Want to Be a Coach for Everyone and Anyone? You’d Better Like Crickets!

Why crickets? Because they will be the only souls you’ll hear after you announce that you’re open for business…and they won’t be making noise about your coaching services.

I understand the resistance to narrowing our focus. As qualified coaches, we are trained to (and can) coach anyone. Why would we want to only do a particular type of coaching when we could help many more people if we don’t specialise?

Theoretically, we could. In practice, however, things don’t work like that. Before we can help people with our coaching, we need to convince them to work with us. And a vague value proposition is not going to attract any clients.

In this article, I will address the most common objections and concerns I hear from coaches who are reluctant to choose a coaching niche and work with a particular type of client. If you want to learn why being a jack of all trades is not doing your coaching business any favours, read on.

I’ll miss out on potential clients

This is a big concern and one that many coaches use to justify not choosing a niche: if the pool of clients becomes smaller, so do their chances of getting clients, they argue.

All things being equal, they would be right. But, and you won’t hear me say this very often, let’s leave math aside for a moment. Because things don’t remain equal. The moment you choose a niche, something changes — your message.

Without a niche, your marketing message will be very broad and vague, because you want it to resonate with as many people as possible. Let’s have a look at a few examples of how coaches who don’t have a well-defined niche describe their services.

I can help you:

• change
• reach your full potential
• step into your power
• live your best life
• thrive
• walk into the light
• fly high
• metamorphose into a butterfly

You got me, I made up the last one. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw someone use this metaphor to describe their coaching. There’s one issue though: That is not how clients describe their problems and their desired outcomes. Therefore, there is a disconnect between what clients struggle with and what the coach offers as a potential solution.

Client: I don’t know my partner anymore! We fight all the time, even for silly things, and we can’t seem to find a way to communicate with each other as we used to. What happened to the person I fell in love with?

Coach: How would you like to step into your feminine power?

Alisa: Really?

That is the danger of not choosing a niche. You try to appeal to everyone, which inevitably dilutes your message. When you narrow down your focus, your message becomes more targeted and, as a consequence, attracts more people.

I’ll run out of things to say

Another worry coaches have is that a niche will narrow down the topics they can address via their content creation and they will eventually start to sound repetitive.

Your niche should be narrow enough that it doesn’t dilute your marketing message. Think of it like a menu: The entire main course section is too broad, but one specific dish is too narrow. Vegetarian main courses might hit the sweet spot. With a bit of research, you can choose a coaching niche that allows you to talk about a variety of topics while appealing to a very specific group of people.

Something to keep in mind is that narrowing your focus doesn’t diminish the problems your potential clients are dealing with. Their struggles can be broken down into several components that you can address individually without repeating yourself.

However, some repetition might work in your favour.

Studies show that for a prospect to become a qualified lead they need to have 7–13 touchpoints with your content. It makes sense for some of the messages they see to be the same, so they can internalise them. My articles are on the same topic — the business of coaching — and the messages they convey are very similar. Yet every time I release a new one, people message me to say how much it resonated with them.

Don’t shy away from repetition. It is what fuses an encounter into one’s awareness.

Someone else is already doing it

Good for them! And good for you too, because if someone else is already doing it, that means there is enough demand on the market for that kind of service.

Competition should not scare you. There is plenty of room for everyone and you can find ways to stand out as a coach and differentiate yourself from other professionals who offer similar services.

Compared to your coaching colleagues who don’t choose a niche, you will have fewer competitors: only the people who target the same market segment. As you get to know them, you might find ways to collaborate and support each other rather than compete.

I’ll be stuck with this niche forever

You don’t have to commit to a niche for the rest of your life — as your business evolves, your niche will too.

I started as a personal finance coach and kept that niche for over 2 years before moving into business mentoring and financial coaching in a business context (pricing, charging, selling, money mindset, etc.). The move was gradual and based on what my clients and audience wanted from me. As I started getting more and more requests for help from business owners, I adapted my offer accordingly. When I eventually changed my focus to work exclusively with coaches, that move felt like a natural step in my business.

You can pivot too if that’s what you want. I would be concerned if, after a few years, my business looked exactly the same as it was when I started. But until you can pivot and change direction, you need to focus on generating revenue right now and choosing a niche is a very important step in that direction.

Can I have more than one coaching niche?

Almost every time I run an event someone asks me this question. In theory, you could have more than one niche, but this is something difficult to manage. If you are running a business that you are not the face of and you have a large team to help you run it, then you could potentially serve more niches under different brand names. A lot of big businesses do it.

However, if you are the face of the business and you manage it alone or with a very small team, it can be very confusing for your audience to see you talk about different things under the same brand. Messages aimed at one target market will annihilate the others and vice-versa.

As you become more established in your business and people get to know you for one thing and trust you to help them get results in a particular area, they will naturally ask you for more. Based on those requests, you can choose to add more services to complement what you already offer.

That is what I did. I offer financial coaching, business mentoring, and strategy consulting, as well as deliver coaching business courses, workshops and other programs in partnership with coaching training providers and accrediting bodies. Nevertheless, they are all aimed at the same target market: (soon to be) qualified coaches who want to build financially viable coaching businesses.

Takeaways

Choosing a niche will help you express with great specificity who can benefit from your services and how you can help them. As a consequence, your coaching offers will be more relevant and attractive to your prospects, which will help you attract clients quicker.

Trying to be a jack of all trades will do the opposite. It will dilute your message to the point that, while trying to appeal to everyone, your value proposition won’t resonate with anyone.

You don’t have to commit to a niche forever, but if you are a new coach, it will serve you well to choose one for now. As your business grows and evolves, your coaching focus might change too. Until then, a coaching niche will save you time and energy.

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This article was originally published on Medium.com.

This work represents the intellectual property of Alisa Barcan and cannot be copied or reproduced without the owner’s permission. All rights reserved ©.