Stand Out in a Niche: Uncovering Your Wedge Opportunity
Stand Out in a Niche: Uncovering Your Wedge Opportunity
If you’ve read anything about starting or running a business, you’ve heard about niches. You’ve probably even spent time understanding your business’ niche and understanding the customers and the products and services that are in the market. You may have even worked to identify your ideal customer persona, the type of customer you want to serve.
But, there’s one more step you can take to serve your customers – the right customers - even better.
That step is to identify your wedge in the market.
What’s a wedge?
A wedge is that slice of your niche that you can uniquely address based on a combination of market need and your experience or expertise. This wedge might be a new product or service or, it might be a different way of providing your product or service.
To better define the difference between a niche and a wedge, here are some examples.
Niche Market : Course creation and marketing education services for entrepreneurs.
Your Wedge : Teaching them how to create short, effective courses that are easy for their clients to digest in our short attention span world.
Niche Market : Upscale men’s personal care product line for people who want clean ingredients and sustainable packaging options.
Your Wedge : Offer a line with portable, re-fillable packaging, upscale designs, and clean ingredients.
Niche Market : Yoga teacher training courses and workshops with online and in-person options.
Your Wedge : Focus on sequencing methods with in-depth practice sessions and resources.
In each of these cases, the niche is well-defined. The niches describe the target customers and how they will be served. However, these are still really big niches! There are a lot of businesses offering services in these well-defined niches.
The wedge takes it to the next level, offering more specifics on how and what will be offered to the niche. It helps give you a very specific direction in which to go.
Your wedge (and niche for that matter) may shift and change as you run your business. After all, the market ain’t a static place, right?
The thing is, as you identify your wedge – by doing a bit of market research – you’ll give yourself some real clarity about everything from messaging (to talk to your customers) to the specific products/services you’ll create. Identifying your wedge can give you confidence about the very next steps you’ll take in your business.
I don’t know about you, but it can be very easy to start looking at what’s going on in your niche and get very overwhelmed. Even if you have a very well-defined niche. Very!
If you are stuck at the starting line of your business or if you’ve been running your business for a while and struggling to keep that traction. Consider diving a bit deeper into your wedge.
I’ve created a quick 4-step worksheet that walks you through how to start thinking about and identifying your business’ wedge.
I’d love to know what you think!