Peter Drucker once said, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

It sounds a bit harsh, but most non-profit organisations don’t know their ideal market niche. Yet, this is where their competitive advantage lies. Once you have identified your market niche, then you can begin to stake the claim to “owning” this space and actually redefine your own market.

This is the ‘Holy Grail’ of financial sustainability.

The NDIS has created an entirely new marketplace and disability providers need to see themselves as a business. For many, this is a fundamental paradigm shift.

In any market with rapidly increasing levels of competition and concentration (such as disability and aged care) you have two choices:

You can either provide a relatively homogenous service mix and compete with everybody else based on price, quality and convenience; or you can pursue a niche that leverages your strengths and build a reputation for innovation and unprecedented value within that niche.

In the new self-directed care landscape, it’s critical for smaller providers to be able to articulate their unique value proposition and differentiate their brand so that they can begin to own their niche.

The more you can niche your service offering to meet a distinct market gap and evolve your business model to meet that niche, the easier it will be to find customers – and the easier it is for them to find you! Your marketing becomes be far more targeted and cost effective.

But how do you go about finding your niche?

A common mistake is to try to compete with other organisations on the same terms. This is not about your competition. If you want to stand out, your competitors can’t be your benchmark. Great marketing – the kind that delivers measurable results – is all about your customer.

The goal should be to deliver uniquely superior value in the eyes of your customers; value they can’t find anywhere else.

Finding your niche begins with asking these questions:

• What are our core competencies and areas of service excellence compared to our competitors? (Put another way: Where are we uniquely excellent?)
• Who has the greatest need for that service and the ability to pay for it?
• What is the ideal business model to deliver that service? (e.g. An uber model, an e-market, a franchise, an agency or a hub model.)
• How do we communicate our unique value proposition?
• What are the obvious alliances and partners?
• What do we need to stop doing? (Where do we obviously lack any competitive advantage?)

Disability is a local business. Families don’t want to travel and often can’t afford to. This means you need to know your local territory like the back of your hand.

I suspect the same is true in aged care.

From 27 February 2017 in the first stage of the new home care reforms in aged care, funding for home care packages will follow the consumer, rather than being allocated to the provider.

This means that we will most likely see more of the same trends in aged care that we are now seeing in disability: increased concentration, increased competition, specialised service offerings and emergent e-market platforms.

Late last year I began working with a disability organisation in Sydney’s south-west region. Following some market research we easily identified 25 local providers within a 15km radius who had all historically been funded by the state government to deliver the same services. (This came as a shock until I worked with a client in a different region and found 42 providers funded for the same services within 15km!)

From the research, it was easy to spot the glaring market gaps that matched their specific area of service excellence. It was also clear what services they needed to exit due to a lack of any competitive advantage.

This might be the hardest decision: deciding what services your organisation is going to stop providing. It’s a tough one. Gone are the days of being all things to your clients. Now is the time to be crystal clear on ‘who you are not’.

Knowing and owning your ideal market niche is essential to achieve sustainable strategic growth in the new self-directed landscape. The more you “niche” your services and evolve your business model to meet a distinct unmet market need, the easier it will be to attract more clients, partners, staff and dollars.

Fran Connelley is the Director at FC marketing.