Coaching call: How much should I niche down my business?

Today I am coaching Alana Bonnemann who is a Naturopath and Nutritionist focusing on supporting women to reclaim their energy. Alana broadly offers her expertise to woman over 30 years, however as a mother, Alana has found that she can offer great value to this market but is struggling to gain traction. In today's coaching call, I offer some suggestions as to why I believe Alana is facing this difficulty and the strategies to overcome it.

In this episode, we chat about:
– How being clear on the audience you are targeting and committing to it can be so valuable, especially when you're fairly new to business
– How to meet your audience where they are at right now
– Why creating an offer that is achievable to your ideal customer is so important
– The key steps to pivot and niche, and the overwhelming benefits of doing so
– The importance of taking imperfect action now and allowing yourself to fine-tune as your new direction evolves

 

I'm coaching Alana who is a nutritionist, who is not really sure about whether she should go broad in the audience that she's trying to reach, or if she should niche down and work with the people who she feels really inspired to work with, but is wondering if she's maybe limiting herself by doing so. 

“I work with women and I'm clear that I work with women. I'm a naturopath and I help women kind of get their energy back, but I'm also a mother and I want to work with mothers. I want to step into that world because I feel like I can connect with them. I feel like I am them. I feel like I can copy all that. But every time I go deeper into this niche, I'm faced with crickets, and then I need to step back and pitch to the broader audience.”

 

How being clear on the audience you are targeting and committing to it can be so valuable, especially when you're fairly new to the business

Being a naturopath for mothers, yes, you might have a slightly smaller total addressable market, right? There's a smaller proportion of women who are mothers, but, you within that market could carve out that name for yourself as the person, the go-to naturopath for mothers rather than trying to swim in this big pool.

So, I personally would think it's more of either an issue with the offer or with the messaging, and judging by the feedback that they've given you where they don't have the time, they've got too many kids, they're putting themselves last. It could be that either they don't see why they need to prioritise it yet or it's maybe just not aligned with what they need right now. Maybe they need something that's less high-touch. 

So run me through what was this offer. What did it look like?

It's a six-week course on getting women's energy back. I'm offering two 1-on-1s, one at the start, one at the end to kind of touch in and to touch out, I guess. And then we're going through six weeks of a course module of what they can do. And I mean, it's also a lot on their part. 

Here's the thing. It sounds like it's a huge lifestyle overhaul, right? They have to change the way they're eating. They have to change a lot of their habits. And that's really hard. I want that, but I'm just too exhausted to make those changes that will get me more energy.

 

Why creating an offer that is achievable to your ideal customer is so important.

Perhaps there's some offer that you can bring in that's a step earlier than that. It's a slightly lower commitment. It's going to be a lower price point, it's a lower time investment. It could offer a quicker win that they can start to implement now so that they can start feeling better. So they can start to see this is doable, this is achievable. 

Then another thing is they might be looking at your course thinking, I'm going to sign up for this, and it's going to be like everything else where I've tried and I fall off the bandwagon a week later because I'm just too busy and I don't have the time and I can't prioritise this.

That's the first thought. But the other thought that I have is that maybe they don't quite understand. Maybe they don't understand what's causing their tiredness. Maybe they assume it's just the way that it is when you've got lots of kids, or maybe they don't understand how you can help them to solve that tiredness.

They don't understand what's involved. They don't understand that it doesn't have to be as difficult as they think it is. Maybe they don't understand that it's possible to not feel tired. There are all of these different things that they potentially need a bit more educating around before they'll be ready to commit.

When you're starting out, it's easier to make a name for yourself in that niche. Once you have become the go-to in that niche, then you can start to look, okay, are we going to go upstream? Instead of focusing on women, maybe we go into corporates and do nutrition and naturopathy workshops in corporates in like offices. Or maybe we go one step downstream. Maybe we do workshops for the kids or we can go broader. Maybe we can do one for fathers, or we can do one for more women.

So we can start to expand, but we first need to make sure we get that first niche working. We get the offer generating income, and once that's all sorted, then you can start to look broader. But it's scary because it does feel like you are limiting the number of people you can sell to. But in my experience and with everybody I have seen who is niche down, it has the opposite effect.

 

The key steps to pivot and niche, and the overwhelming benefits of doing so

It doesn't have to be this huge big announcement of hello world, I've pivoted. This is what I do now. Of course, you can email your list and you can tell them, Hey, this is what I'm going to be focusing on going forward. If you don't want to get these emails anymore, click here. I'll remove you from the list.

You can do that. And that's a good way to do it. So you're not paying for extra contact on your list who don't want to be there. And you can say to your social media audience, you know, this is what I'm going to be talking about going forward.

You might find that there are people who still, even though they're not in that niche, they still follow you because some of the things that you share might be relevant to them in another way, or it might be something that will be relevant to them in the future. So they stay on your list there or stay in your audience there.

In reality, such a small percentage of our followers see what we post anyway. I think probably more than half of the people who follow me, follow me because they wanted to learn how to launch a podcast, which I talk about in my free workshops, in my free masterclass, but it's not something I talk about on social media.

But they're still there and they are free to leave if they want to. And I know that I will still attract more of the right people back in return. So, I guess, knowing that you will attract those right people in, it might not be 3.6 billion or however many there women there are on the planet. But I'm pretty sure there are a lot of mothers on the planet. 

And I think for you, I would say the biggest step that you can do here is to actually commit to it. Because it's very easy to say, oh, I don't know whether to be this niche or whether to go broad. And you stand with one foot in either of them and then you end up being very wishy-washy because every time you sit down to post something, you're like, I don't know who I'm writing this to. 

Or every time you write an email, you're thinking, is this for a mother? Is this for all women? Who is this for? And then it ends up resonating with nobody. And you said it yourself at the start, you find it really easy to write copy for mothers because you can relate to them. Well, there's a great place to start.

A good one to start with is to, write out the story behind why you love serving this niche, and why you are drawn to that. Write it out for yourself, first of all, and then send, or maybe tailor it a little bit, tweak it so it's in an email format. Send that to your list and explain this is why you've decided to niche down. Same with your Instagram audience post on there, why you've decided to niche down and explain. 

Your niche is evolving over time as well, and these are the people you feel you can impact and serve the best right now. It doesn't mean you're stuck with it forever.

You can also niche by the offer, right? So you can have different offers that serve different niches, but you can still be more broadly a naturopath for women. It does become harder especially if it's a personal brand, it does become harder to build that name for yourself within that specific niche because then rather than being a naturopath for mothers, you're a naturopath for women. But you can make it so that your offers are niche, so you can have one that's for mothers, you can have one that's for people over 30.

But I wouldn't worry about changing the podcast yet. You might find over time that you do want to evolve, that you do want to pivot it slightly. You might find that you start talking about different content naturally because you are going in a different direction but focus just on what content you're sharing with your audience elsewhere at the moment. 

 

“Alana, what are you going to go and do? What are your next steps?”

Well, the first thing is committing to myself to do it, and yes, giving a timeline to doing this and I think getting clear on myself why I'm doing this, and then also just explaining that to my existing audience because I sometimes feel I am telling people that I'm moving and changing. But I think just to get clear with myself, explain that to people transparently and then commit to it and give it a timeline for six months and then refresh in six months and see where I'm at and then go from there.

And start tracking numbers. Start looking every time somebody gives you some feedback, write it down. Because you know, even at the start when you said you launched your offer and it was crickets. For me, crickets are just absolute silence. Yours, that was great. When we get that kind of feedback, we can take it on board and we can use it to improve or we can say, oh, they're not buying. But meanwhile they're telling us why they're not buying and that gives us something we can work with. 

 

Pin it?