When you decide to become a coach, identifying your niche is going to be one of the most crucial steps in creating a successful business.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds!

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What is a niche?

A coaching niche is a specific area of coaching that you specialise in. It’s a good way to differentiate yourself from other coaches and focus your coaching practice on a particular area of expertise or kind of work that you enjoy the most.

Having a defined niche for your coaching business makes sense for lots of reasons including making it easier to market yourself and making it easier to be found by clients who are looking for solutions.

How narrow does your niche need to be?

This is where my advice might differ from a lot of other business coaches but I don’t believe you have to have a super specific niche to be successful. If you’re multi-passionate, having a very specific niche can feel stifling which completely eradicates any benefit from being so narrow in the first place!

In fact, some people much prefer to approach the whole topic of niching as ‘I am the niche’ because when you simply focus on being yourself and sharing what lights you up, the right people tend to find you.

However, it can take some time to feel comfortable using that kind of approach so how do we begin?

Identifying your niche

Identify Your Passions and Strengths

Start by identifying your passions and strengths. What topics do you feel most passionate about? What are you really good at? What are you most interested in? When people come to you for help or to ask questions, what are they asking you about? What can you talk about all day long? Consider these questions, you really have to be super passionate about whatever your niche ends up being because you’ll be doing it a lot!

Market Research

Once you have an idea for a niche based on your passions and strengths, do some market research to see if you can round out the niche idea a little further and get a better sense of whether or not people are looking for solutions in this area. Market research should help you answer the questions – what problems do you solve for people and what aspirations do you help them achieve.

Look at Your Competitors (or not!)

At this point you might want to take a look at other coaches in the same niche as you to see what they’re doing. This can be a great idea as you can see what’s already working and decide how you might want to differentiate yourself from others (quick tip – just being yourself can work here!). However, if you’re prone to comparison then feel free to skip this step. Sometimes looking at the ‘competition’ can feel really disheartening and not actually be that helpful.

Coach some test clients

Before committing to a coaching niche, test it out with a few clients. This will help you determine if there is a demand for your services and if you truly enjoy coaching in that area. Priceless Power Hour style calls can work really well here to see what works and what doesn’t.

If at this point you’re feeling confident that you’ve identified your niche, it’s time to start putting together your main coaching programme and doing some marketing! A really good test of your niche is when you start and create content for your marketing – if that feels hard then maybe it’s not the right niche for you.

What is a profitable niche?

I don’t think it makes sense to consider niching in any other way than identifying one that is profitable as it has to be profitable by default if we’re going to run a successful business!
Ultimately we need to be identifying a niche and being clear about the problems we solve and the aspirations we help people achieve – we also need to be confident that people are seeking out solutions that we can provide and are willing to invest to get that solution.

Ultimately I believe every niche can be profitable – but it might be that your business model needs to look slightly different depending on what niche you go for.

Areas such as health, relationships and money are always great niches where people are willing to invest, but there are plenty of other niches where you can create a profitable business – remember that a big element of this is your marketing, sales and branding too. You can have the best niche in the world and struggle if those elements are off, and likewise you can have a less common niche but be nailing your marketing and making it work really well.

Mistakes coaches make when it comes to niching

Niching can be a really hard part of running a business. I struggled for a long time because I couldn’t niche down. Even now, my niche of helping business to consumer coaches grow their businesses is pretty broad, but I’d get totally bored if I had to niche down to just helping health coaches for example.

The tricky thing that can happen with niching is that you get niche-procrastination where you get really stuck and just don’t move anything forward because you feel like you haven’t landed on this one perfect niche.

The truth is that yes, niching is important, but it’s not more important than taking action so find a balance between carving out a niche that is workable for you and being able to move forward with it all.

It’s also worth remembering that your niche will likely shift and change as your business evolves too.

My Wholehearted approach to niching

Something that I teach in my course The Unboxed Guide to Niche and Messaging is to get more clarity closer to the sale you get. What this basically means is you can have a fairly broad niche but your paid programmes and services do need to be highly specific. I find this gives me the freedom I need to talk about all sorts of different topics in my marketing, but still enables my business to successfully get sales because most of my services are quite focused.

I hope this rundown of how to find your coaching niche has been helpful and do check out my programme The Unboxed Guide to Niche and Messaging for more support in this area!

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