Web Design: Branding Your Niche

Web Design For Cats and Dogs

Yes… there is a picture of a cat… Partly because cats are funny, but mostly as an ode to Mike and Shane on our development team, that by and large, tend to be “cat people”. I have always thought it funny how there are “cat people” and “dog people” and that the greatest challenge in website design is trying to appeal to both of them.

The Web Naturally Encourages Niche's

The internet, by its very nature, encourages us to create a very specific niche – 6 seconds to capture someone’s attention leaves us streamlining content, pushing the consumers focus, eliminating the fluff, and really just getting to “what we do”. It’s a side-effect of the age of information; there is so much information out there that it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle, and so we end up doing all we can to say more, while explaining less, BUT, does that make it better?

By the theory of best internet practices it does. Search Engines measure the density of specific words, terms, and phrases in a url, in the titles of paragraphs, in the content, in the META information, etc., encouraging the concept of niche marketing. It’s been proven time and again that the easiest way to be successful online is to take a niche specific approach and run with it… As far as the internet is concerned it is the “best practice” – but how niche is to niche? And how many times will I use the word “niche” in this blog post?

Can a website design be "too niche'"

How niche’ is to niche is a question that should be asked and evaluated within every organization on a regular basis. Though finding a niche is important, sometimes as a business we need to ask ourselves the question “Are we looking for really looking for ‘cat people’ or ‘dog people’ OR are we really just looking for people that like pets?”. Finding that level at which you want to communicate with your customers is essential to not only online success, but to the overall success of your brand.

Identifying the level that you want to market your company on is not only key, but can often be difficult to establish, here are a couple of questions that you can ask to help find out just how niche’ your company should really be:

Does the position that we are marketing from allow us scalability? If you are not gaining customers then you are losing them – does your breadth of services and marketing not only allow growth, but promote it?

Are we focused enough to compete? Though there is something to be said for versatility, but if you are going in too many different directions then it can often lead to being lack luster at all of them.

These two questions both combat and complement each other, but primarily they address the need for balance between them. It’s important to remember that even more crucial than finding your niche is figuring out just how niche’ one should be. For those of you counting… this blog post has used the word niche 13 times.

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Added on 02/21/2011

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