How To Niche and Not Lose Out
You have heard the term "riches are in the niches," but are they?
You know yourself, your business, the problem you can solve, and it seems wrong to have to select a specific group of people to help with that problem when it could be helping so many.
In this episode of The Online Business Clinic, if you are earning less than $1M a year, we are talking about why niche, the power of niching down, and how to niche down without completely cutting yourself off from opportunity.
Hey there, Online Business Strategist, Molly Ann Luna here, and this is the place to be for service-based professionals who are sick and tired of trading your time for money, wants to be their boss, and run a successful six-figure online course business that allows them to work less than 20 hours a week.
Why narrow your niche?
Take a moment to think of an online influencer you love to follow. Maybe they are entertaining or provide educational tips that help you feel smart.
What is their niche?
If you think about it, most likely they serve many different types of people and solve many types of problems.
Moreover, you might be thinking to yourself, wow, they serve various types of people, solve various problems, and are uber-successful, "I should do what they're doing."
Now ask yourself, how long have they been in business?
If I had to venture a guess, at least 15 years is the average amount of time it takes a person to gain notable success in any industry.
Here is the thing, online influencer businesses are great. They can not only entertain you, but also provide industry insight and spark ideas about the future possibilities of your business.
However, be careful about trying to emulate their tactics and methods because what is working for them now would not have necessarily worked for them when they first started like you.
The reality is that they had to earn the right to expand their niche and reach a wider audience over the years.
When you are first starting, you must prove your offer and expertise to a base audience of people to grow your brand.
It is like a tree; branches and fruits do not blossom without a strong foundation and one core trunk to support the various branches that expand 360.
Name an artist you love. It could be a musician, actor, painter, or writer. If we flip back through their success origin story, you will find a common thread.
Let us take comedians, for example.
Before making it to the silver screen, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Robin Williams, Sarah Silverman, and Ray Romano all started their careers in comedy clubs. They eventually built their brand and fan base to the point where they could branch out into dramatic roles.
Do not be afraid to start small by doing one thing well again and again.
When it comes to business, until you have proved your offer and proven it until you have built this brand where you had this audience who trusts your experience, you have to be specific, or you are going to get lost.
The best way to stick out is to narrow it down.
How to narrow your niche?
Firstly, the who.
You must know whom you want to serve.
Moms
Business Owners
College Students
Couples, etc.
Secondly, the what.
There are three primary 'what' niche categories:
Health
Wealth
Relationships
What do they want to change or improve in their lives?
No matter the industry, we humans care primarily about these three things. How can we improve our health? How can we increase our wealth? How can we strengthen relationships?
Which of these three does your core offer the most help to solve?
Moreover, note that it is ok if your offer dips into more than one of these main niche categories.
Once you know the answer now, we need to identify your sub-niche.
Why do they want to help improve our changing this in their lives?
We will use my dog as an example.
The problem I was experiencing working from home alone was loneliness. I thought that getting a dog would help me feel more connected with both myself and my family members (relationship) and ward off negative feelings like depression (health).
When I turned to Google to find a dog, I typed "dog," and populated thousands of shelters, puppy stores, and individual posts.
While I am taking you through the experience of the 'customer,' this is how I want to encourage you to think when narrowing down your niche for your online business because your marketing messaging will either attract the right customers to you or it won't.
We have to hone in on the sub-niche to stand out online, so we begin to narrow down.
"dog"
"Adopt a dog"
"Adopt a young dog"
"Adopt a young family dog"
"Adopt a young family dog good with kids"
What you don't want to do is say I help moms and dads, I help parents, I help all business owner, I help influencers, I help professionals, college students, couples, pet owners, travelers, bloggers, as you can see, there's a lot of the people in all of these niches.
You have to get specific with your niche by defining details around one, the specific struggles or dreams. AKA - uncover the WHY.
Why does your ideal client want to improve their health, wealth or relationships?
In our dog example, if we were the marketer trying to sell a dog or get a dog adopted, we'd narrow down our niche, and strengthen our marketing through messaging by understanding the paying clients' more profound need.
I.e. overcome depression, get in shape, strengthen family ties, expand their family without having another baby, etc.
As you can see, now, this starts to specialize. You start to make it so that you are more of an expert and begin to stand apart from the competition.
Then the next thing we want to do is identify a specific milestone for our ideal paying clients.
Let us say our who is business owners, our what is increase wealth, now our why is so that they can provide jobs to others, but we need to narrow it down a bit more with a specific milestone.
Where is your ideal client on their journey?
Example:
"I help business owners who are trying to make their first $5,000."
"I help business owners who just made their first million and are ready to scale their team."
Make sense?
Here are more examples of specific niches:
First-time dog owner
Families with multiple pets
Geriatric dog owner
All of those are much specific. You can read those, but I took all of that broad niche, and I made it way more specific so that you'd be able to stand out when you create your marketing content.
That is why we're choosing this first.
So choose to niche down based on being able to talk to more, talk more specifically to your audience, because what that allows you to do is now say, I am just talking to dog owners looking for a puppy to become their family dog.
You can create so much more powerful messaging around that versus I'm talking to all dog owners.
Sometimes I see this happen where entrepreneurs niche down just because they're told to, and then they get specific for the wrong reasons. So understanding the reason why you're niching down is essential. And the reason why is because it allows you to create content and messaging that talks directly to a specific group of people so that you can stand out from everybody else.
As you get specific about your niche, keep this in mind. So as you're choosing that specific niche, don't just do it to say, oh, well, Molly said, I did say, but the reason why is because you're gonna have to create content and messaging and copy and ads and funnels as you go through this program that talks to this person.
And so what are you most qualified, most passionate, most excited about serving what specific group of people, and then that's why you choose it, because that allows you to talk to them more clearly.
Remember this; if you're trying to talk to everybody, you're actually talking to nobody.
A lot of times, people are afraid aid to miss out on sales. And so they keep it broad. That's very common; we've all done it. We don't wanna miss out on revenue where business owners are trying to grow our business.
And so for that, for that fact, we keep it broad. And we say, well, I, I could talk to moms with toddlers, but my services and my offer could all also help moms with teenagers or adult children, but only like 5% of it is going to that person's, but I'm gonna still talk to them.
It takes away your impact and your success with the specific group by trying to keep it broad. So don't try to keep it broad balance.
For example, when I first launched my signature program, The Income Amplifer where I teach you how to get paid to launch an online course business, I kept the marketing messaging specific to stay-at-home moms with new babies.
I called her out "mama" in my sales copy.
And to my surprise, the first people to buy my program were single men.
Niching down strengthens your marketing messaging, not weakening it.