by Megan Hudson, Marketing & Business Coach
To niche or not to niche? This is the ultimate question for the modern entrepreneur, consultant and coach. Have you been wrestling with this niche thing? Won’t it limit your opportunities and chase away potential clients? Anyway, how on EARTH do you get to your niche, if you decide to go that route? It’s incredibly confusing.
Let me use the example of the coaching industry as my case study, which has become increasingly commoditized over the years. The same has happened in the consulting industry and many other businesses. I’ve spent almost 2 decades coaching, and during this time, marketing a coaching professional body and coaching coaches on marketing. When I first started out – there were so few coaches in the world that we could differentiate ourselves by calling ourselves business, life, or executive coaches. That has changed completely, with coaching having been identified as being one of the fastest growing industries in the world.
The problem is the more and more people are calling themselves coaches. For example, you have financial advisors calling themselves wealth coaches, people selling vitamins and supplements calling themselves health coaches and so it goes on. We also have people calling themselves coaches who are what I would describe as mentors or consultants– in other words, they are transferring their knowledge and subject matter expertise to another person. The last time I checked on LinkedIn, there were more than 2,750,000 people describing themselves as business coaches! This tells us is that we have to differentiate ourselves in some way in order not to become just one among millions.
I truly think that – unless you are a well-established coach or consultant whose name and reputation is a brand in and of itself – you need to clearly define the value and results that you deliver to your clients, and for me, that is essentially what your niche is. If we can’t be clear and explicit about the work that we do, the results that our clients achieve and what we excel in, then how can we expect a potential client to figure it out?
Neuromarketing tells us that the brain avoids three things:
clutter,
having to decode a complicated message, and
tasks that take too long.
Clearly defining your niche means that you can be succinct in your messaging. You can communicate what you do simply, quickly and clearly. You make it easy and cognitively energy-efficient for a potential client to choose you out of your thousands of competitors out there.
One of the questions that I am asked regularly is whether or not defining a niche will limit the amount of business you can get or will chase potential clients away. Deciding to niche or not is a very personal decision, but I want to caution you not to make it from a position of fear, or with a poverty mentality. My advice to my clients is to treat it as a journey and not a destination. My original niche was as a business coach. I then refined it to be a marketing coach, which later morphed into a coach who specialized in helping other coaches and consultants market their businesses without spending a cent.
However, the cornerstone of effective marketing is being able to be clear and explicit about the work that we do, and that means we need to clearly define and regularly refine our niche based on our professional practice. The decision to define your niche needs to be based on wanting to do what makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get started doing work that you are passionate about, and it was while on the quest to find a useful tool for my clients to guide their journey towards finding and defining their niche that I stumbled on the Japanese concept of Ikigai.
Ikigai was first identified in studies of longevity that identified “blue zones” or communities of people whose populations regularly lived to 100 years or more. It loosely translates to “a reason for being” and is a sweet spot at the centre of your mission, passion, profession and vocation. It embodies and draws on what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for and what you are good at.
So ask yourself these questions:
What do I love?
What am I good at?
What does the world need (that I can offer)?
What can I be paid for?
After all, we all want to lead purposeful, purpose-filled lives, don’t we? In conclusion, clearly defining your niche is the single most effective thing you can do to future-proof, crash-proof, bullet-proof and recession-proof your business.
Megan Hudson is a marketing and business coach in South Africa who specializes in working with coaches, consultants and solopreneurs to help them find and define their niche, and to market their businesses without spending a cent. She trained in coaching at the University of Stellenbosch’s Business School and is also a qualified Time To Think practitioner. She runs two online courses that include 1:1 coaching sessions: 5 Simple Steps to Find and Define Your Niche, and 12 Weeks to Market Your Business Without Spending a Cent. Contact Megan via email megan@business-zone.co.za or visit her website http://www.nicheintelligence.co.za or Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/NicheIntelligence/