In this episode, I’m answering one of the most common questions I get as a business coach: “How do I choose my niche?”
I’m going to be sharing with you how to choose your target audience. I cannot tell you how often I am asked the question: what should my niche be? What’s the right niche? Do I have to be a business coach to make money? Can this niche make money? How do I know if this is right? Is it clear enough? Is it tangible enough? I get questions every single day on niching, and it’s often one of the first things that I focus on when I am speaking to a new client. We are working on their niche and, to be fair, rightly so, because your niche, your ideal client profile, and your messaging is the foundation of everything in your business.
If you do not know who you’re helping—or you do know, but you do not know how to clearly articulate that in a tangible way that’s actually going to resonate with your potential clients—you are leaving so much money on the table. You’re going to find business really hard and it doesn’t matter how much you want it. It doesn’t matter how much action you take. It doesn’t matter any of those things. It’s just going to be hard.
There’s a lot of noise in the space. No, it doesn’t matter if there are other people in your industry or if it’s “saturated,” because the reality is that most people are inconsistent and so you don’t have as much competition as you think you do. If you’re just more disciplined, you just focus on being better, then you don’t really have much competition after all. I’ve seen a lot of people go out of business in the last six years that I’ve been in business, and it’s really sad. But you know, if you show up differently and better, then you also have a better result.
So I thought I would just be really transparent, and I probably won’t be able to go into everything that I share with my clients just because, like I said, it’s a bit of a beast of a thing. I often have a full one-on-one with each client, or a member of my team does, just on this whole thing, back and forth, just on their niche. But I wanted to give you genuinely as much of a high-level overview as I can of this topic so you can at least ponder on some things and make some big changes if you’re not clear on this. And then I can always help you at a deeper level if you would like to work together, for example.
So I just shared with you why niching is important. We want to start with conducting some market research on your niche just to make sure there is a market for this. People are paying to solve this problem, there is demand here, there is a need for it, because if there’s not—if it’s very fluffy and not dialled in well—then yeah, it’s going to be really difficult to grow. So we want to have clarity over guesswork.
So do some market research. Think back to your previous self. If that’s who you’re helping, a previous version of yourself, ask yourself: did you pay for this niche? What were you struggling with? How did you articulate it? What did you actually purchase and what did you really really want? You can do market research from other people that you do or do not know, but you can also think back to your previous self. You can join other Facebook groups and see what questions people are asking, see what people aren’t sure about in the topic of your niche, and that can really help as well.
You can look at competitors on Instagram by searching mindset coach, fitness coach, business coach. See what their “I help” statements are. You can see how they articulate it, you can see the size of their following, and so much more. Then you want to have conversations with people, ask people questions, give them a one-on-one coaching session in return for them being really honest with you. All of these things can severely help when it comes to actually growing your business. You just want to regularly update your niche as well so that it’s always up to date.
People usually get it wrong thinking that this takes so much time or that they’ve changed their niche too many times. And yes, definitely some people can go too far on that. It’s my aim when working with a client to kind of nail it from the beginning. But do not mistake the fact that you will need to iterate it and build and test regardless. I’m always doing that in my business and that is a very, very normal thing to do.
Now, how to create your ideal client profile once you’ve done that market research? Your goal is to stand out as the go-to expert. You do not want to blend in with every other coach out there. And the way to do that is to become known for solving one hyper-specific problem and provide a really powerful, clear, bold, tangible solution. I can’t stress that enough—people want to pay a premium to experts, not generalists.
Who do you think makes more money, a general GP or a cardiologist? Obviously the cardiologist. Which one do you think works more? I’m going to bet that a GP is working those eight-hour days, whereas you often see that people at the top of their field are actually only available and work like three days a week because they actually make more money in that time and don’t need to be working every day, should they choose not to, for example. So we’re always going to pay for experts if it’s an area that we really care about. And at the end of the day, that’s who we want to target.
We want to target people that are willing to pay a premium to solve a particular problem and get an outcome. We don’t want to be working with or focusing on tyre-kickers, for lack of a better word. So your messaging should really be built around this one belief—that your signature method, which is again a process that I teach my clients, is the thing that will help your clients or audience get the result that they want. And if you can get them to believe that, then they’re going to work with you over everyone else, so long as they like, know, and trust you, because you’re the only one with that method.
So I have a process called the Scalable System, which is broken into Seamless Sales, Sustainable Strategy, and Simple Systems. Now you have to be working with me to have that entire process, and a lot of my messaging and marketing in my content is about selling my audience on this method because I genuinely believe in it and it’s made me millions of dollars. So the moment you try and sell them on multiple things or position yourself too broadly, your sales will really start to suffer. And honestly, I cannot stress this enough—the number of people that have tens of thousands of followers and don’t make any money is crazy, because it’s not just about followers and audience size. Yes, when dialled in, that can play a massive positive role, but engagement doesn’t mean money, for example. So it’s really important to recognise that.
Now there are a lot of universal desires that people want, so you want to make sure that your niche comes under one of these universal desires. People want to make or save more money, they want to look and feel better, they want to find or maintain better relationships, they want to protect themselves, their families, and their business from loss and harm, they want to improve, upgrade, or transform their lives, and they want to impress other people. So in other words, there are three main areas that people invest in: their health, their wealth, and their relationships. So you want to make sure it comes under one of those categories.
Now it’s really important that your ideal client ticks a few boxes in particular. Number one is that they have to be someone that you have a true desire and passion to serve, because you will be talking to these people and about these people literally every single day. There is no way I would be here right now helping coaches if I wasn’t madly obsessed with helping them—but I am. You have to be obsessed.
They also have to be someone you can actually support to generate incredible results. You’ve got to have embodiment in it or experience in it—that is essential. It needs to be one or ideally both of those things. People will trust you in that case. Unfortunately there’s a lot of people in the industry that are not congruent with what they do. You know, there will be money coaches that are actually terrible with money and are broke, but they do that because they think that that’s what people will pay for, etc.
You want to make sure that your ideal client profile, like your dream niche, they all have a similar demographic, a similar current situation, and a similar dream situation so that all of your content resonates with all of them—and they have to have the money to pay you. So they need to tick that box: you need to be obsessed with them, you need to be able to actually help them, they need to have a similar demographic, they need to have a similar current situation, a similar dream situation, and have the money to pay you.
Now when I talk about demographics of your niche, you don’t have to unnecessarily niche—so don’t niche by gender if gender doesn’t matter. But if it does matter, then niche by gender. If it matters, things to look at when it comes to your demographic are their age, gender, location, race, education, job title, relationship status, or income level. You do not need all of those things, but there will be something that is relevant.
