Three Ways To Find A Health Niche (and make it BIG)

A health niche is key to success in the direct to consumer online dietary supplement business. It’s the difference between a wildly successful supplement company or another me-too bottle of pills.

The online dietary supplement space has matured rapidly over the last 5 years. There are so many options available to consumers today and so much conflicting information out there that consumers trust levels are diminishing rapidly. Leaving visitors in a state of indecision.

Honing in on a subset of the market is one way to overcome that indecision. Your market niche defines how you’ll satisfy specific needs of the marketplace.

With so much competition out there, in seems that all the niches are already taken. So how can you possibly compete, right?

If you want to compete you have to go down into the sub niches. Where there are still untapped gaps waiting to be filled.

Let’s take weight loss as an example. It’s a very big market. But weight loss for women is more niche but still extremely broad. Weight loss for women who are getting married in 6 months is a sub-niche. It’s specific and focused and narrows down to a very particular sub-section of the wider weight loss market.

You’ll always have more chance of success if you drill down into a sub-niche of a popular wider market. It’s counter intuitive that going smaller actually means bigger, but…

Trying to appeal to everyone and anyone in the wider market where there’s already a ton of competition, means you’ll struggle for success.

How Do You Find Your Health Niche?

Let’s explore three simple ways to niche down your health business.

The first way is to niche down to a specific health condition.

The definition of a “condition” can be taken loosely when niching down. After all, a condition is nothing more than a struggle. There’s no reason why it can’t be something outside of the classical definition of a disease state.

For example, recovery from sports can be looked at as a “condition” for the purposes of a niche. A competitive, individual is always looking for an edge to gain youthful vitality, a boost to endurance and overall performance.

The Nootropics and mental clarity market falls into this “condition” category.

Another way to find a health niche is to narrow down to a lifestyle specific niche. There are plenty of these untapped areas all around you if you stop to look. Dietary supplements for golfers is one easy one that comes to mind.

The golf market is a large one that is very passionate about the game and they also share similar conditions, like Golfer’s Elbow (i.e. joint pain). Targeting the common problems of the group is one way to serve the market better.

Other untapped sports niches includes runners and or swimmers. Let’s take a moment to think about the specific needs of runners and swimmers. They don’t like to be weighted down by protein.

So a timed release protein that releases protein into muscles at a broader frequency would allow runners and swimmers to have more energy towards the end of their race or training.

This plays into the needs or “conditions” that are specific to those sub-groups and positions your health supplement to those specific markets.

The third way is to focus on a specific customer group outside the norm, like pets or kids. Hip and joint health supplements for dogs is a growing niche as well as probiotics for pets and children.

Tapping into different trending diets is also another way to focus on a specific customer group, while also combining a lifestyle. For example the Keto diet trend and a specific supplement line around the diet.

This is nothing new of course, it’s called line-extension in the world of marketing and has been used for years to expand an existing product into other sub-markets.

Finding Your Unique Health Niche

Finding a health niche can often times be difficult. Sometimes the problem lies in the business owner. It’s difficult to actually commit and choose. Niching feels like you’re scaling down and giving up a larger audience. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s the difference between an inch wide and a mile deep vs. a mile wide and an inch deep. A lack of depth means less impact.

One of the most common mistakes that we see working with a number of health companies is that they go after markets that are too wide. This has to do with the product more than the principle. The typical dietary supplement has multiple ingredients which as a consequence can support a healthy response in a multitude of different areas. Promoting all of these areas for a single bottle of your supplement creates an enormous amount of doubt in your prospects mind. It creates a “too good to be true” feeling and is in direct conflict with the prospects beliefs. Niching down to that one area in your marketing messaging will not only increase trust with your prospect and thus increase sales but also help to set you apart from the crowd of me-too products out there.

How To Do Health Niche Research

Understanding what the marketplace is seeing, hearing and what are the top concerns is the place to start your health niche research.

Start your health niche research by searching on Google Trends ( https://trends.google.com/trends ) to see how often a health condition or supplement ingredient search term is been used relative to total search volume across the world over time.

The value is in seeing what keywords and phrases have been getting more attention in recent months. And what the trend has been over the last 5+ years. It allows you to look as far back to 2004 to today, so you can see if it has been trending up or down over time.

Next you’ll want to search social media and health message boards like WebMD (https://messageboards.webmd.com) to learn what top concerns and stories people are talking about.

Stay tuned into your customers needs, and what the marketplace is telling you. But don’t lose sight of your own authenticity. Staying true to the reason why you started your health company and mission is paramount when creating and marketing your vitamin supplement brand