Don't niche yourself. DO niche your offers.
Don't niche yourself. DO niche your offers.
A lot of us heart-based solopreneurs rebel against the advice that we have to find and commit to a niche. Maybe we consider ourself to be a multipotentialite, integrating various modalities and fields into our work. Or we otherwise don’t like to limit our identity. Here's my advice: Don't niche yourself. DO niche your offers.
Posted by George Kao, Authentic Business Coach on Friday, July 14, 2023
A lot of us heart-based solopreneurs rebel against the advice that we have to find and commit to a niche.
Maybe we consider ourself to be a multipotentialite, integrating various modalities and fields into our work. Or we otherwise don’t like to limit our identity.
I get it. I’m the same way. To say that I’m an “authentic business coach” is still very broad, and I teach classes in everything from authentic Ai to facebook ads to book publishing.
Notice that my offers are niched, but not my overall brand. This is the strategy I’ve been using for 14 years, so if you’re niche-resistant, it’s the advice I’ll give to you as well.
For your personal brand, stay as broad as you’d like. You can simply describe your business based on values, and/or overall type of work (e.g. coaching, healing, etc), and/or your broader mission.
For each of your services, programs, products, events, get as specific as you are able to. A coach might create a webinar about overcoming blocks to career advancement in a specific industry, and a coaching package to help someone through the challenges they have with their family of origin. A healer might offer a service subscription for those dealing with chronic fatigue, as well as a group healing experience to ease anxiety.
The common concern about someone not niching themselves is that they won’t be memorable. My response: who cares if an acquaintance doesn’t understand nor remember what I do? I don’t mind that I’m not memorable to random people.
Yet, those who know me personally or my work, tend to promote whatever current thing I’m offering.
Or maybe they remember a particular course of mine that made a difference for them, and they’ll share it with friends who have that issue as well.
Therefore, instead of fearing that you won’t be known for something specific, put your energy into making a deeper impact in your content and your service towards clients, fans, and friends.
When you give someone a meaningful experience, they have a lot more energy and room in their mind and heart to remember the thing that you did that made a positive impact for them.
And that’s what they’ll tell other people about.
It’s like a musician who has multiple albums, dozens of songs. The song I remember — and share — is the one or few songs that made the most difference for me.
They might even produce music in multiple genres, and as a fan I might not connect to most of what they made, but the few pieces that moved my heart? That’s what I’ll always remember fondly when I think of that band, and that’s what I “know them for”.
Same thing with you: you can announce dozens of very different offers in the next few years. But each of your clients, fans, friends will only remember the one, or the few, that was most relevant for them.
The offers that weren’t relevant for them? They’ll have scrolled on by, and probably won’t even remember that you offered it. There’s way too many other things they saw that day, some of which had more of an impact on them.
(That’s also the danger of niching your business as a whole: if it’s not relevant to your network, they’ll forget about your offers anyway, and you only have that one niche to test with them. If however you stay flexible, you get to test many offers, in whichever niches you want to play in, and see what works well for your network.)
So, don’t fret if you can’t niche yourself or your business as a whole. Stay open, stay creative, and play with the edges as much as you’d like. You won’t know which new thing you create could become your biggest hit, unless you try it out.