Put your Business and Your Clients under a Magnifying Glass

Identify target markets for your virtual assistant business in a few easy steps and enhance your marketability with a good niche market strategy.

Start with yourself – assess your own interests, work style, and personality…

…and then expand it step by step to include your ideal clients and their needs.

Ask yourself some basic questions – such as these below – to help identify target markets for your business:

• What am I good at
• What do I enjoy doing
• What passions do I have that I haven’t explored yet
• What do I hate/dislike doing
• What of my current services are not profitable
• What services are not requested often enough to keep them on my service list

By answering these questions, patterns might arise that can offer some clues about the services to focus on for a selected market niche. Concentrate on the services that you enjoy and that are profitable and cut the ones that you dislike and/or do not provide enough profit.

Now, take a look at your ideal clients and answer the following questions

• Which existing clients do I enjoy working with
• Why
• What are the characteristics of my ideal client
• In which industries do they work

Answering these questions probably brought you a step closer to providing the services that you enjoy most to the clients that you enjoy working with.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. It is also important to understand what benefits your services have to these clients. List these benefits, but make sure to list “benefits” and not only “features“.

A feature is what something “is“.

A benefit is what it “does“.

For example: You can compile and maintain databases fast and accurately (that’s the feature). The database however, put all the business’s key information in one place, makes it easily accessible, and easy to update (that’s the benefit).

Understanding this difference is important because people do not make use of your service to get a feature. They use your services to get the benefit produced by the feature.

After listing all the benefits, list some of the clients whose current situation could be improved by those benefits. You should begin to see a definable group emerging as a niche market.

It is however also important to determine if the group you’ve identified as a niche market is a profitable market. This can be determined if you’re able to

• identify a few individual clients within the group and can find contact information to communicate with them
• determine if these clients have a need for making use of your services
• deliver a sales message to these clients
• ensure this group is large enough to produce the volume of business you need

If you’re able to do these few steps, you are on the right tract to identify target markets for your virtual assistant business.

VA Niche Markets

Virtual Assistant niche markets can primarily be divided into industries and/or services. Your niche market can be a particular industry and you can build your skills for that industry and/or it might be clients who need a specific skill set.

Examples of some niche areas can include, but are not limited to

• Corporate Travel Arrangements
• Event Management
• Social Media Management
• Desktop Publishing
• Database Design and Maintenance
• Website Design and Maintenance
• Translations
• Transcriptions (Medical, Legal, Other)
• Real Estate
• and many other

To identify target markets that work for your specific situation is based on an approach of“freedom of choice”. You can determine what market you feel comfortable with – a target market based on an industry, a market based on skills or both.

Choose a target market that fits your specific situation.

For more information also read

Specific Services that can be Performed in these Target Markets
What is a Target Market and Why is it Important
How to Market your Services