A niche should be ‘an inch wide and a mile deep’. I can’t even remember where I heard this description – it was years ago – but it was true then and it’s true now.
Within that inch-wide niche lies your ideal client.
Yesterday I delivered May’s free masterclass over in Coaching Republic (our free community for business-building coaches). In it, we were talking about how to talk about your coaching, without completely confusing the person you’re talking to.
It’s Always About The Ideal Client…
The way to talk about coaching without blowing the mind (or the concentration span) of your audience, is to talk about the specific problem (your niche) that your coaching solves for your ideal client.
When chatting with one of the webinar attendees, I asked him who his ideal client was and he told me it was a professional between the ages of 20 and 40 who wanted to change career.
The problem with that answer is that a) it is at best describing a niche, not an ideal client and b) it’s nowhere near focused enough.
Age Ranges
Let’s leave to one side the fact that the word ‘professionals’ doesn’t describe anyone in particular.
The simplest way for me to explain why I’m saying that there’s a serious problem is to just look at the age range. Anyone who wants to change job, but is struggling to do so could probably do with some coaching – that’s true. If we’re talking about people who could do with coaching, we’re talking about the delivery side of your business.
As you know, The Coaching Revolution is far more concerned with the skills that you need to create the opportunities to do the delivery.
If there’s a 25-year-old potential job changer and a 50-year-old job changer, those are two people at utterly different points in their career. The 25-year-old may be new to their career, the 50-year-old is probably towards the peak of it.
Those two people need to hear completely different things in order to understand why they might want to pay for some coaching.
This is the essence of niche marketing. Not to cast your net wide, but to hone in tighter and tighter until you’re speaking to one kind of client.
Would you like to talk to me about how to hone your message? This is my diary.
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