Mass market or Niche market?

How do you determine the best way to approach the market, a mass-market product or a niche market product?

Do you offer premium content to a few people or offer a product at scale to potentially every person?

At what point do you scale?

The drive to reach a larger audience is usually very tempting for a new startup or even a new product being launched by a big company.

The startup

Traction is king: and it is natural to do everything to get your startup in front of many people while most likely paying little attention to the things that ensure sustainability.

The Big Company

The resources are there to execute the campaign at almost any scale, and this proves to be very good (or maybe not).

Google Ads, Youtube ads, and just about every advertising agency are buzzing with the ad leading to this new product.

Analytics

Analytics software is very effective in determining the best go-to-market strategy.

This software provides the data to properly analyze the performance of the product and adjust to fit its niche or attack the market as a whole

Advantages of Niche Marketing

• Helps a company identify where it thrives the most.
• More effective
• Less costly

Advantages of Mass Marketing

Cost efficiency of scale – mass marketing reaches a larger number of people for a relatively low cost.

Critical mass

Critical mass is the point beyond which a product begins to grow in the number of users, subscriptions and other metrics that provide validation for its success.

It can be imagined as an inflexion point or overcoming inertia. The point beyond which rapid growth begins to take place.

Before Critical mass, Niche marketing may be the best type of marketing as it helps reach a targeted audience and since the users can easily interact with each other.

Read more on Critical mass.

Case Study: Facebook

Facebook launched on the Harvard campus as a peer-to-peer social networking platform. This helped the platform reach more users easily. As soon as you got on the platform, you saw other people you knew instantly, and you wanted to stay on for some more time. This worked impressively well.

They gained traction while launching on different campuses. This provided the basis for deploying around the world, and today, the numbers speak for themselves.

Several Niche Model

To avoid putting all your hopes into one basket, develop several niches rather than having to depend on one. Identify and plan on addressing an existing niche that has good potential for using your unique product or services.

For example, let’s assume you’ve invented a fantastic sports drink and want to develop the market for your product.

Here are the first three steps you must take to find your niche:

1. Assess yourself and determine what areas of life you are most interested in and how it will interface with your product.
2. Assess your potential market to determine if there is an area that could use your services. An easy way to make this determination is by talking to the people in your targeted community. Another is to join groups of people who have similar interests such as health clubs, little league boosters, soccer clubs or car racing activities.
3. Once you find a promising niche, then determine if you can be comfortable with the anticipated income from it.

Related:  Second mover advantage!