How to Find Your Niche for Your Online Business [Entrepreneur Edition]

Marketing TipsBusiness Tips and Tools

Oct 7

Written By brandmerry

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

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The niching down process always seems to feel like a dark cloud over your head at all times.

And you're probably thinking to yourself, “I just need to figure it out and then I can move on.”

I was in the same boat years ago and most of my clients inside of Roadmap to Freedom are also feeling this way when they first start the program.

Niching down feels heavy and a big hurdle to take on. What if it isn’t good enough? What if it isn’t specific enough? What if I want to change it?

All of these questions are probably floating around in your head so today we’re going to strip it back and talk about what niching down actually is and some of my top tips for the process so you can feel confident moving forward with your business!

WHAT IS A NICHE?

I'll tell you what your niche is not. Your niche is not your product or your service.

Something that I see entrepreneurs do time and time and time and time again is they say, “This is what I offer. This is what I offer. This is my niche.”

No, it is not. That is the avenue that you support your clients. That is the tool that you use for the work that you do.

It's not your niche. It's not your focus. It's not your little carved-out space in the industry.

And the other side of this is not only is that not what your niche is, but it's also limiting you.

Your niche is the center of the branding process, it is one of the first things you do when starting your business because everything stems from this.

It's one of the first things that we do inside of my program, Roadmap to Freedom.

Imagine if you center your entire brand around a product or a service, what happens if you pivot?

What happens if you decide to add another product or service?

What happens if you decide that your current product or service is no longer something you want to offer?

You're kind of screwed. You're going to have to spend a ton of time going back to the beginning and redoing your brand foundations and rebranding everything. And it's not worth it.

And it's not the correct process of niching down. So if you're reading this and you're like, ooh, I think my niche is centered around my product and service, don't worry. We're going to talk about what it is instead.

The other thing that your niche is not is your ideal customer.

Now you're going to learn in just a second that your ideal customer does play a role in determining your niche, but your target market is not what solely defines a niche. If someone asked you your niche, and you responded with, “mothers” that would be wrong.

FINDING YOUR NICHE

When you start to think about your niche, I want you to focus on the problem that you solve for your ideal customer.

You've got a target problem for a specific person or group of people. This problem that you solve, which is the cornerstone of a successful business, is also the center of your niche.

People buy things, services, products, whatever, to solve a problem.

If I make eggs every single morning and I have a pan and my eggs stick to the pan every morning, my problem is I have a pan that my eggs stick to. So I need to go out and find a pan that's not going to do that.

If I have adult acne on my face, I've got a problem. I need to find a solution to that problem. So I'm going to go out and I'm going to search for something to solve that problem.

If you want to start an online business and you don't know how to start an online business. That's the problem. You're going to go out and you're going to look for something to help you solve that problem. And you're going to find Roadmap to Freedom and you're going to sign up and the rest is history, JK. For some of you that is 100% true.

So you have to solve a problem with your business. So that's what we want to use in the niching down process.

SPECIFYING YOUR NICHE

Now, if you're sitting there thinking, “I solve a lot of problems.”

Let's have a conversation about that.

When you're starting your business, i.e. the period before you’re making consistent money in your business the more specific you can be, the faster you will grow.

We've got to start small to go big.

It can be really easy to say, “I want to do all of these things. I want to have five different programs. I want to solve five different problems. I want to have five different ideal customers. I saw so-and-so is doing that and I want that too.”

There are two things that might be happening with so-and-so, let’s call her Sally.

One could be that Sally is doing that, but they're not making any money. Which happens way more often than you would imagine.

Option number two, and what might be happening is Sally has been doing this for a while. Sally got really good at one thing and then added something else and then added something else.

And now she sells journals and posters and sweatshirts and coaching and books and live events and, I don't know, tapestry for their walls, right? Because Sally can do that.

But if you're in the beginning phases and you're not consistently making income, you are not in a place where that makes sense.

So you want to be specific because that's going to allow you to grow faster.

When I first started, I specifically helped people launch their business. My focus was helping them build their brand, show up on social media and build their website. Those were the three things that I focused on.

That's all I knew how to do at the time, by the way. So I didn't make any promises of signing clients. I didn't say I'll help you launch your first group program or I'll help you build a podcast or anything like that. I was like, I'll help you take all of your ideas, streamline them and put a business out into the world.

Then as I started to learn more and more, I was able to expand.

Today, the problem that I solve is supporting entrepreneurs who struggle with creating a revenue-generating business. They're not making consistent money from their business and they come to me. That's probably why you're here. The avenues that I use are branding and marketing. And I have specific programs under each of those.

My niche has expanded over the years as my business has grown.

FINDING YOUR NICHE THROUGH BRAND STORYTELLING

So, to start you want to identify the problem that your target audience is facing.

This is why ideal customer work is so important because it's going to be really hard to identify the problem if you don't really know who your ideal customer is. They fit hand in hand and that's where it can get confusing sometimes.

So the way that I love to teach it is, to begin with the process of storytelling. That begins with identifying a few key pieces about who you are.

What are your strengths?
What are the things that you're really, really good at?
What have you helped people with? Friends, family, colleagues?
What have you been paid for in the past?
What's your training and all these different things?

What are the things from your story that you know make you unique, that you're really, really good at, that you can bring to the table?

Then think about who you ultimately want to support in doing just that. This is the second phase, which is your ideal customer.

For example, when I was starting my business, I made a list of all of my strengths, and this is still an exercise that I teach inside of Roadmap to Freedom, and then started grouping them together.

And I found that something that I was really good at was communication, that I had a background in PR, but I didn't want to teach PR. That I knew how to use social media and communication and messaging. And I had done a lot of work in branding and messaging and advertising in different forms for companies and nonprofits.

By looking at this, I was able to see that there was a central theme in what I enjoyed doing and that was communication.

So then I started to think about, well, who do I want to work with? Who do I feel really connected with? Who can I share a lot of similarities with? Because that was important to me. That's not a decision marker for all businesses, but for my business, I had in my mind specifically who I wanted to work with and what their desires were.

So I started writing that down.

Then the third piece of it, I said, okay, this is kind of my general focus. This is my ideal customer.

What are their main problems within that focus?

So I started to ask myself, with my ideal customer in mind, what do they struggle with most with communication? And I was able to start to pinpoint those specific problems to which I could then create my niche.

THE EVOLUTION OF YOUR NICHE

Now your niche can evolve over time. We've already said that. And I think sometimes we think that pieces of business are so permanent and we let ourselves believe that like, well, I'm going to do this and then I'm never ever going to be able to go back to it and change it ever again.

That's not true.
Your business is evolving.
You're evolving.
Your level of expertise is evolving.

It's meant to change.

But you've got to have something solid and specific to get started, otherwise you're constantly going to be changing it and moving it around and you're not going to make money in your business.

CONCLUSION

With niching down, we've got to focus on the main problem. Because again, we will pay a lot of money to solve a problem.

When you’re thinking about niching down, think about doctors.

If you go to a general doctor who can help you with anything under the sun, you can bring all of your questions to them. They make less money than a specialist, right?

If I’ve got a problem with my foot, I'm going to go to a foot doctor and they're going to help me with that specific problem. If I want to get my skin looked at, I'm going to go to a dermatologist and they're going to help me with that specific problem.

Those specialists make more money because they're specializing in solving a very specific problem. We will pay more money as a consumer to solve very specific problems.

So if there's anything to motivate you to get specific, especially in the beginning, think about the money that you'll be able to create that will then allow you to expand to a point where yes, you can sell journals and jewelry and tapestry and books and all of those different things. I get it. I want to do it too. But I also know that I'm going to need money to do all that.

So don't stretch yourself too thin. Focus on getting really, really specific.

When you're thinking about the niching down process, think about the specific problem that you solve for your ideal customer.

I’m guiding you through this entire process in my upcoming Niche Challenge happening October 18 - October 24, 2021.

We will walk through my signature process for niching down so you can walk away with a specific niche and an understanding of how to communicate your niche in a way that magnetizes your ideal customer.

Join the free challenge at brandmerry.com/niche.