Thriving on the Edge of an Industry

For every need, a solution: this is the mantra behind the corporate world and one that humanity as a whole has embraced with both hands. No matter what product or service you need, there’s a 99% chance that someone has not only created it but also solved two other issues you didn’t even know you had as well.

The thing is, when we start categorising and listing off all the industries out there, it’s clear that there are some businesses which are considered the core and then many more which sit more on the fringes of the field. We will be taking a look at some of those businesses which exist to support more central ones and what they’ve done to find success with their niche production.

Specialists For Hire

A major modern business, while it may have one primary focus, will invariably step into other industries now and then for the purposes of expansion, diversification or sometimes just marketing. In these cases, the company will often be lacking specific skill sets or expertise, and this is where specialists would step in.

Much like having a solution for every issue, there is a specialist available to hire for every task out there, and some industries rely on them more than others. For example, many businesses will make use of a creative design or marketing agency for generating adverts or web material, or as we’ve previously covered at EuropeanBusinessReview.com, building entire campaigns around social media influencers.

Niche Industries

Conversely, there are groups such as the nascent esports industry which are almost entirely reliant on one-off specialist contracts and external experts to operate. In most cases, the tournament operators and organizers would be seen as the core, but then there are production companies, talent agencies, venue managers and many more specific contractors that need to be involved. It’s no surprise that the act of hiring in esports has itself given birth to a separate industry with sites like Hitmarker.net which is a job site purely geared towards esports and video gaming.

When you also consider that esports is itself a fringe area for the main video game industry, it begins to paint a picture of an interconnected hive of companies. It is thriving currently because every single business is laser-focused on its niche, and this concept extends to these types of businesses in other industries. The most successful examples in this category are the ones who concentrate on doing one thing extremely well.

Supporters and Facilitators

Aside from those businesses which work directly with the larger industries, there are also those that operate more in parallel. These companies would have limited contact with major names, but instead, build a business model around what they create. Traditional examples would include trades like plumbing or mechanics, but in the modern world, the golden word is ‘content’.

Take the UK site WhatCulture.com, for example, which has been able to take major elements of pop culture like TV, movies and video games, and generate rapid content with information based on all of them. It’s certainly not a unique model, but it is a resilient one as, by nature, the amount of source material to work with increases all the time.

While that is a larger example, there is an entirely separate industry of smaller sites and content creators who are cashing in on the concept via advertising revenue. After all, digital marketing real estate in the current age is almost worth as much as actual real estate in some regions.

The Review Industry

As another branch of the same concept, there are also a huge number of review sites out there, and few have refined this particular idea more than online casino reviewers. Major sites like CasinoReviews.com have grown into massive libraries of thousands of sites, and their profiles are designed based on actual customer questions and user testing.

This sets the site and those like them aside from reviewers that would cover food or movies, for example, as they are more objective and more consistent and reliable from a business perspective. Having that authority and objectivity is simply more attractive to marketers and advertisers.

While these companies have a little more space to spread their wings and branch out, it comes back again to understanding the gap in the market, focusing on one precise concept and making your business the best it can be in that category. As with everything in business, it’s no guarantee of success but it is a formula that has worked time and time again when adopted the right way.