Because most niche advice out there, frankly, sucks.

Let’s answer the obvious question.

What’s a Niche?

Your niche refers to the specific topic or area of expertise you choose to focus on while catering to the needs of your target audience.

All businesses, brands, brick-and-mortar stores, etc. have a target audience that they serve.

The positioning (or place in the industry) you choose to take to your target audience is your niche.

A niche provides clear guidelines on your target audience, content topics, and product development.

Example: When I was a virtual assistant, my niche was mom-owned service-based businesses.

Meaning I served only service-based businesses that were founded by mothers, and all my marketing was geared toward that target audience.

The running theory is that having a niche takes out the “general” in your business, and empowers you to reach the right target audience much quicker by magnifying your marketing efforts.

Do You Need a Niche?

Now, onto the loaded question I get asked multiple times a week, “Jayda, do I need a niche?”

If you’re a multi-passionate person like I am, then the term niche can be extremely scary. It can feel like you’re putting yourself in a box creatively. I get it.

Here’s my short answer: You need a niche.

It may just not be as specific as others. Here’s an example: some companies make baby products, and some companies make baby diapers.

If you are passionate about motherhood and baby products, don’t limit yourself to just baby diapers. Rather than doing that, it would be better if you choose a specific area to focus on (such as baby products) and then expand into children’s and women’s products later.

How To Choose a Niche You’ll Thrive In

When I have this conversation and help people discover their niche, they usually feel so much pressure to choose the right thing.

First off, breathe out and take the pressure off of yourself to discover your dream niche.

This is not a contract or one-and-done thing. You can always pivot your niche down the road, make adjustments to your specialization as you go, or entirely change your mind.

During my time as a virtual assistant, I pivoted my niche twice.

So just breathe. You’re not locked into an eternity of serving hospitality businesses or wedding photographers.

It should be freeing to know that you can always try something and decide that you don’t love it, then move and build in another direction.

The important thing is just to start somewhere, and let it evolve naturally over some time with the momentum of your business.

Honestly, there doesn’t need to be a ton of strategy behind choosing a niche, and you really don’t need to have it entirely figured out.

Niching down works best when you move in a general direction and then work based on the response and emotion of your audience to continue to specialize.

Entrepreneurs put way too much emphasis on strategy, and not enough on momentum.

Just get going, and ride the wave of response.

My Formula For Choosing a Niche

Passion + Need + Potential = A Great Niche

Let’s break it down.

PASSION

You should choose services or products for an industry that you’re genuinely passionate about. One of the biggest things that I loved about being a virtual assistant was being able to shape my business into my passion. This is key.

If you don’t have a burning passion for an industry or area, I highly recommend doing some self-discovery to ask yourself if there are hobbies, causes, or areas of life that set you on fire.

Passion should be reflective of the vision you have for your life and who you want to be.

If you don’t have a vision for your life, that’s another topic for another day.

NEED

This is where your old bestie, market research, comes into play.

I always like to say: Look for the gaps in your industry.

What do you see people asking for a lot? One of my favorite ways to find this out is to get into Facebook or LinkedIn groups and run polls to groups of people who would be your ideal audience.

The market research for needs in your industry will be different based on whether you’re in the market for B2C or B2B.

You want to look for clear pain points that aren’t being met with robust solutions yet.

Example: There are hundreds of pancake brands, but not many grain-free pancake brands.

Another example: There are many graphic designers, but not many specialize in designing custom wedding invitations for wedding planners.

The goal is to look for the needs that still need to be met in an industry. You can then innovate your solution, specialization, and services from that.

POTENTIAL

Growth potential is essential when choosing a niche.

The advice I often see given to business owners is to be as specific as possible and niche down as small as you can. This is awful advice that makes my skin crawl.

If you niche down as small as possible, you’re locking yourself into an incredibly small audience and limiting your potential to expand immediately.

An example of a far too specific niche would be virtual assistant services for female-owned pest control services. I know, humor me.

If you built an entire business, branding, and marketing plan based on female-owned pest control businesses, there’s no room for growth.

Your entire audience would be the extremely small pool of people who happen to be both female and own pest-control businesses, which in case you were wondering, is an extremely small pool of business owners.

You want to make sure that the niche you choose has the potential to evolve into high-ticket offers.

How To Know If Your Niche Is Working For You

Here are some tell-tale signs you can look for to determine if you need to pivot.

• Are you genuinely excited about your niche? If not, that’s the #1 sign you need to pivot. Otherwise, you’ll end up burning out.

• Are customers expressing interest? Notice I said expressing interest, not purchasing. You may have customers expressing interest but not booking or buying, which is a marketing and/or sales problem.

If there is no interest in your product or service, it could mean there’s no need for it or it lacks product-market fit.

Your niche could be too specific, too broad, or just not profitable.

THE WRAP UP

Choosing a niche for your business can be intimidating and frustrating.

My biggest piece of advice is to trust your gut and move in a general direction, letting momentum lead you to a more specific strategy.

Again, you’re not tied to anything, so there’s a continual opportunity to change and pivot.

Multi-passionate entrepreneurs need to set boundaries on the directions they pursue.

Choosing a niche, even if more broad than most, will help you to create these boundaries and gain momentum in your business by defining a clear target audience.

Hopefully this blog was helpful, and you feel confident to choose a starting point.

Until next time,

Jayda Martin