Who is your ideal customer? If you are going to say “small business owners,” think again.

Use this online business optimization worksheet to optimize your website for your own, unique customer “Niche”.

What is your niche?
Creating demand is hard. Filling an existing demand is much easier. Don’t finalize your service or product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find an easy to reach market—define your customers—then rethink your product or service in terms that will meet or at least begin with their needs. For example, Hewlett-Packard markets all-in-one machines that print, fax and scan to home office niche, while they sell larger businesses for higher-priced, single-function units.

Your niche is a small group of people:

• whose unique needs you understand and can meet
• with an offer in language they understand
• that care about and will act on or afford what you are offering.

Develop your niche persona(s)
Your niche persona is a flesh and blood example of the members of your niche. There may be more than one persona within your niche. You will find help for defining each of your niches and personas on the worksheet.

How to use this worksheet.

What is your niche?

Creating demand is hard. Filling an existing demand is much easier. Don’t finalize your service or product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find an easy to reach market—define your customers—then rethink your product or service in terms that will meet or at least begin with their needs. For example, Hewlett-Packard markets all-in-one machines that print, fax and scan to home office niche, while they sell larger businesses for higher-priced, single-function units.

Your niche is a small group of people:

• whose unique needs you understand and can meet
• with an offer in language they understand
• that care about and will act on or afford what you are offering.

Develop your niche persona(s)

Your niche persona is a flesh and blood example of the members of your niche. There may be more than one persona within your niche. For each persona, describe the following:

Go thru each of the following and fill in as much information as you can get.

• Problems to be solved, needs to be met, or wants to be fulfilled:

These are problems, needs and wants that tend to remain on the forefront of their mind and possible pain points.

• Current environment:

Are there any obstacles to taking action on using your product or service? These may include family or political conditions, lack of agreement with peers on how to solve problem, budgetary constraints, etc.

• Strategic personal, business and or career goals

Are there viable personal, business, and or career outcomes that achieve goals?

• Preferences and Aversions:

What is their predisposition or perspective to solving the problem? Do they favor opportunities or risk mitigation?

• Competitive Considerations:

Does your service or product help them differentiate them from the competition? Does the solution create an advantage or make them equal to competitors?

• Influencers:

Who can influence the buying process? Friends, family, colleagues, stakeholders, users, champions, consultants, external peers.

• Information sources:

How do they get their information for making decisions and choices. What do they read? Do they search the internet? What keywords to they use? Do they use social media? Where and how are they having conversations around their problem, need, or want?

Test-market.

Before moving ahead, assess the direct competitors you’ll find in the new niche and determine how you will position against them. For an overview, it’s best to conduct a competitive analysis by reviewing competitors’ ads, brochures, websites, and social media presence. Look for their key selling points, along with pricing, delivery and other service characteristics.

But what if there is no existing competition?

Believe it or not, this isn’t always a good sign. True, it may mean that other companies haven’t found the key to providing a product or service this niche will want to buy. However, it’s also possible that many companies have tried and failed to work with this group. Always test-market carefully to gauge the market’s receptiveness to your product or service and message. And move cautiously to keep your risks manageable.

Some niches may become saturated with marketers, increasing competition and thus, according to the economic law of supply and demand, reducing the slice of the pie available to each competitor. One solution is to find smaller, “undiscovered,” but still profitable, niches, usually by searching out the best keywords to target. These lower cost keywords are called long-tailed keywords, as in the long tail of secondary keyword phrases that usually follow the main keyword in popularity of number of searches conducted by internet users. Some are too obscure and may have very few or even no clicks per month, and therefore not much use to target.

So how do you get all this information to find, understand, speak the language of an meet the needs of  your niche personas?

That’s where listening comes in.