Do you know your client niche?
Are you super clear on who you serve in your practice and who you don’t serve?
If you’re not, you’re going to want to figure it out – ASAP. Without understanding exactly who your audience is, it is going to be extra difficult to engage with actual or potential clients around addressing the toxins in their homes and in their daily routines. Honestly, without understanding this, it’s going to be extra difficult to engage with clients around anything!
In some of my courses I hold group mastermind sessions where we talk through some of the ins and outs, challenges, and ideas around integrating the environmental toxins conversations into a health & wellness practice. Additionally, this past year, I started holding private coaching sessions with clients where we focus almost exclusively on this “integration/application” piece.
These conversations, both in the group setting and privately, have the same threads running through them, and I’ve found myself having the same conversations over and over with different clients. This tells me that health coaches are still struggling with identifying their niche, OR, they’re going about determining their niche in the wrong way.
So I’d like to share some of my thoughts about niche, why it’s so critical to nail it down, how so many people go about picking theirs in the absolute worst way (that’s almost guaranteed to be a let down), and why you need to know yours in order to “talk toxins” with any impact. Here goes:
Some Thoughts On Niche:
You’ve heard this before: “If you serve everyone, you end up serving no one.”
Let’s say you have a toothache and are looking for a dentist. You find two dentists in your town: one proudly advertises as being able to fix your tooth, balance your hormones, give you a flat tummy, cure your diverticulitis, adjust your spine, and wipe out your seasonal allergies, while the other promises to fix your tooth, make sure the tooth pain doesn’t come back, provide you with the tools to ensure good oral hygiene going forward, and offer recommendations for the best products for your teeth.
Which would you choose? Which dentist is likely more attuned to the specific problem you’re experiencing and seeking a solution to (tooth pain)?
Clearly, it’s the second dentist. The first one is trying to solve too many problems that seem unrelated. (They may not seem unrelated to you, wise practitioner, but they definitely seem unrelated to potential clients.)
Be the second dentist! Get super clear on the specific problem that you know you have a the solution to (out of balance hormones, digestive troubles, acne prone skin, chronic fatigue, etc.), and speak about solving those problems.
Having Trouble Nailing Yours Down? Try Reverse Engineering:
Story time: When I first got out of nutrition school, I wasn’t sure how to market myself, other than by saying “I’m a holistic health coach”, which didn’t mean much to most people. I didn’t even know what a niche was, let alone how to find one! Most of the clients I was attracting were coming to me for weight loss, and since I felt confident that I could help people achieve this through diet & lifestyle changes, I decided that this was essentially, my niche. Hurrah!
I assumed that if this is what people were coming to me for, then this is what I was meant to be helping people with! It was the universe talking! Turns out, not so much, and here’s why: I didn’t love it. Frankly, I got tired of the “kale & quinoa” conversation, and I got tired of struggling with clients who argued that “vegetables are bland!” I actually began to dread not only client sessions, but the idea of marketing myself as being a weight loss health coach, because in my bones, it just wasn’t meeeee. Not even a little.
This is the same mistake I see so many health coaches making: they assume that a) they must serve the people who come to them unsolicited, and b) that the people who come to them determine who they serve. This is backwards!
Why? Because you’re in charge, and you get to decide! Practitioners who let others tell them who they should serve, who chose their niche based on it being “the biggest audience out there “(read: “I think I can help everyone!”), or who follow any cookie cutter example, are likely to not be deeply connected to their subject, will lose interest, get burned out, and never fully succeed.
Faced with these realizations, I decided to clear the decks. I starting by asking myself “Lara, what really and truly fires you up, and gets you excited? What would you be doing/reading/talking about, even if you weren’t getting paid??”
It was environmental toxins. Bam. THAT was what I wanted to be doing all day. Talking about, researching, translating, and sharing about environmental toxins! I LOVE being a super nerd!
So I decided to reverse engineer this whole “niche” thing, and ask myself “who wants/needs this information? Who will benefit from understanding this subject?”Asking these questions allowed me to stay within my sweet-spot-subject, while still providing value or service to others.
Figure out what you love, what you’re passionate about, and what you don’t foresee yourself getting tired of, or burned out on anytime soon… and THEN figure out who needs to know/learn/experience this passion of yours!
Why You Need To Know Your Niche To “Talk Toxins”
The language we use the describe what we do, who we serve, and how we serve them, falls into the category of “marketing.” Your marketing needs to speak directly to your ideal client, and not to other people (see dentists, above). Depending on your niche, you will very likely use different language when speaking about toxins.
Why?
Because if you’re working with clients around hormonal imbalance, you’re going to focus more on the hormone disrupting qualities of chemicals in their environment… if you’re working with clients around weight loss, you’ll focus more on the metabolic disruption caused by these very same chemicals.
The language you use to speak about toxins, must, in order to really hit home and be powerful, speak directly to why your clients are working with you in the first place – and they’re working with you because your marketing is so super clear that you are clearly dentist #2 – you get them. You understand them.
Everyone lands on their niche their own way, and in their own time – but the most successful people out there always have a very clearly defined one. So have you narrowed yours down??
