How to Get Past Your Own Objections and Create the Best Niche for You and Your Practice
By Nina Price, LAc
Among the practitioners whom I coach, I hear a lot of objections when I encourage them to develop or define their practice niche. They tell me that:
- They don’t have a niche, or they don’t want to have a niche
- They don’t want to exclude people from their practice
- It’s too hard to define just one niche
This is why they’re leaving money on the table—they are not defining a niche. This is how I answer these objections:
If you don’t now whom you serve how can you find the right clients?
Knowing who you want to serve is crucial in a service business. If you don’t know this, how can you find the right clients? Many practitioners resist niche marketing because they find it too confining. While this may be true on the surface when it comes to investing money in a website, marketing collateral, giving workshops, promoting information products or doing other marketing tactics to help promote your business, if you don’t know whom you’re communicating with, how will you develop products or messages that address their needs? You could find yourself wasting a lot of time and money and find it hard to know where to spend your marketing dollars for the biggest return on your investment.
When you know whom you want to serve and can clearly articulate who they are (e.g. women who want to get pregnant who are struggling with infertility, menopausal women, bicycle commuters, people with back pain, cancer patients) you begin to have a picture of exactly who they are. The more specific the picture, the more details you have to use in treating them. What does a specific picture of your ideal prospect or client look like?
A clear definition of your niche can help you make decisions:
With your specific ideal-client picture you can make decisions about where you locate your office, how you dress when you meet with clients, how and where you communicate with your potential clients, what your logo and card look like, what groups you attend or present to, and what topics you speak and write about. What decisions could a clear definition of your niche drive in your practice?
Does having a niche mean that I only work with clients in that niche?
It’s true that many practitioners have clients they enjoy working with who are outside their niche. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s really about how you spend your marketing dollars. Your ideal clients are the people you attract with your marketing dollars. A family therapist I know works primarily with parents and their school-aged children. She has an established practice and gets plenty of referrals for this kind of family therapy work. However, she wants to do more work with cancer patients and cancer survivors. Clearly she needs to spend her marketing dollars on attracting these new clients while maintaining her existing client base. She may want to have two niches for a while and then choose the one she finds most satisfying, or she may continue to have two niches for the long term. In this case she may need to develop a whole new referral network and build partnerships with new people and organizations.
Multiple niches:
Is having more than one niche a problem? Not necessarily, especially if the two are in some way related. An acupuncturist I know is an expert at women’s issues, but recently she’s decided that she wants to also work with specific digestive issues as well. Since both of these areas are addressed by traditional Chinese medicine, she is planning to tell her existing and potential clients that in addition to working with women’s issues, she can also work with specific digestive issues. Then she can help her current clients see how the new work she’s doing can benefit them. She may also need to develop a new referral network and new partners, but she can also build on the established practice she has.
If the niches you want to work with are related, you may be able to use one website and one set of marketing collateral. But be careful. Multiple niches can confuse potential clients. Multiple niches can cost you more marketing dollars, so you may prefer having separate websites and marketing collateral for each niche. If you’re determined to have more than one niche, which approach will work best for you?
How having a niche helps you grow your business more effectively:
Focusing your marketing dollars on getting your ideal prospects to become paying clients is a compelling reason to have a niche. But how does having a niche help you grow your business more effectively?
When you know exactly who your ideal client is, it is easier to find them because you can become an expert on everything about them. When you understand how they think, how they choose the services they buy, where they look for information about your expertise, you can offer them what they need at the right time and place. What matters to your ideal client when they look for the services you offer? How can you provide this to them in an appealing way?
About the Author
Nina Price is a licensed acupuncturist and a business and wellness coach who helps people “push the reset button” on their health, their careers, and the rest of their lives. She helps them prevent burnout and have the professional life they want, no matter what.
Nina is a former Silicon Valley high tech marketing exec who teaches coaches and service professionals how to become incredibly good at marketing themselves and their practices so they can rapidly gain more clients and increase their income.