How to Find Your Niche in Business

Apr 17

Whether you are just starting out or looking to narrow down your niche, I’m sharing why it’s necessary and four questions to answer in order to niche down and grow your business.#entrepreneur #niche #nichingdown #onlinebusiness #femaleentrepreneur #…

How do you actually say Niche?!

It’s the great debate online, but one thing that isn’t debatable is the NEED for it.

Every single day your ideal audience is bombarded with messages that might sound similar to yours, so how do you stand out?

How do you build something that is worth the time and energy of your ideal customer?

It’s all in your niche boo.

Now, I know I know you’ve tried.

Maybe you even feel solid in your niche now, but still find yourself not clearly communicating your expertise with your audience.

That’s because there’s probably still more work that needs to be done.

So, let’s strip it back and talk about niching down.

Importance of Niching Down

It’s very important that at the beginning of your business you are known for something. And that something can’t be a million things, no matter how easy it might be to think you can create a business that helps people:

Discover their purpose
Save their marriage
Homeschool their kids
AND start their online business

When you try to be known for too much, especially in the beginning, you will lose your audience and potential customers.

The best thing you can do out of the gate is to focus on one key niche and problem you solve in order to build expertise and momentum online.

As your brand grows and more importantly your awareness, THEN you can begin to introduce more elements and therefore expand your niche.

Be known for something - especially in the beginning, building a business (expert)

Why is this important?

Niching down is not just the what, it is also the who. And in order to create magnetic messaging online and pull in the right people to your brand you need to specifically create content for them and their problem.

Niching down requires you to get specific on the problem you are solving for a specific person.

DETERMINING A DEMAND FOR YOUR NICHE

It’s crucial that what you want to offer your ideal client not only solves a problem but is in demand.

This is why I love a competitive market.

People shy away from creating something because it’s been done before or there are so many people who offer products and services in a specific market and I say GO FOR IT!

So what does a competitive market tell us? It tells us there is a demand. It also tells us a lot about what is being offered and how we can fill the hole.

It’s not about a small, barely touched market, you’ll actually make more with a big market. The key to niching down is getting specific.

SPECIFIC NOT SMALL.

For instance, Branding is a big market there are a lot of people - it’s competitive. The hole that I discovered early on was that people didn’t feel confident in sharing their personal life through their brand, people we’re struggling to connect with their audience and that people wanted to build a personal brand.

So I found a very specific niche inside of branding that is related to storytelling and personal branding.

SOLVING A PROBLEM WITH YOUR NICHE

The most important thing you need in order to create a profitable niche is a problem. If your product or service doesn’t solve a problem there will be little demand...see how everything is connected?

Think about the problem that you're solving first. And then think about how you're going to solve that problem - that’s your framework, product and/or service.

This is why looking at the demand and possible competition is so helpful, you can literally see what people are saying their problem is.

Then you can explore how that problem is being addressed. Do you offer a different take? Is there a gap that you’re seeing in the market that you could fill?

Identifying this allows you to stand out. It’s like this weird reverse engineering process.
Look for the demand.
Look at the competition in your specific market.
See where the holes are.
Fill the holes.
Market to the specific person!

4 QUESTIONS TO ASK TO IDENTIFY YOUR NICHE

Before we get into the questions I want to take a second to talk about qualifications.

Hear me when I tell you that it’s not about your “qualifications” it’s about your experience. Yes, of course, your experience could be your degree or certifications, but it doesn’t have to be and for many of you it won’t.

If you think you have to have a specific degree or certification to start a business, you’re holding yourself back. Start with the experience you have now and expand on that as your business grows.

ASK YOURSELF THESE QUESTIONS

1. Create a Master List
The goal of the master list is to find your ballpark - think of the overarching market for your niche. List out all of your skills, certificates, degrees, work experience and even what people ask you for advice on. You’re essentially listing out anything you could provide or teach others.

After you’ve created your master list, look for “like” areas of interest. For instance, when I made my list early on I saw a lot of topics around communication so I decided to explore that further.

2. Create a Content Topic List
The goal of this content list is to begin to brainstorm the different topics you could share through your brand. Content is so important as an online entrepreneur and showing up, consistently talking about your specific niche is hard if you don’t have a lot of information in your brain.

Ask yourself, “If I had a Youtube channel what would I make videos about?”
Or
“If I have a blog, what would I write blog posts about?”

After you’ve created your content topic list you can look once again for “like” areas of interest. Compare this list to your first list of skills to see where the crossover is.

3. Determine The Demand.
Once you’ve narrowed down a couple of possibilities for your niche it’s time to ask and look for the demand.

I always suggest asking friends and family who might fall into the category of needing this service to rate the demand, but there are also tons of tools online to help you determine what people are seeking support on.

You can use tools like YouTube, Pinterest and Google to see what people are searching for. You can use these platforms to search for your central theme that you’ve determined and see what specifically people are searching for.

For instance, let’s say you want to go into marketing and on YouTube, you see a lot of videos on Instagram marketing, that might be something to explore.

The key is to look for video views that will tell you what content people are consuming. For Google, you can use a tool called Keywords Everywhere to see search volume.

Another thing that you can do after narrowing down the demand is to look at your competitors and see what they charge for their services. This will also give you an idea of the demand based on price.

4. What is the Problem and Who is it For?
Let’s pretend that you’re wanting to be an Instagram Strategist - great! Now we need to determine who you’re solving the problem for so we can further identify the pain and problem they are experiencing.

As an Instagram Strategist, you could consider if your services are for a brick and mortar?

Is it for an online coach or consultant? Is it for small businesses? Is it for a solopreneur? Is it for someone with a personal brand? Is it someone with a company brand?Is it for a service or product?

These are just some of the things to really start thinking about.

PAIN
Let’s be real for a second...people pay for pain, or specifically to eliminate pain.

As humans, we can easily tell you what we want to eliminate or experience less of over what we want more of. This pain point or problem is the deciding factor for your specific niche.

After you’ve determined your overall market, found a demand for a specific sector of that, identified where you can fill the gap and then narrowed it down further to a person/persons and a problem solved...you’ve got it boo!

There has to be a problem that you solve - if there's not a problem, it's going to be really, really hard to market. Having a business that you are passionate about is important, but if that passion doesn't solve a problem, you will have a very hard time marketing and therefore making money.

So start with the master list, writing out things you love and work your way down!

CONCLUSION

Remember the three things you want to identify are...

What problem do you solve?
Whose specifically do you solve that problem for?
How do you solve that problem?