When I invite coaches to join the Nail Your Niche Challenge, a common response is “I already have my niche.” They tell me they’re going to focus on overwhelm and anxiety, or burnout recovery, or mid-life women in transition. They’ve identified what they think is a clear focus, so they don’t need a challenge about niching.
Except what they’ve identified isn’t a niche at all. A niche is made up of a WHAT and a WHO. These coaches can tell me the WHAT (what topic I want to coach around), but they can rarely tell me WHO they’re choosing to focus on. The thing is, it’s the WHO that’s the difficult part – it’s the part that makes the difference between success and failure.
The What vs The Who
The WHO is the audience, the WHAT is the topic for coaching. Unless we know who we are going to be marketing to, we’re trying to market to everyone, and that doesn’t work. All marketing is focused, not on what we’re going to deliver, but to whom we’re going to deliver it.
It’s how we separate ourselves out from the rest of our overcrowded profession.
When coaches say they’re focusing on overwhelm and anxiety, or burnout recovery, or career transitions, they’ve identified what they might help with. What they have yet to do is identify who they’re going to help. Overwhelm and anxiety in a newly promoted NHS manager looks completely different to overwhelm and anxiety in a tech entrepreneur or a charity CEO. The language is different and the context is different. The shame around it is different and the solution pathway is different.
If you’re trying to market to all of them at once by talking about overwhelm and anxiety in general terms, you’re marketing to no one specifically. Your content won’t trigger anyone’s Reticular Activating System because it’s too vague to feel personally relevant.
The Surprise and The Resistance
When I explain to coaches that “overwhelm and anxiety” isn’t actually a niche, they’re genuinely surprised. They thought identifying a topic area meant they’d done the niching work. When I then explain that, for example, “mid-life women” isn’t a WHO – it’s a poorly defined demographic that’s still far too vague – that’s when the real resistance appears.
They don’t resist the idea that “overwhelm and anxiety” is a WHAT rather than a WHO. Once they understand that distinction, they get it. What they resist is the level of specificity required for the WHO. Mid-life women feels focused compared to “everyone,” but it’s still far too broad. We need to know which mid-life women – in what context, facing what specific situation – because we want our marketing to prick their Reticular Activating System. When we’re vague, it doesn’t. The brain only pays attention to what feels personally relevant, and “mid-life women” is too broad to trigger that response.
What A Proper WHO Actually Looks Like
Coaches think mid-life women, or parents, or professionals, or senior leaders are focused enough, but they’re not. These are still massive, diverse groups of people with completely different challenges, contexts, and language.
Leadership coach isn’t a niche. Leadership coach for mid-level solicitors might be.
Executive coach for professionals isn’t a niche. Executive coach for VPs in banking might be.
Burnout recovery coach isn’t a niche. Burnout recovery coach for senior nurses in the NHS might be.
Career transition coach isn’t a niche. Career transition coach for redundant oil and gas executives might be.
Do you see the difference? One version could be marketing to anyone. The other version is marketing to someone specific, in a specific context, with specific challenges that we can describe in specific language.
Why This Level of Focus Matters
When we’re this specific, we can finally create marketing that lands. We know where these people are, what language they use, what specific challenges they face, what shame or embarrassment might be stopping them from seeking help, what outcomes they’re hoping for, and what it’s costing them to stay stuck.
We can write content that makes them think “they’re talking about me” rather than not thinking anything at all, because they don’t register that what you’re saying might apply to them. We are able to describe their 3am worries in their own words. We can demonstrate that we genuinely understand their specific situation, not just a general topic area.
We can separate ourselves from the thousands and thousands of other coaches also talking about overwhelm, burnout, transitions, or mid-life challenges, because we’re not talking about it generally – we’re talking about it specifically for this particular type of person.
The Resistance To Getting Specific
I understand the resistance. It feels like we’re closing doors when we should be opening them. It feels like we’re limiting ourselves to a tiny group when we could be helping lots of different people and it definitely feels safer to stay broader because then we’re not excluding anyone.
What actually happens when we stay broad is that we exclude everyone, not deliberately, but practically. Our vague marketing doesn’t trigger anyone’s attention and our general content doesn’t make anyone feel seen or understood. Our broad focus means we have no focus at all.
The specificity isn’t limiting, it’s liberating. Once we know exactly who we’re talking to, content creation becomes easier, much, much easier. We know what to say because we know who needs to hear it, we know where to show up because we know where they are and we know how to describe their challenges because we speak their language.
Even If You Think You Have A Niche
Even if you think you already have your niche, you might want to join the challenge anyway, to be sure. One coach who attended told me: “This is better than the gazillions of masterclasses and webinars on this topic I’ve attended over the years!”
Another said: “Finally, I understand what a niche is and why I need one. Why has no one explained this so clearly before?!”
These weren’t coaches who had no idea about niching. These were coaches who, like you perhaps, thought they already had their niche sorted. They’d identified their WHAT and thought that was enough. The challenge helped them understand that they needed a WHO too, and it showed them how to find it.
The Gap Between What You Think And What You Need
There’s often a significant gap between thinking we have a niche and actually having one that works for client acquisition. We’ve identified something that feels like a niche – a topic area, a demographic descriptor, a type of challenge. We’ve narrowed from “everyone” to “some people” and we think that’s job done.
Effective niching goes much further than that. It goes to the level of specificity where we can describe a particular person’s particular situation in their own words. We’re talking not to everyone struggling with burnout, not all mid-life women in transition, but this specific type of person in this specific context facing these specific challenges.
That’s the level of focus that makes marketing work because it’s the level of detail that makes content creation straightforward. That’s the specificity that separates successful coaches from struggling ones.
What You Might Be Missing
If you’ve identified overwhelm and anxiety as your focus, you’re missing who experiences it and in what context.
If you’ve identified mid-life women in transition, you’re missing which mid-life women and what specific transition.
If you’ve identified burnout recovery, you’re missing who’s burned out and what led to it.
If you’ve identified career change, you’re missing who’s changing from what to what.
The WHAT gives you a topic. The WHO gives you a market, and you need the market to build a business.
Why Join Even If You Think You Know
The Nail Your Niche Challenge isn’t just about choosing between being a life coach or a career coach or a health coach. It’s not about picking between different broad categories. It’s about getting to the level of specificity that actually works for client acquisition.
Even if – especially if – you think you already have your niche, the challenge might show you what you’re missing. It could reveal that what you thought was focused enough actually isn’t. It will definitely help you understand why your current “niche” isn’t translating into clients despite you posting regularly and being visible.
You might discover that you’ve been marketing a WHAT to everyone instead of marketing to a specific WHO and that small distinction makes all the difference between coaches who struggle and coaches who thrive.
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