How to Choose a Profitable Coaching Niche
Before starting any business, it’s essential to pick a niche to avoid competing in an already saturated area or offering a service that no one wants. The same applies to coaching, too, as experts need to choose what type of information they will provide and the people who will listen.
Failing to choose a niche is a path to a potential deadlock and failure, as your efforts and actions will be poorly focused, and your value will remain invisible. Fortunately, this post aims to provide you with maximum information on choosing your niche, why this process is crucial, and what mistakes to avoid.
Let’s begin!
Importance of Choosing a Coaching Niche
As a starting coach, your primary goal is to establish a loyal audience and also create a steady stream of revenue as time progresses. In this case, finding a niche helps to achieve this goal, as it ensures a particular group of customers will want to buy from you instead of patronizing the competition.
Furthermore, studies have shown people are more likely to choose a coach with narrow expertise. In other words, people want you to tackle a specific issue, and the more specific it’s, the more credible you appear compared to being broader.
It’s not uncommon to see starting coaches go broad and fail to pick a niche out of fear of losing opportunities to get clients. However, in reality, trying to serve everyone leads to you serving no one. Choosing a Coaching niche presents more benefits than risks.
Proven Benefits of Choosing a Coaching Niche
Identifying your niche presents multiple benefits that translate to increased brand loyalty, more patronage, revenue increase, and more. These benefits include:
Less Competition
Less competition is a substantial benefit of identifying your niche as serving a limited audience means fewer establishments are offering the same service. While a smaller number means fewer customers than a more broad niche, it’s a more effective way to begin your journey as a coach.
Remember that less competition shouldn’t be the only reason to pick a niche, as that may also indicate it’s not a lucrative area. Essentially, this reduced competition is only beneficial if the audience is significant.
Increased Profit
Choosing a Coaching niche with a significant audience often presents high-profit margins since you’re meeting clients’ specialized needs that other brands often ignore.
One other factor that makes niching special is that your audience can pay extra since they can’t get your service anywhere else. You’re invaluable and a necessity to many.
Brand Loyalty
Brand Loyalty is when a client attributes positive emotions to your coaching services, thereby compelling them to continually patronize your offering to demonstrate their satisfaction.
Choosing a niche helps build brand loyalty by engaging with a smaller audience with mutual understanding. This allows you to focus on the quality of customer service and nurture a relationship with your clients.
Less Marketing Expenses
Offering a wide range of coaching services forces you to spend more money on marketing and advertising to reach your audience. Fortunately, niching down reduces these costs substantially; you only have to worry about a limited audience, keeping the marketing efforts highly targeted.
It’s a cost-effective option.
Valued Expertise
When you serve a limited audience, you tend to be perceived as a respected expert in your field; you’re the best source for reliable answers. Additionally, it’s challenging to be an expert in every field, but niching allows you to focus your abilities in one area and earn much-deserved respect.
Effective Steps for Finding your Coaching Niche
Now that you understand the importance and benefits of choosing a coaching niche, it’s time to outline a few steps for finding this comfortable working area. These include:
Identify your Strengths and Passion
Irrespective of how much knowledge you possess about various niches, it’s essential to choose one that you enjoy. This factor ensures you dedicate the bulk of your time to developing the area and staying consistent for long-term success.
One way to identify your passion or strength is to look at your life and see areas where you triumph the most. It could be how well you help your family or friends overcome a specific obstacle or an area you spend a large portion of your time on.
Remember that this area doesn’t need to be a part of your past or current job; rather, it should be based on your life experience; something you deeply identify with.
You can ease the process of finding your strength and passion by creating a list consisting of:
- You’ve already achieved results personally, with your clients, or with loved ones.
- Teachables are concepts that you have mastered and can articulate to another person.
- Things you have experienced, and while you’re not a master, you can help a beginner going through the same phase.
Create a list based on these factors, and you can narrow down your passion and strengths in coaching.
Identify your Audience
Once you’ve identified your passion and strengths, the next phase is defining who needs this type of help; what problems will they like to solve. You can create this profile by asking your sled specific questions and finding the answers.
These questions mostly include:
- Who will benefit from working with me?
- What benefits will they get from working with me?
- What kind of people are they? (business owners, seniors, mompreneurs, etc.)
- What goals do these people have?
- What will I teach them?
Understanding your audience and their profile allows you to craft your services in a way that appeals to them, thereby increasing engagement and patronage.
Check Marketability
Before dedicating several hours to the coaching area that rests on your passion and strengths, consider checking whether the service you wish to offer is in demand. To keep your business running, people must be willing to pay substantial amounts for the remedy you provide.
In coaching, three factors compel people to pay for your service; these include:
- Deep desires (financial freedom, work-life balance, etc.)
- Feelings (confidence, happiness, health, etc.)
- Becoming (recognition, less stressed, punctuality, increased productivity, etc.)
These three factors play an intense role in what people are willing to pay for, and to know if your audience falls in that group, look at what they already invest in. What are they talking about online?
You can check Facebook groups, Quora posts, related forums, and other places where you can ask questions directly. There’s no better way to validate your service than receiving feedback from the intended group.
Specify
Once you’re done with creating a list of your passion and strengths, proceed to identify the audience and their desires, then check whether the niche is lucrative enough to be worthwhile.
Once you have outlined these factors, create a description of your business and what you do. For example, “I help mompreneurs start and maintain lucrative online businesses and attract clients while having a work-family balance.”
Articulating your niche in your head solidifies it, giving you a concrete road map to begin working on your new business.
Common Mistakes with Choosing a Coaching Niche
While following the guide above to choose a niche, avoid the common mistakes listed below. These include:
Having no Connection with the niche
Some beginner coaches focus more on the financial aspect of coaching, leading them to choose some of the most lucrative options. While money is essential to keeping a business, failing to connect to your chosen path is a recipe for disaster, as you’ll struggle to continue work whenever you’re exhausted, tired, or burned out.
Choose a niche that’s both lucrative and exciting to you, one where you understand the clients, language, obstacles, etc. It’s the best way to remain consistent even during complicated times.
Going too Broad
Going too broad at the beginning of your career is recommended as focusing on one area helps you grow and focus all your energy on marketing. In other words, you shouldn’t just be a “Business coach”; you need to specify.
A good example is “A business coach that helps freelance writers begin their careers and find success in Fiverr, Upwork, or via custom websites”. Saving you help people in all business areas will lead to either failure or time wastage before correcting yourself.
Choosing a Niche with Low Demand
The primary reason for being in business is to earn money; therefore, lucrativeness should be a driving factor when picking a niche. However, some coaches get passionate about a specific area and fail to properly estimate how much it’s worth.
While passion is an important criterion for picking a coaching area, you shouldn’t fail to double-check whether your passion is marketable. If people aren’t ready to pay for it, you may waste a large portion of your time.
Conclusion
Choosing a niche is essential for business success as a coach since it allows you to understand your audience, effectively focus your marketing efforts, and be valued as an expert. Hopefully, the tips in this post will be sufficient in finding your niche or pointing you in the right direction.
