In this episode, I explore the often-repeated advice to niche down in your marketing and why it can be more confusing than helpful. I use an analogy from Schitt’s Creek to illustrate the frustration of unclear advice. I share my personal journey with niching down in my business, the complications it caused, and the realization that overthinking your audience can sabotage your marketing efforts. By simplifying your approach, you can create more authentic and effective content.
Resources
Content Marketing Strategy for Busy Business Owners – A Guide with Checklist
Examples of Strong Lead Magnets
Listen In
Watch the Podcast
Raw Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct, and conversational. And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
How many times have you been told to niche down? A few, 100.
I don’t know what that means?
Have you ever seen that Schitt’s Creek episode where David and Moira are trying to fold in the cheese for the enchilada recipe? And David’s like, okay, but how do you fold in the cheese? And then Moira responds, you just fold it in David.
I mean, that scene is like so on point. I would be David like for the love of beer. Just give me the specific details.
So for this episode in the sweet spot, welcome back to the episode, by the way. I’m going to provide some direction on how to define your niche so that you can be super effective with your marketing.
Without defining your niche, which is simply put, identifying who you’re talking to, or even known as reading the room, without it, it’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall. It won’t stick and it won’t resonate.
Here’s the deal. As business owners, we tend to overthink the whole know your audience thing. And I mean really overthink it. We stress about demographics, psychographics, behavior graphics, all the graphics, until we end up sabotaging our own marketing efforts. Does this sound familiar to you?
So here’s my advice. Ditch the niche. That’s right. Just ditch it. Pitch it. Nix it. Scrap it. Do this instead. Write for you. Target you. You are your niche.
Now let’s break this down and get into why this is a good idea. Let me ask you, why did you start your business? I bet it was because of something that you needed, something you were passionate about or something that filled a gap in your life. Am I right? So it makes so much sense to create content that resonates with you.
And when you write for yourself, you’re able to tap into that person, that authenticity that makes your business unique, you’re not second guessing what your audience wants to hear. You’re speaking from the heart and guess what? That’s magnetic. That’s what draws people in.
I’ll share this story with you about my business. When I started my business, I was all about trying to figure out the perfect audience. I actually had niched down to photographers. But then the business owners from other industries would reproach me, and I thought, oh, I can’t tell them no.
As I reflect back now as a recovering people pleaser, I didn’t want to tell them no because they might not like me or they might get mad at me. In reality now, I see that what I do helps business owners in more industries than just the one. My expertise is a foundation of knowledge that works across multiple industries.
It’s the same framework, but with different tactics.
As time went on, I opened up my niche. Then I went back to photographers only. And what happened was interesting. I got stuck. My content felt forced and disconnected. And the worst part, I didn’t see an increase in sales.
But I digress.
One day it occurred to me, I am so over hearing everyone saying to niche down and find out details that absolutely made zero sense for me to know in order to market my services. Like why do I need to know what color eyes they have? Of course, this would be helpful if I was in the eye contact business, but I’m not sure.
Maybe if most audiences have brown eyes, which like 70 to 80 percent of the world has, I could say, Hey, if you have brown eyes, maybe you want this freebie of mine. Okay, I’m joking, obviously, and hopefully you get what I’m trying to say here.
Once I started aiming my content at people like me, I was talking to myself. It made creating it so much simpler. It didn’t feel like a chore, which by the way, I loathe chores.
So, my dear business owning friend, ditch the niche, and you write for you, boo. I actually never used the word boo in my natural language, but for some reason I just had to.
If you create content that makes you happy, that you’re passionate about, your audience will find you. I mean, it’s not a build it and they will come sort of thing, because you’ll still have to share it. But they’ll be drawn to your authenticity, your passion, and they’ll stick around because they resonate with what you’re saying.
Alrighty. That’s all I’ve got for you today. If you found this episode helpful, don’t forget to share and leave a review. And if you’ve got any questions or topics you’d like me to cover, hit me up over on Instagram at compass digital strategies. Stay tuned for more episodes on making your business thrive online.
I’ll see you in the next sweet spot. Cheers.
Thank you for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you’re looking for SEO and content marketing help, consider joining the small business sweet spot. It’s a group coaching program where you can get answers to your questions about your business directly and clarity around the marketing strategies that you would like to implement in your business.
You can find all kinds of information at compassdigitalstrategies. com. And if you liked the episode, please tell a friend. Cheers.
