How do I find my niche?

Finding your niche helps you focus your energies on winning the right sort of clients for your business. This affect everything from your the services you offer, your mission, your messaging, your finances and your happiness or satisfaction in what you do.

When you’ve got a wide range of clients from different industries with different budgets, it is very easy to feel lost, and not know where to start.

There are several ways to niche your business, so if you are struggling to find your “industry niche”, then start from a different angle… consider working out what you do best at the moment.

What task/service do you offer that you are absolutely LOVE to do and are really good at it. What problems does that service solve for people? That’s a great first step.

An Example – Meet Terry

Let’s pretend I am Terry and I am really good at creating landing pages that convert.

Service Niche

I love doing them and I pretty much read blogs on them, listen to podcasts and dream about them all the time. Therefore I’ve chosen my “service niche”.

Next I unpack the problems my service solves. For example:

• “I dont know how to build a landing page”
• “My landing pages do not convert”
• “I can’t work out how to design/lay out my landing page”
• “I don’t understand how to reflect my brand/personal brand in a landing page”
• “I don’t have experience of what does and does not work when creating a landing page”

I’ve now unpacked a “service niche” that I can offer because I rock at it, I love it, and it is also an extremely valuable service.

You could say it is like Basecamp…. their niche isnt the design industry, it is offering a project management tool. They do it really well and it solves a specific problem for a lot of people.

Industry Niche

If I wanted to find an industry to “double down” on my niche, then I could then continue to expand on this.

As I (imaginary Terry) look back over the landing pages I have created for clients, I find that 70% of those have been with personal brands. I look at the invoices they pay and find that many of them pay good money for my services. I could make a good living from creating landing pages for entrepreneurs around the world.

I am also really passionate about helping those people with the technical online work, as I recognise it is a time drain for them. They want to focus on providing their consultancy/product/service/speaking gigs etc, and not get bogged down with tech and with trying to work out how to build landing pages.

Based on this, I come up with the following:

“I am Terry, I build landing pages that convert for personal brands that don’t have the time or expertise, and want to focus on what they do best.”

This renewed focus affects everything I do. In my mind I know my identity, what I work on, the problems I solve and who I solve those problems for.

From this I have my mission, and my message.

With this mission and this message I can start to build up content around it. For example: I can blog, podcast, create videos, etc all around building landing pages for my target audience. All of this targeted at personal brands to build my audience, credibility and obviously convert some of that audience to paying clients.

And the rest is imaginary history. Good old Terry 😄

In a nutshell

Spend some time working out what you do best to establish your “service niche”. That might already be enough to transform what you do. If you want to double down then expand on who you do it for to discover an “industry niche” that you can get passionate about.

If you are struggling to find your niche and would like more help and support, we’ve created a community called Agency Trailblazers where agency owners can learn to build an agency that they love. Check it out here.