then this becomes less about work and more about play. You may want to start with the obvious, find hashtags to follow on Twitter and follow people with bios that mention your niche. Followerwonk is an excellent tool for this.
Facebook has millions of Groups, and there is bound to be some that are relevant to your niche product. As with any social based activity you need to make sure that you are offering value to the group and not just spamming them with your product.
Billing itself as the front page of the Internet, Reddit is another excellent place to look for people who could form part of your customer base. According to Similarweb, Reddit receives around 1.5 billion visitors a month — that’s more than the New York Times.
It may sound a little daunting when you know that there are over a million different subreddits, but it has a great search function to help you find the groups that are related to your niche ecommerce business. There are also tools like Redditsearch.io that can help you uncover these subreddits.
One word of warning though. Reddit groups are notoriously against self-promotion, so it is always wise to check the rules and guidelines of each subreddit you join up to (each and everyone is slightly different).
After you have looked at the obvious you need to dig a little deeper, there are hundreds of niche social networks out there that could help you find potential customers and brand advocates.
Did you know that there are specific cat and dog social networks? They could be perfect for you to find customers for your CBD for pets business. Advanced search operators in Google can help you locate these smaller and lesser known social communities, join up and participate, let people know that your niche product exists.
2. Search for shared interest within groups and forums.
Forums are often forgotten about when trying to locate potential customers for your niche ecommerce business, people think that they are stuck in the past.
The truth is that they often have very loyal and active member base to this day. A few email exchanges with the moderators to explain who you are can be enough for you to be able to start interacting.
As long as you are not overly self-promotional they can be a great way to get the word out about your product and often send a steady stream of referral traffic to your website.
You may also want to try Display Advertising on these forums – for minimal cost you can have your product in front of your target audience on the sites they often visit daily. While a slow burner this can be an excellent tactic for bringing a steady stream of visitors to your site.
