How can you benefit from narrowing your niche?

A niche refers to a focused segment of a market that has specific needs, preferences, or characteristics that make it different from the overall market. If you are a fitness coach, while you may start with your niche as "women over 40" that is not specific enough. To really define a niche effectively, it's important to get even more specific by combining demographics, psychographics, and geographic factors. For example: Women Over 40 who -Are Premenopausal -Work in an Office -Are in your Local Community who want to get fit Each of these segments have different needs. If you speak to one it may be lost on the other: Pre-menopausal women need help managing hormonal changes, while office workers & local area women may not.

It seems counterintuitive, right? If I narrow my niche than I limit my earning potential. That was me for a long time. I thought "I have so much knowledge why should I confine myself?" I wanted to share everything I knew with everybody but what wound up happening is that nobody was listening. When your message fails to connect with an audience it's just noise and space. When you choose your niche your messaging and your products/ service offerings are crafted to resonate with your audience. Those who need what you offer start to take notice. Your message lands. Soon you are seen as the go-to authority, the expert in your field. People know you have the solution and that you are the best person to help them. Your business grows.

Narrowing your niche is crucial to the value you offer and your personal enrichment. The more devoted you are to one stream of thought on a particular subject, however counterintuitive it may sound, you will develop more variations by continually iterating over the given thoughts,beliefs and literature. For example when thinking of building resilience amongst youth, training them to be resilient may not be so effective as much as training them to future-proof themselves in the uncertain economic climate. So narrowing your niche helps to understand and augur more value to your clients because you can use different frameworks in a non-traditional setting but often get similar results.

You may have heard the phrase “ The riches are in the niches,” and yes, it feels counterintuitive at first, but having a niche doesn’t mean you can’t help others. It simply means you become a sought-after expert in that area.

Narrowing your niche allows you to deeply understand a focused target audience and provide maximum value for them in a way broad competitors can't. When you try to appeal to a broad audience and cater to everyone's needs, your message becomes diluted and generic. It becomes unimportant. Instead of captivating and engaging your audience, you become just another faceless voice in the sea of noise of countless other voices all vying for attention. By narrowing your focus, you can offer tailored solutions that meet the needs of your ideal clients. This allows you to distinguish yourself from the competition and position yourself as an industry expert. In turn, this builds trust and authority and ultimately leads to increased sales.

Sometimes, if you observe the type of clients you get, you’ll see a pattern. Or, you’ll like a certain type of client better than others. When I started my business 13 years ago I was a generalist in all digital marketing. Then, a B2B client asked me to do a LinkedIn training for their sales team. It led me down a path of narrowing my focus so that now my ideal client is B2B or professional services- anyone that grows their business through referrals.

A cool way to get inspiration for content to attract your your audience is to look for recent or upcoming conferences in your niche and see what the talk topics are. These have been chosen and vetted from among many submissions as addressing top industry trends and concerns. Then you can riff on the topic with your own opinions and tips.

You want to be seen as the go-to authority or the expert in your field. Really get to know your audience on a deeper level. Not just what they want, but what motivates them. For example, a postpartum mother may want to lose the excess baby weight but what is the motivation behind it? Perhaps she sees people around her losing weight faster or perhaps she is not feeling like she wants to be intimate with her husband. Knowing the why behind the want helps you craft better offerings and content to service their needs. Take the time to acknowledge your accomplishments. It may feel awkward at first Celebrating your successes is not bragging, it's branding. People need to know what you've achieved if they're going to trust you as an expert.

Think of your business like a gourmet marshmallow shop that only serves marshmallows shaped like famous landmarks to marshmallow-loving tourists with a penchant for architecture. Niching down means focusing so narrowly that you're the go-to marshmallow architect in town. Sure, you might miss the marshmallow hotdog enthusiasts, but you'll be the marshmallow Eiffel Tower master!