Kickstart Your Business Growth
by Niching Down
For the longest time, I resisted niching down. In fact, I resented the idea every time one of my coaches (or other coaches out there) mentioned it. I felt that my interests and abilities are far too broad to “pigeon hole” into one specific area. It sounded like I’d get bored quickly because I thought that niching down would not give me the variety that I like to have in my work. I also thought that casting a wide net was better than casting a “smaller” net, where I’d get the attention of more people if the net was far and wide.
Well, after a few years of being an independent coach and consultant, and making changes along the way that resulted in increased business success, I see the error in my younger, less experienced-self’s thinking.
​
So, let’s talk about this idea of niching down. What does that even mean, anyway? Let’s start by defining it.
​
Definition of Niching Down as a Coach
Niching down as a coach means narrowing your focus to a specific subset of the market. It means targeting a particular group of people with distinct needs, challenges, and goals. Instead of trying to serve everyone, you specialize in a specific area or demographic where your expertise and experience can provide the most value. This specialization allows you to tailor your services, marketing efforts, and messaging to meet the unique needs of your chosen niche.
Why Nailing Your Niche is Essential
-
Clarity and Focus: By defining a specific niche, you gain clarity on who your ideal clients are and what their specific problems and goals are. This focus helps you tailor your services and marketing messages to resonate deeply with your target audience.
-
Expertise and Authority: Specializing in a particular niche positions you as an expert in that area. This authority builds trust and credibility with your audience, making them more likely to choose you over a generalist coach.
-
Effective Marketing: When you know exactly who you are targeting, you can create highly specific marketing strategies that speak directly to their needs, desires, and pain points. This targeted approach increases the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
-
Resource Optimization: Niching down allows you to focus your resources—time, money, and energy—on a specific audience. Knowing who your market is helps you figure out where they are so that you, too, can spend time there. This optimization ensures that your marketing efforts are not spread too thin and are more likely to yield better results.
Relationship Between Nailing Your Niche and Increasing Sales
-
Attracting Ideal Clients: By clearly defining your niche, you attract clients who are a perfect fit for your services. These clients are more likely to see the value in what you offer, leading to higher interest in you as a service provider.
-
Higher Conversion Rates: If you're unfamiliar with the term, "conversion rate" simply refers to the percentage of interested prospects that become (or convert into) paying clients. When your marketing messages resonate with a specific audience, they are more likely to engage with your content and take action. The closer you can align your messaging to your audience's specific needs, the higher your conversion rates should be.
-
Premium Pricing: As an expert in your niche, you can command higher prices for your services. Clients are willing to pay a premium for specialized knowledge and solutions that directly address their unique challenges.
-
Referral and Word-of-Mouth: People generally know other people who are like them. Satisfied clients within a niche are more likely to refer you to others in their network who have similar needs. This word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly powerful and can significantly boost your sales without additional marketing costs. In fact, I find that my conversion rates are higher with referrals than any other form of marketing I've done. This is awesome because it doesn't require any extra time, money, or effort on my part to get traffic from referral sources unlike other aspects of my marketing strategy which do require effort and time... and we all know, time is money.
-
Client Loyalty and Repeat Business: When you consistently deliver value to a specific group of clients, you build strong relationships and loyalty. These clients are more likely to return for additional services and recommend you to others, ensuring a steady stream of business.
Example of a Successfully Narrowed Down Niche vs. A Broad Niche
At this point, you may be wondering what a successfully narrowed-down niche looks like... and what a vague or broad niche looks like. Let's compare two examples: Coach A (successful) and Coach B (unsuccessful) using Career Coaching and Life Coaching as the examples.
​
Successful Coach A: Life Coach for Mid-Career Women in Tech
-
Target Audience: Mid-career women working in the tech industry.
-
Specific Needs and Challenges of her Target Audience: Overcoming gender bias, balancing work and family, advancing in a male-dominated field, finding work-life balance, and combating imposter syndrome.
-
Tailored Services: Workshops on leadership skills for women in tech, one-on-one coaching sessions on career advancement strategies, group coaching on work-life balance techniques, and online courses on building confidence and personal branding in the tech industry.
-
Marketing Message: "Empowering mid-career women in tech to break through barriers, advance their careers, and achieve work-life balance."
​
Why It Works:
-
Clarity: Clear understanding of the specific audience and their unique challenges.
-
Expertise: Positioning as an expert in a niche field (tech industry for mid-career women).
-
Effective Marketing: Marketing messages directly address the pain points and aspirations of the target audience.
-
Increased Sales: Higher engagement and conversion rates due to the specialized focus, leading to a loyal client base willing to pay for targeted solutions.
​
Less Successful Coach B: General Life Coach
-
Target Audience: Anyone looking for life improvement.
-
Broad Needs and Challenges: General life issues such as mindset shifts, personal development, career and health.
-
Vague Service Offerings: General life coaching sessions, broad self-improvement workshops and online courses.
-
Marketing Message: "Helping you improve your life and achieve your goals."
Why It Doesn’t Work:
-
Lack of Clarity: Vague understanding of the target audience, resulting in unclear messaging.
-
No Specific Expertise: Struggles to establish authority in any particular area, making it difficult to stand out.
-
Ineffective Marketing: Generic marketing messages fail to resonate with any specific group, leading to low engagement and conversion rates. Also, where will this person find a pool of prospective clients?
-
Decreased Sales: Broad focus dilutes marketing efforts, making it harder to attract and retain clients who are looking for specialized solutions.
Comparing and Contrasting Coach A with Coach B
-
Target Audience:
-
Coach A: Specific and well-defined (mid-career women in tech).
-
Coach B: Broad and undefined (anyone looking for life improvement).
-
-
Understanding of Needs and Challenges:
-
Coach A: Deep understanding of specific challenges faced by the target audience.
-
Coach B: Surface-level understanding of general life issues.
-
-
Service Offerings:
-
Coach A: Tailored to address specific needs of the niche audience.
-
Coach B: Generic and broadly applicable, lacking focus.
-
-
Marketing Messages:
-
Coach A: Clear and resonant, directly addressing the pain points and goals of the target audience.
-
Coach B: Vague and general, failing to connect with any particular group.
-
-
Engagement and Conversion Rates:
-
Coach A: High engagement and conversion rates due to targeted approach.
-
Coach B: Low engagement and conversion rates due to lack of focus.
-
-
Sales and Client Retention:
-
Coach A: Higher sales due to specialized focus and clear value proposition.
-
Coach B: Lower sales due to diluted efforts and unclear messaging.
-
When you compare these two examples side-by-side, it’s evident that narrowing down a niche successfully leads to a clearer understanding of the target audience, more effective marketing, and increased sales, while a broad and undefined niche results in vague messaging and lower engagement.
The Story of Two Coaches
Coach A: Grisel (aka: me—a few years ago), The "General" Career Coach
When I first started officially selling my career coaching services, I had been coaching people on their career for over 15 years. I had worked with people from all walks of life. So, I started off by offering a wide range of services to anyone looking to improve their career, from recent graduates to mid-career professionals and even executives. My marketing materials talked about helping people find their passion, improve their resumes, and prepare for interviews.
I thought that was pretty specific.
​
Well, one day, I came across a post in an HR Facebook group. By the way, I am a member of this group for two main reasons:
-
I come from the HR world myself, so HR folk are my peers. I understand their unique challenges and desires, as well as their day-to-day work.
-
As a career coach, I need to stay on top of hiring and decision-making trends in today’s changing professional landscape and what better way to find out what’s happening now and how companies make hiring decisions than by belonging to an HR group who do this kind of work every single day?
Anyway... on this particular day, an HR professional—let’s call her Lisa—was seeking a career coach to help her navigate a career crossroads. Lisa had been in HR for about 15 years and was feeling stuck. She wanted to explore new possibilities but wasn't sure how to leverage her skills outside of HR.
​
I saw Lisa's post and immediately resonated with her problem. I responded in the comments section, offering to help. I genuinely shared my experience in helping people find new career paths and expressed my willingness to help her to navigate her career crossroads. Despite my vast experience solving this specific problem with HR professionals, Lisa ended up going with what she perceived to be a “more specialized” coach.
Enter Coach B: Sarah - The “More Specialized” Career Coach for HR Professionals
Sarah clearly knew the importance of niching down to a specific group. She is a career coach who has chosen to specialize in helping HR professionals and she includes that information in her value proposition statement.
​
By doing so, Sarah lets her audience clearly understand who she specializes in helping. It lets people know that she understands the unique challenges and opportunities in the HR field, and she states in her marketing materials that she worked in HR herself before transitioning to coaching. Her services include personalized career planning for HR professionals, resume optimization for HR roles, interview preparation, and strategies for advancing within or beyond HR (although she doesn’t mention specifically that she helps professionals navigate a career crossroads).
​
Sarah's marketing materials clearly state her niche: "Empowering HR professionals to navigate their career paths with confidence and clarity." On her website, she shares success stories of HR clients who have successfully transitioned to new roles or advanced in their careers with her help. (I know that because I went to her website to check out her service.)
​
Lisa (the HR professional who was seeking a coach) read Sarah’s response offering to help, which included her value proposition aimed directly at HR professionals. Lisa was immediately drawn to Sarah’s specialized focus and responded in the comments that she would like to speak with her and get her help.
​
Lisa did not respond to my comment, nor did she respond to any of the other comments from other career coaches who offered to help. But she did respond to Sarah's.
​
Why could that be? Well, Sarah's laser-focused value proposition immediately showed that she understands the specific career challenges of professionals in the HR field, and because of that, her service stood out to Lisa more than anyone else's offer did.
​
The Outcome
From my continued participation in this particular FB group, it's clear that Lisa reached out to Sarah and decided to work with her. Sarah got to help Lisa through her career transition instead of me or anyone else who threw their name in the hat. How? By having a clear niche and incorporating that into her unique value proposition, which demonstrated her specialized understanding of the HR industry.
Sarah must have provided Lisa with targeted advice and strategies that led to a successful outcome. I say that because now, years later, I still see Sarah (and other career coaches who specifically call out HR professionals in their value proposition) being referred as the go-to career coaches for HR professionals within this HR Facebook group.
Lessons Learned
I was disappointed. I could have helped Lisa. But, when I saw Sarah’s value proposition, I immediately understood that my broad focus didn’t instill the same level of confidence and trust in Lisa as Sarah did because of the way she chose to niche down to a specific audience.
So, I missed out on the opportunity to help Lisa but learned a valuable lesson which opened my eyes and helped me notice that most of the successful coaches out there... the ones whose ads and marketing messages flood my social media feeds every day with their $1 million-dollar promises, have something in common: they are speaking to distinct group of people. They’ve niched down to a particular segment of the market.
​
Do I know that I could have helped Lisa? Yes. Did I get the opportunity to do so? No.
By comparing my experience in this particular situation with Sarah's, it started becoming clearer that—although I was resisting niching down—I needed to embrace it. So, I embarked on my journey to do just that.
​
The more I did, the faster my drip of interested prospects became. It eventually got to the point where I had to increase my prices, create new processes, and invest in technology to streamline how I served my clients and make handling my client load more manageable.
​
Having personally experienced the transformational shift in my business when I got more specific on my niche is exactly the reason why I'm focusing on this aspect with you. Because if you're here, it's likely that you'd like to serve more clients and have a more consistent flow of prospects coming to you.
​​
And I want that for you, too.
​
Getting specific on your niche allows you to instantly connect more deeply with your target audience, build a higher level of trust faster, and effectively stand out in a crowded market, ultimately leading to increased client attraction, close rates, and business success.
​
But, niching down can be difficult, confusing, overwhelming, and daunting. Let's get into the reasons why in the next section of this guide.
​
The Challenge Most Coaches Face When Niching Down
Niching down can be particularly challenging for coaches for several reasons. For the most part, it seems counterintuitive to think that narrowing our focus can result in more clients. But actually, the opposite is true. The more we can zero in on our target audience, the more opportunities we create for ourselves, and the easier it is to get their attention and convert them into paying clients.
Here is a list of the most common challenges to niching down based on my own experience, research I've conducted on this topic, and from what I've gathered from other talented yet struggling coaches in my network:
1. Fear of Limiting Opportunities: Perceived Loss of Potential Clients
The fear that, by narrowing the focus, you'll miss out on a broader range of clients. The idea of excluding potential business can be incredibly uncomfortable, especially if you don't have a comfortable case load of clients yet.
​​
2. Need for Immediate Income: Short-Term Financial Pressures
If you feel the pinch to generate immediate income, you may feel you can’t afford to narrow your focus, fearing it will reduce your prospect base and revenue in the short term.
3. Emotional Investment: Attachment to Broad Identity
You may feel a strong emotional attachment to your broad coaching identity. You may believe your value lies in your ability to help a wide variety of clients with a wide range of topics. And you probably can. That's what makes you an awesome coach. But your coaching ability and the effectiveness of your marketing messages are two different things. This could be causing a resistance to narrowing your focus to a specific group. This one was a biggie for me, and if I'm being honest, it continues to be a stumbling block for me. I'm a "multi-passionate" professional, as someone in our Facebook group called it recently. If you're like me in that way, getting specific on a segment of the market can be quite challenging... yet is possible to do it.
​
4. Uncertainty About the Right Niche: Lack of Clarity
You may struggle to identify the niche that best fits your strengths, interests, and market demand. This uncertainty can make it difficult to commit to a specific niche. Clarity comes with experience working with particular groups, and your visceral reactions to the work you do with them. It also comes from knowing which audience is willing to pay for a service to help them overcome their challenges. It isn't enough for them to experience the challenge. They also have to be willing to pay for a solution. As an example, years ago, I knew that nursing homes in particular were having a serious problem with their work culture and with employee turnover. These are two problems that my consulting business specifically aims to solve. I explored that market as a potential niche for my consulting business. Come to find out, although they were suffering tremendously with these problems, they just weren't willing or able to pay for a service to help them fix it. ​​
​​
5. Inadequate Market Research: Insufficient Information
At this point, you may not have enough information about, or experience working with, a variety of different people to understand which audience you work best with. Without this information or experience, it can be hard to choose your focus on a smaller, more specific group. Start with one group for the sake of your marketing efforts and to get more clients in the door. Gather your information and evolve from there. For a long while - years, perhaps - your target audience will continue to become clearer and more refined. This is a normal part of the process. Your goal should be to start somewhere and observe the information you gain from working with that group. ​
​
6. Fear of Failure: Risk Aversion
Committing to a niche can feel risky, especially if it doesn’t yield immediate results. The fear of failing in a narrowly defined market can prevent coaches from getting specific. That's why it is so important for you to do your self analysis first and then conduct market research before committing to your niche.​
​
7. Lack of Confidence: Self-Doubt
You may have some doubt in your ability to succeed in a specific niche. You may question whether you have enough expertise or credibility to specialize. ​Pro Tip: if you choose a topic area that you are genuinely interested in, and have experience in... and if achieving positive outcomes in this space speaks to your values and your WHY, then what you already know right now is enough to help someone who isn't as far along as you are. So, you can start there and continue to evolve your expertise in this space and learn as you grow. The key is to start first with what you know, and then grow from there.
​
8. Marketing Challenges: Complexity of Niche Marketing and Fear of Being Seen
Niche marketing requires different strategies than general marketing. It requires to put yourself out there and be seen for what you know, which can trigger a fear of being seen and judged. Fear that someone will say, "you don't know what you're talking about." On a similar note, you may feel unprepared to market yourself effectively within a specific niche, and the thought of that can be overwhelming or lead to analysis paralysis.
​
​Narrowing down a niche involves a strategically identifying and focusing on a specific segment of the market where you can provide the most value wherever you are at this particular stage in your professional journey.
​
Here’s a step-by-step guide for coaches to narrow down their niche:
​
1. Self-Assessment and Reflection
​
Identify Your Passion and Strengths:
-
Reflect on what aspects of coaching you are most passionate about.
-
Identify your unique strengths, skills, and experiences.
-
Consider the areas where you feel most confident and capable right now.
Evaluate Your Experiences:
-
Look back at your coaching journey and note the types of clients you have enjoyed working with the most.
-
Identify any recurring themes or problems you have successfully helped clients with. Focus in on the ones that you've enjoyed working with the most.
2. Market Research
Analyze the Market:
-
Research the coaching industry to identify profitable topics, gaps, and opportunities.
-
Look at trends and emerging needs in different sectors. Think about exploring what's happening in the world in an area related to where you want to serve. For me as a career strategist for mid-career professionals (and business mentor for online coaches, service providers, and digital creators), it means looking at layoff rates and why it's happening, people's changing thoughts and preferences about their professional life, technological changes that affect the job-search process, the number of people who are leaving the work force to start their own business, the number of coaching businesses that fail in the first two years and why it happens. What could those topic areas be for you related to your service area?
​
Study Your Competitors:
-
Analyze other coaches in potential niches to understand what they offer and how they position themselves. Don't let this overwhelm you, don't be discouraged if you find there are many people who are offering to solve a similar problem as you are (instead, let that validate that this problem is one that many people are seeking an answer to), and do not compare yourself to them. Instead, keep your focus on breaking down what they're doing, how they're doing it, and whether it's working for their target audience. You're not evaluating this to copy them because if you're copying them, then your authenticity won't shine through and you'll fade into the noise instead of standing out. Instead, you're looking at what features they're using- such as a narrowed niche and areas where you see their marketing materials the most. Also, notice if your audience the same as theirs, or is it a little different? If it's different, how is it different? You want it to be a little different so you're targeting a more specialized segment of the market.
-
Identify areas where you can differentiate yourself. Hint: your personal/professional story, your experiences, your target audience, and your WHY helps differentiate you.
​
Identify Potential Niches:
-
List potential niches based on your passion, strengths, experience, and market research.
-
Consider different demographics, industries, and specific problems you can address right now based on your existing knowledge and experiences.
-
Don't be afraid to get specific. Think "micro-niche" where you can home in on a particular problem and be the expert that helps clients overcome this problem quickly... because most people today want quick, easy, digestible solutions.
3. Define Your Ideal Client
Create a Client Avatar:
-
Develop a detailed profile of your ideal client, including demographics (age, gender, location, occupation) and psychographics (values, interests, challenges, goals).
-
Consider what specific problems your ideal client faces and how you can solve them.
Understand Their Needs and Pain Points:
-
Conduct surveys or interviews with potential clients to gain insights into their specific needs and challenges. Notice and capture the language they're using to describe those needs and challenges. Most likely, they talk about those things in a way that is different than how you might be talking about them.
-
Engage with online communities, forums, and social media groups to listen to conversations and identify common issues. Find the trends that appeal to you and your expertise.
4. Test and Validate Your Niche
Pilot Your Services:
-
Offer your coaching services to a small group within your potential niche.
-
Gather feedback and assess the demand and effectiveness of your services.
Refine Your Approach:
-
Use the feedback to refine your coaching approach, services, and messaging.
-
Adjust your niche if necessary, based on the insights and results.
5. Position Yourself as an Expert
Develop Specialized Content:
-
Create content (blogs, videos, webinars) that addresses the specific needs and pain points of your niche.
-
Share success stories and case studies that highlight your expertise and results in your niche.
Tailor Your Marketing:
-
Craft a clear and compelling value proposition that speaks directly to your niche.
-
Use targeted marketing strategies (SEO, social media, email marketing, networking with referral partners) to reach your ideal clients.
Network Within Your Niche:
-
Join industry-specific groups, associations, and events to connect with potential clients and build relationships.
-
Collaborate with other professionals (aka. referral partners) who serve the same niche with a non-competing service to expand your reach and credibility.
​​
Join the Free 5-Day Niche-Down Challenge
By this time, it should be clear that when you niche down, you can create an effective marketing and sales process that attracts your ideal clients.
​
If you’re struggling to identify your niche alone, let's do it together. Join my free 5-Day Niche-Down Challenge.
​
​This will be the pilot of my new intensive bootcamp-style challenge where we’ll work through the core essentials of niching down. In the future, this will be a paid offer I give to my clients. However, at the moment, I'm inviting you to join it for free in exchange for your feedback.
Each daily session will focus on a different topic. ​The layout of the challenge will look like this:
​
Day 1: Self-Assessment and Reflection
This first day will be dedicated to understanding the work that you are most passionate and excited about, your strengths and skills, your past experiences, and your preferred client type. You'll need to take some assessments as pre-work before the first day to get a head start on this piece of the puzzle. We'll talk through your results and translate that information into actionable pieces you can use both to design your offer and to identify your ideal clients.
Day 2: Define Your Ideal Client
On the second day, you’ll get specific about the exact type of client that you want to target right now. Although the clarity of your ideal client will sharpen over time as you grow your business, this day will give you a starting point on identifying your ideal client so your marketing messages and your value become clearer, more targeted, and therefore get the attention of your ideal clients.
Day 3: Market Research
This third day, we’ll focus on creating your very own market research strategy to gain valuable insights from your ideal clients. The insights you gain from your market research will help you craft your offer and your messaging around the challenges you help clients overcome as well as the outcomes you help them achieve. This piece helps you get more traction in your marketing efforts and turn more of the right heads toward you.
​​
Day 4: Test and Validate Your Niche
The fourth day is all about creating a pilot offer that you can test with a small group. You’ll brainstorm your offer, identify your test group, create feedback questions you want to ask, and learn how to refine your offer (and your niche) based on their feedback and your experience with them.
​
Day 5: Position Yourself as the Expert
On this fifth and final day of the challenge, you’ll create your content plan, craft your marketing strategy, and identify opportunities to collaborate with referral partners so you can start increasing the flow of interested prospects inquiring about your service offerings.
​
Each day, you’ll have:
- a live Zoom discussion for around 90 minutes where you’ll receive actionable strategies
- the opportunity to create each piece of your strategy inside the live sessions so you can implement them immediately
- guidance and opportunity for discussion with me and your peers to get these 5 pieces done in a week's time
​
Want to create your game plan with free support instead of doing it alone?
Click the button below to get on the waiting list.
Actual dates for the challenge will be announced soon.