If I ask a coach what their niche is, I’ll get one of two answers. The first is a job title: I’m a parenting coach, I’m a career coach, I’m a health and wellness coach etc. The second is a vague description of a problem: I work with overwhelmed and anxious people, I work with people navigating difficult transitions, I work with people who are struggling.
Neither of those things is a niche. They’re what we say when we haven’t done the work required to learn how client acquisition for coaches works. That isn’t a failing. Coach training produces excellent coaches, but it doesn’t teach us how to articulate the value of coaching in a way that non-coaches can understand.
Why “Difficult Transitions” Feels Right
When we say that we want to help people navigate difficult transitions to other coaches, we know exactly what we mean.
The transitions we could help people navigate include things like university into a first job, a first job into a first supervisory role, then into a first management role, and every step after that. From a non work-based perspective, those difficult transitions could include divorce, having children and going back to work once they’re at school. We use the phrase navigating difficult transitions as a catch-all, and we assume a listener will understand that.
They don’t.
Navigating difficult transitions doesn’t mean much to a non-coach, and expecting somebody to unpack all of that from three words is optimistic, or perhaps hopeful in the extreme. Here’s the problem with that – optimism and hope are not client acquisition strategies.
What a Niche Is
A niche is the intersection between WHO you want to work with and WHAT problem that person is grappling with that working with you could resolve.
Once you know WHO they are and WHAT they’re struggling with, you know WHERE they are and you know HOW to speak to them in a way that helps them understand that you’re the person who can support them to resolve it.
Nobody Is Searching for Us
Precious few people are looking for a coach.
Go to the Google keyword tool and you’ll find something in the small tens of thousands of monthly searches for coach, and that’s worldwide. That figure includes sports coaches, business coaches, voice coaches – every kind of coach there is. The number of people searching for our sort of coaching is a vanishingly small fraction of a number that was already tiny.
Run the same search for therapist and it runs into millions a month. People know what a therapist does, which means they know when they need one.
That difference is important to realise – people don’t know what we do, so they don’t know when they need us.
Directories Don’t Work
Plenty of us join coaching directories, free or paid, in the hope that this is where people go to find a coach.
If precious few people are searching for a coach at all, a directory is not a place that people are searching. Joining one feels productive, but it isn’t effective, because it assumes a search that just isn’t happening.
Shame
There’s something particular about the problems coaching helps with, which is that they tend to carry an element of shame, even when there’s no logical reason for it.
Somebody looks around, sees nobody else visibly struggling with the thing they’re really struggling with, and they conclude the problem is a personal failing. That alone stops people asking for help, and it also means they’re not saying any of it out loud, let alone typing it into a search bar.
Our Competition Isn’t Other Coaches
When I ask coaches who their competition is, the answer is usually “other coaches”. They’ll tell me that we are a saturated profession, with coaches everywhere, all fighting over the same clients.
We’re not fighting over the same clients, because those clients aren’t looking for any of us.
Our real competition is podcasts, YouTube channels and self-help books etc. That’s where somebody goes when they’ve got a problem they can’t resolve on their own and a sense that they ought to be able to. Occasionally another coach is the competition, but it’s rare.
What Having A Niche Changes
When you have a niche, two things become true that weren’t true before. You know where to be, and you know what to say. That sounds small written down, but it’s the difference between effective marketing and simply saying and writing words.
Coaches we work with put it a particular way, and they use almost the same words each time. They say I’ve found my voice. They go on to tell me that they know how to talk about what they do and know what their particular people need to hear to understand why they should pay a professional fee.
That’s an extremely powerful place to be, and it’s available to anybody prepared to do the work.
Why Marketing Feels Grubby
I talk to coaches about becoming coach marketers and I watch them shudder, because the phrase conjures up something grubby/grabby and boastful. Being everywhere, shouting about how marvellous your coaching is.
Let me reassure you, that isn’t marketing. In exactly the way the public thinks it knows what coaching is and is wrong, coaches think they know what marketing is and are wrong.
Without a focus, you’re not marketing because there’s no such thing as unfocused marketing. To be even clearer, if it isn’t focused, it’s not marketing. If you’re trying to market at everyone, you’re not marketing at all.
You Can’t Outsource Something That’s Not Working
Coaches often tell me that they’ve tried to outsource their marketing, but it didn’t work. There’s a very simple reason why that’s the case.
We can’t outsource an effective client acquisition process until we have one. Before that, we’d be asking somebody to articulate the value of coaching in a way non-coaches can assimilate when we can’t do it ourselves. We also can’t supervise or support work we don’t understand, so we’ve no way of knowing whether what we’re paying for is any good, until we’ve paid for it and it hasn’t resulted in clients.
Your voice is the part that can’t be outsourced. Finding your voice is part of learning how the client acquisition process works for coaches.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about how to find your voice, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
We run it several times a year and it runs for four days. Coaches who’ve been through the challenge describe it as a game changer, and they say things like why didn’t I know this before? and this is the first time niching has made sense, and it’s the first time I’ve felt excited about marketing rather than horrified by it.
There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how marketing for coaches works.
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