There’s a great deal of nonsense gets talked about niches, and about marketing generally. and I want to deal with one area that is certainly one in which coaches get confused and it’s this: what’s a niche?
A niche is a target audience. Niche and target audience are synonymous. That’s it and it takes about two seconds to say it.
What takes longer is explaining why so few coaches understand this, because when I ask a coach what their niche is, the answer is almost always one of three things, and none of the three is a niche.
“I Don’t Need A Niche, I Can Coach Anyone”
This is the first answer, and it’s true. On the delivery side of the business, you can coach anyone who sits down in front of you.
On the other side, the side that creates the opportunities to do that delivery, you need a focus in order to get anybody sitting down in front of you at all. You can coach anyone. You cannot market to anyone. There is no such thing as generic marketing – if it isn’t focused, it isn’t marketing.
You don’t need to worry about the distinction between who you can market to and who you can coach if you coach somebody else’s clients. That might be through a platform like BetterUp, Lyra, Ezra or CoachHub, or through another associate company, the client acquisition has been done for you. You turn up and coach. The rate for that work is usually nowhere close to what you’d earn with your own clients.
While we’re here, there’s something worth thinking about. You can be the best coach in the world, and if you have no clients to coach, are you a coach, or are you a person with a coaching qualification? If you pass your driving test and never get into a car again, are you a driver, or somebody who holds a licence? Just a thought.
“I’m a Transformational Coach”
The second answer I get to my question, “what’s your niche?’ is a job title. A transformational coach, a mindset coach, a change coach, a health and wellness coach, a functional medicine coach. It’s either a title the coach has invented or the name of their course/qualification. Let me explain to you why these are not only not niches, they’re also not as helpful as we think they are.
The word coach is already a barrier to being understood, because people think they know what a coach is, and they’re not thinking of our kind of coaching. Bolting another word onto the front of it doesn’t help. Worse, change, transformation and mindset all describe coaching itself, so what we’re really saying is “coaching coach”.
We could spend our time and energy arguing on LinkedIn that coaching should be regulated and that people ought to understand what we mean by it, but that’s futile because it isn’t and they don’t. The way out of this righteous indignation is to stop trying to compete on those grounds and meet potential clients where they already are.
The coaches most surprised by this tend to be the health, wellness and functional medicine coaches, who believe health and wellness is their niche. It isn’t – it’s where their coaching expertise sits on the delivery side of the scales.
Every business that succeeds needs two skill sets in equal measure, and I picture them as an old-fashioned weighing scale. Delivery on one side (so our coaching skills) and creating the opportunities to do that delivery (client acquisition skills) on the other, where we need to be equally excellent. A niche sits on the second side.
“I Coach Around Anxiety and Overwhelm”
The third answer is the WHAT. For example, career development, anxiety and overwhelm, difficult transitions, leadership. It’s the topic the coach wants to work with, usually their main interest, and it’s a perfectly good WHAT. What it isn’t is a niche. To be specific, it’s half a niche.
The Grid
A niche needs a WHO and a WHAT, and it helps to picture an enormous grid.
The verticals are industries, sectors and professions that exist anywhere in the world. The horizontals are every topic anyone could coach around. Your niche is the point where the vertical you choose crosses the horizontal you choose. This diagram gives you a little section of what is a massive grid.
That’s where I find the most resistance, because choosing an industry, sector or profession feels far too tight, but it isn’t.
The reason you need to know who these people are, right down to a job title or a small range of job titles, is that when you know WHO they are, you know WHERE they are. For example, choose lawyers and you know which professional bodies they belong to, which publications they read, which networking events they attend, which conferences they go to.
Same Problem, Different World
If we take emerging leaders as the WHAT – so someone moving from doing the work to supervising other people who do the work – it’s a demanding step and exists in every industry, sector and profession there is.
A lawyer making that step and a computer programmer making that step may face the same challenge, but they face it in different places and in different contexts. The programmer isn’t at legal conferences, isn’t reading legal publications, doesn’t belong to the Law Society. The experience differs too, because our work shapes our experience.
For most of us, the rhythm of life is dictated by the work we do. 9-5 work pattern for some, shift work for others, terms for teachers, semesters for academics etc. Once you know what somebody does for a living, their year becomes reasonably predictable and that’s crucial.
It’s also why you can’t pick a profession you know nothing about. Coaches need lived experience of a sector, industry of profession, or at the very least a front row seat to the life of somebody living it. You need to understand the nuance and the nitty gritty of how their year runs, and you need to know how events in the wider world might affect them.
Whilst you don’t need any of this to coach these people, you do need it to market to them, and marketing is the majority of what client acquisition is made of.
It’s The Whole Job
Attention has never been as scarce a commodity as it is now, and it gets scarcer. Our job in marketing is to be noticed by the people we want to work with and that can only happen if we know who they are. Because when we know who they are, we know where they are, and we can be in the places where they already are. We can be there with a marketing message that speaks directly to them about their experience of the thing that they’re struggling with that working with you as a coach can resolve.
Potential clients aren’t interested in us.
They’re not interested in our coaching skills or our qualifications, because for the most part they’ve no idea what we do, so postnominals become clutter rather than help. It isn’t that they don’t care, it’s that they don’t understand, which means there’s nothing there to be interested in.
That’s a huge problem for us as coaches. Because they don’t know what we do, they aren’t searching for us when they have a problem we could resolve. Selling a house means finding a lawyer for the conveyancing. The end of the tax year means finding an accountant. There’s no equivalent trigger for coaching, because nobody knows what we do, so therefore they don’t know what the trigger would be.
Effective marketing means being where they are already and talking about their situation. Note that I haven’t said that we talk about what coaching is, because they’ll never be interested enough to learn it. Something more like this: are you struggling with this thing? I know how it’s showing up for you, I know how it’s affecting your life, I know what you’ve already tried, and I can tell you why those things haven’t worked the way you hoped. I know where you are and I know where you want to be.
No consumer cares about a purveyor’s processes. We don’t either, when we’re the ones buying. Good client acquisition comes down to one sentence: the ability to articulate the value of coaching in a way that non-coaches can understand. Simple sentence, complicated process, and entirely learnable.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what this simple yet challenging process involves, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
It runs several times every year. I’ve run it several times a year for more than five years, and the feedback is consistent: why has nobody explained it like this before, and finally I can feel excited about having a niche rather than constrained by one.
It doesn’t mean blocking out four days. A video lands in the community at 7am UK each day, none longer than twenty minutes at normal speed, each with a concept and a task attached. You can post your task in the task thread and ask anything you like in the Q&A thread. At 5pm UK, Monday to Thursday, I go live with three or four of my mentors, so there are several experienced coach marketers answering questions.
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. Groups are capped at ten.
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