Why Niching Down Too Early Is A Huge Mistake & What To Do Instead
- Jul 15, 2021
- 4 min read
Written by: Justine Beauregard, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Niching down before you’ve made money in your business is often the reason making money feels hard. In the time you take trying to figure out who you should serve, you could already be serving paying customers with your offers.
You could therefore be paid to learn who your offer serves the best, instead of making hypotheses without any real data. After all, hindsight is the gift of experience.
When you create a niched-down message before you’ve gathered facts about who your offers are best suited for, you’re likely to picture someone like you. Someone who does not will then be more likely to feel left out and not buy. This will then skew the results of your efforts and trick you into believing what you assumed to be true – that like attracts like – which is not always the case.
Instead of falling into this trap and being the reason why you aren’t making money in your business right now, I recommend taking a few mindful next steps.
Validate Your Offer
Validating your offer is how you ensure two key things. First, that your offer is good and second, that it is something people will buy. The clearer and less complicated your offer are, the quicker you’ll get a definitive answer.
Start by doing some simple market research. Go on Amazon and check if there are books on what you sell or the result it provides people who buy it. Visit your favorite podcast platform to see if there are podcast episodes or entire podcasts centered on this topic. Join Facebook groups and ask people directly if they would be interested in such an offer.
If you have an existing audience, you can send a brief survey or invite them to be beta testers at a special price point or with special perks. Whatever you do, don’t invest in marketing or selling anything until you’ve validated your offer.
Learn How to Communicate Its Value
Once you know what it is you desire to offer and know your audience will buy it, you're going to want to create content that magnetizes people to your offer. This requires learning how to monetize your message.
When you do this well, you’ll always know exactly what to say to draw people in and get them excited to buy from you. Your results speak for themselves, so if you're not making sales, you haven’t yet done this. You’ll know you have when you get lots of engagement, sales, and praise consistently.
If you’re struggling here, start by auditing and improving your sales process one step at a time. Read everything you write and ask questions like, “Is this clear?” and “am I an instant yes?” The money is in the mistakes you discover by being honest.
Confidently Sell Lots of Your Offer
Before you know your ideal niche, you're going to want to sell lots of your offers to lots of people. When you have a solid number of paying customers, it's easy to identify a pattern. I recommend a minimum of 100 customers to identify a pattern, which makes the math very simple to do. Plus, it’s easy to hit this baseline when you've learned how to communicate the value of your offers!
Let’s talk about this math for a moment. Say, 25 people out of that 100 have a lot of the same characteristics. Well, that's 25% of your audience. You can break down so many metrics this way. Think about what’s important to you and what’s important to know for scaling purposes. Like, personality traits you admire and would like to see mirrored in your customers as well as key demographics for ad campaigns. Be thoughtful and diligent here. No shortcuts.
See Who Your Best Customers Truly Are
Just because you've sold a lot of your offers to one specific type of person does not necessarily make them your best customer. Your best customer buys multiple products and understands the value of your offers easily and quickly. They are brand champions and tell everyone they know about your offers. They are also easy to work with in every stage of the buyer’s cycle.
These people are truly invested in your business. It’s not about one single purchase but loyalty and advocacy. Go beyond the numbers here. You desire to identify who your best customers are, even if there are less of them. This doesn’t mean you can’t also serve other people. It does, however, demand your focus goes to them.
Niche Down for The Benefit of All
Once you decide who your best customers are, you can niche down more. Again, this doesn't necessarily mean excluding those who are not your best customers. You can begin by bringing in more imagery that represents your ideal customer base. What they look like, how they speak, what they value most and other embodied characteristics.
You may also choose stronger language to describe who you serve when asked. Like, saying you prefer to work with a certain age demographic or using certain adjectives that strongly resonate with your best customers. Just be mindful that niching around your offer more than your audience is going to create more money in your business. Definitive language like “only” and “always” should be used sparingly and thoughtfully.
Now’s the perfect time to check in with yourself.
Have you taken each of these actions and in order? What happened to you? Where are you at revenue-wise? What’s your best next step? Don’t skip this part – it’s like mining for gold.
Justine Beauregard, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Justine Beauregard is a Marketing Coach for compassionate entrepreneurs worldwide. She uses the skills she's learned as a marketing and sales training expert since 2008 to empower her clients to thrive in their zones of genius + joy to maximize their net impact and income. Since 2015, she has launched two 6-figure businesses of her own and developed a unique marketing process that allows you to be yourself, do what you love, make an impact + still feel like a human who cares. It has been used by hundreds of entrepreneurs worldwide to grow up to 6x revenue in as little as 30 days.
Her work and expert opinions have been featured in major online publications such as Brainz Magazine, CIO.com, FitSmallBusiness.com, and Business2Community.com.
