How Niching Down Worked for Me
Entrepreneurs talk about the power of finding your niche.
Written By Lisa Peranzo for Smartrepreneur
As soon as you begin to entertain the idea of becoming an entrepreneur and know what your business will entail, the idea of niching down your clientele seems to be present everywhere. Every established business coach as well as the majority of entrepreneurs talk about the power of finding your niche so that you can have clarity in regards to marketing your services.
An entrepreneur is someone who wants to channel their creative energy and passion to serve their community by providing their community with valuable services that will improve their quality of life. For the entrepreneur, creating and providing these services gives them the financial and time freedom to have a better balance between work and life.
In the beginning stages of business development, being an entrepreneur can be extremely overwhelming. Most entrepreneurs are givers by nature and want to help as many people as humanly possible. While admirable, this can create a confusing and convoluted message to the audience the entrepreneur is intending on impacting and as a result can have the opposite effect. Instead of helping people, the people on the receiving end of the message can end up so confused that they do not buy the services being offered. Quite plainly, they do not know if those services are intended for them or for someone else.
Therein lies the power of niching down especially in the beginning stages of business. We as entrepreneurs need to quell this driving desire to help absolutely every single person we can and focus on establishing ourselves in the entrepreneurial space. The more clarity we can provide to our audience, the more clients we receive, and the more our business grows as a result. Clarity of our message helps to build trust from our audience which in turn increases our credibility.
This focused message to a target audience can also guide the creative process in our business. It can give us insight into what we created because we will be creating services we know our niche will find particularly valuable. It is at this point that niching down appropriately becomes particularly important. You have to make sure that you are niching down to an audience you find ideal. After all, we need to be excited about what we create and excited about working with our clients, so if you are not excited about your niche, you will not be excited about doing the work. Ultimately, what we are initially developing in our business becomes cyclical. We know who we want to market to, so we create the services they will find valuable, our business grows and the cycle repeats itself. As the cycle continues to repeat itself, we can find ourselves in an increasingly growing network both on social media as well as in person.
Our “like, know, trust” factors grow to the point where our audience knows that whatever they purchase from us, whatever services we offer will be of value.
At this point, niching down has done its job. We create a strong business foundation, we have clarity in our message as well as our services, and we have an established audience. Now we can do the opposite of niching down and go back to our original desire of being able to help as many people as humanly possible. We can expand from our ideal client and our niche to helping absolutely anyone who would benefit from our services. Essentially, we niche down to eventually be able to expand even more.
While tedious and at times frustrating, niching down helps with growth.
By taking the time and putting in the effort to niche down we increase our credibility to our audience because we are clear with what our business provides. By knowing who we initially want to serve and how we can serve them from a place of compassion with valuable offerings, we give ourselves the capability and space to build a business that will be larger than we initially thought.
