In today’s episode of the podcast, I’m going to help you identify your target market.
If you’re really struggling with how to make the decision about where to niche or who your target market should be, this is going to be a great episode for you.
Let’s dive on in.
Before we jump into how to decide on your target market, let’s get really clear on what your target market actually is.
Target market is another way of describing your niche. Your niche or your target market is the specific group of people you focus on when marketing your business.
This is actually a big mistake that people make when they are choosing their niche or their target market.
They are focusing on all of the people they could help, or the people who could really benefit from their services. They’re focusing on all the people who could experience a great shift if they were able to work with them.
At the end of the day, that is not a niche and it’s not a target market. When we are growing our business online, we need to be very conscious and very selective about a specific group of people that we are going to focus our marketing activities towards.
The reason being is that we have never had the capacity to expose our businesses to as big an audience as we do today. Due to that and the fact that we’re competing with a lot of noise on the internet, we need to be able to create deeply resonant messaging and offers that have people feeling so certain that that’s what they need and that they want to work with you.
In order to achieve that, our messaging needs to be relevant, tangible, specific and deeply resonant.
We cannot be specific and tangible if we’re continuing to talk to everybody.
There is a marketing phrase that says that if you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to nobody.
That is more true today than ever before.
In addition to that, if you try to speak to everybody, your messaging is very fluffy, it’s usually very high level, the examples that you give could apply to anyone and therefore you are not stopping the scroll and your messaging just doesn’t hit the mark for people.
When it comes to growing a business online, niching is a critical foundational decision. In fact, it’s one of the first foundation decisions that we need to make, especially if you’re going to market online.
Hand putting pin in map – how to identify your target market in geographic location
If you are stuck in a geographic location and you’re working with people who are physically located near you, then that is a niche decision that’s kind of been made for you because you have a geographical location as part of your niching.
If you are able to work with anyone around the world, that is when it is even more critical for you to be very specific about who your niche will be.
With this episode today, I have a very special resource for you.
It’s my Nail Your Niche training and it is absolutely free.
In that training, I walk you through in a little bit more detail why niching is so important, what a niche is, what a niche isn’t, and the five most important niching decisions that you need to make when you are marketing online. It’s specifically to marketing services online.
I won’t repeat all of that training in this podcast episode, but I do want to encourage you if you’ve never watched my Nail Your Niche training before – or it’s been a while since you’ve watched it – to watch that training specifically.
To add to that training and those five niching decisions, in this podcast I wanted to give you some prompts on how you can decide what your niche is.
It’s all well and good to know what the decisions are that you need to make about your niche, but how do you actually make that decision?
I’ve got four things that I’m going to give you today that are going to help you to make that decision.
1. Your niche can often be you in the past
If you’ve been through the same journey that you are now facilitating as a business owner, then you when you were first starting through this journey could be what your niche is.
Let’s say you were in chronic pain and you discover this beautiful healing modality. You taught it to yourself, you healed yourself and now you teach that modality to other people so they can heal themselves as well. That means that your niche and the decisions that you make about what your niche might look like, could be you before you discovered this particular modality.
That can absolutely be a way to make your niching decisions easier.
Just pick you from however many years ago, and look at what your situation was back then. That can definitely be one way of making a decision around your niche.
It’s better to start with something than to start with nothing.
If that’s a starting point and you end up refining it later, that’s absolutely brilliant.
2. Look at the people you absolutely adore
When I first started my business, I thought I was going to be career coach (but that didn’t last very long), and then I knew I wanted to work in entrepreneurship, businesses and teaching people marketing online. I initially just looked around at who my friends were and what they had in common.
Something that I noticed, was that I absolutely adored creative people – artists, people who did handicrafts, sewing, making amazing mosaics, pottery, artworks, all those things.
In my friendship circles, the people I hung out with in my old job, and in my family, I connected with a lot of people over arts and crafts. I really adored crafting myself – I wasn’t an artist but I was definitely a crafter.
I knew that that particular subset of people in my life really struggled with the business and marketing side of making a living out of their arts and their crafting.
That’s the niche that I actually chose.
It wasn’t a me five years ago thing, it was the people I absolutely adore hanging out with, and I knew that putting my skills with their amazing talents would create incredible results. That’s how I made those niching decisions.
Look at people you adore and people you really want to hang out with. Why shouldn’t your business be filled with people that you love hanging out with and spending time with?
I think that’s a really beautiful thing.
3. People you get ranty or passionate about
I’m definitely this kind of person these days.
As soon as I started my own business, I was a convert. To every person I spoke to who was complaining about their work, I’d just tell them to quit and start a business. My friends would get so frustrated with me and I would get so frustrated with them while trying to tell them what they’re missing out on and that they need to just start a business, forget working for someone else, screw the corporate structures and smash the patriarchy.
I would get so passionate about having a business and entrepreneurship.
Even now to this day, when I find out that someone is a business owner, an entrepreneur, or they’re giving something a go themselves, I just love and adore them.
I went and had a blood test at the doctor’s surgery a few days ago, and the nurse asked me what I did for my job, so I said that I work with people online, I have my own business, and I teach social media, marketing and sales strategies to people online.
I gave her the laypersons explanation of what I do, and she told me that she’s just set up these Airbnb’s in our local area, and maybe she should go and follow me because she doesn’t know how to spread the word about them. And I got so excited for her that she was embarking on this opportunity to create some form of other income outside of her work and be in business for herself and she was wanting to learn about social media and marketing.
I get so passionate about these things.
I had to bite on my tongue to not offer to have a coffee catch up with her where I could teach her everything I know over coffee because I’m just so passionate about that type of work.
You might find that there is a certain person or a certain type of thing that you get so passionate about that whenever anyone says any inkling of an idea that they might be interested in that as well, you just completely latch on to it and get really passionate and ranty.
That’s definitely a space that you might want to be niching in.
4. Just choose
At the end of the day, it is better to choose and pivot than to not choose and keep going round and round in circles and staying un-niched.
The longer you stay un-niched with your marketing and messaging online, the longer it’s going to take for you to develop a bigger audience, get your conversion working and really get that resonant messaging so people want to buy from you.
Hopefully you’ve found these beautiful tips helpful for how to select and make those decisions around who your target market or your niche will be.
As I said, make sure if you haven’t watched it before, come and check out my Nail Your Niche training.
If you have had any lightbulb moments or questions as a result of reading this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know you’ve been listening to episode number 232 and tell me what your insights are, if you’ve got any follow up questions, or maybe if this has helped you to make that niching decision.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
