#304: Trouble Choosing a Target Market? Do This Instead

Hello there, health coaches. Thank you so much for joining me today as we move into the fall season. I felt like it was the right time to go back to basics, and it has definitely been a minute since we talked about your target market or your niche. So we're going to do that today. Now, if you're here with me live and you're struggling with figuring out your target market, tell me what you got so far in the chat area. Even if you're like, I have no idea, you could just write, I have no idea. I'd love to see where you're at with this. And to be honest, through the years, my opinion has changed on how health coach should actually go about choosing a target market. Because after seeing thousands of coaches go through healthy profit universities courses and even more who are inside our free Facebook group, I've actually changed my advice around this and I want to share it with you today.

So let's do this. I'm going to definitely need my glasses for this episode. More and more days, I just cannot pretend like I don't need these glasses. So now that they're on, let's get into it. I'm going to start by telling you what a target market is. It is not something that defines the only clients you can ever work with. It's not a box to put yourself in. It's not a pigeonhole. What it is is a marketing tool. It's going to make your marketing better in an ideal world because it will be a guidepost for how you put yourself out there and how you find clients. So here's an example. If you are targeting accountants, then where would you try to hold your workshops? Probably at an accounting firm that just make so much sense. You would know where to find accountants if you were looking for accountants, and you would know that accountants are probably struggling with things like stress and headaches and weight gain because they're sitting in front of their computer all day. They have that type of job. So that's going to help you market yourself as a health coach much more effectively than if you're kind of just generally trying to reach everyone about health and you have no idea what actual health problems this specific person is dealing with, and you wouldn't really be sure where to host your events or what kind of content to provide or what kind of programs to offer. So this has not changed. It makes good solid business sense to choose a specific target market. I know you've heard this advice, you've probably heard it from a thousand different sources including me. But what actually happens in practice in real life is that as health coaches, we're not always ready to choose a target market. Anybody feel that way? If you're here with me live, just say me in the comments and I know it can just feel overwhelming.

It can feel like, I don't know, they told me I have to pick something, so I'm just going to throw a dart and I'm blindfolded and let's just see. Boom. I'll just name a group, I'll just name some type of target so I can move on. But you don't actually know what it should be. You're not actually feeling it yet. You don't actually even know who you are as a coach yet when you're just starting out or what your strengths are. So what happens is I see coaches just getting stuck in the mud right here, and then they're in this vicious cycle. I don't have any clients, so I need to choose a target market, but I can't decide on a target market. I haven't had any clients yet, but I have no clients and we just go round and round and round for months and months and kind of get nowhere.

So it reminds me of when I was starting college. I was 17 years old when I arrived at college for my first day. I didn't know what the heck I was doing When you started college or when you're asked to someone make these big life decisions, you're not really prepared for it yet. And it reminds me of this. So when we go to college, I don't know why this didn't occur to me, but you can just be undeclared. Instead of choosing a major, they let you do that. They know you might not be ready and then you can declare later. Or if you're like me, you can start as one major and then you can change majors down the line. I started as a physical therapy major. I graduated with a degree in art. Suffice it to say I didn't know what the heck I was doing.

So it's just, it's normal. This is how we grow. This is how we walk the path. We can't always plan everything out in advance. Today I'm going to give you three approaches that you can choose from to move forward. They're all valid. I want you to choose one of these three approaches for the short term and just know, just like you can go from physical therapy major to art major, you can refine your target market. You can change your target market as you go, just like you could do that in college and ultimately get where you're meant to go in this life, even if it's not a straight line, sometimes it just has to unfold organically. So Ellen is saying about her target market, chronic stress in women over 50 ending up in chronic illness or chronic overwhelm. So we always want to look at who the person is.

Do we have a specific, and I'll talk more about this in a second, a specific person in mind. So women who are chronically stressed ending up with chronic illness. So in that case she would have some type of diagnosis and those would be very specific. So if her chronic illness is something like autoimmune disease, then maybe we'd want to say targeting women who have autoimmune disease and she's over 50. That's very specific. And then the other part of it is what is the big problem that she's looking to solve? Usually it's going to be a reduction in symptoms. What is the one thing that she is actively searching for, actively paying money to help solve? So you always want to think about who is it and what's that big problem that they want to solve. Again, we're going to talk more about all of this, but thank you for the example Ellen.
So approach number one is to have, and this is what we're generally taught to do a very specific target market, something you're sure of what type of person you can help, exactly what they want help with. So Ellen's example here, or you can get real specific, like I help millennial women get rid of IBS symptoms, specific person specific problem. Or I help men in their fifties get rid of their beer bellies specific person specific problem. Or I help moms of elementary school kids in Detroit, Michigan get toned and fit. Same thing, but just because you can write a sentence like that. I help moms of elementary school kids in Detroit, Michigan get toned and fit and you're like, there you go, Michelle. It's specific, specific person, specific problem. Just because you can write that on a piece of paper in front of you, it doesn't mean it's going to work in practice.
So this is a caution. You need to be able to find lots of people in this intended target market. That's first and foremost. Now, if I wanted to find moms of elementary school kids in Detroit, Michigan, I'd be hitting up all the PTAs and school events and all the local spots, the soccer games, the supermarket in this area, and I'm going to find a lot of moms there. So that would work. But sometimes when we say something like, I help, if all we're saying is I help stressed out women, well guess what? All women are stressed out. There's very few women that are not stressed out. So that makes it hard to find her. So think about who you're targeting if you think you are this specific and just be like, Hmm, have I defined this in a way that I'm actually going to know where to find her?

And then you need to know that this group of people are spending money to solve the problem that you purport to help. You may think millennial women would be very, very happy to get rid of their IBS symptoms and they're really struggling with that. And yeah, she might be struggling with that, but I remember from being younger, she might not be prioritizing that right now. It might not be on the top of her mind. She may not even know that she has IBS. She might just think even if she does know it's IBS or she's been told it's IBS, whatever, that even actually means that it's just bad luck. This is just something I'm stuck with. And she's not thinking about it as something she can change or something that she wants to solve. It's just like she's taken it as a given. So in that case, she's not out there searching actively trying to solve this problem that's going to be very hard for you.

If that's your target market, you're going to want to appeal to the thing that she is searching for that she is spending on. Okay, so naming a really specific target market is fantastic. That's where you want to end up eventually do make sure you can find them and do make sure they're already spending money on the problem that you want to help them solve. If they're not already spending money on it, I cannot emphasize this enough, and I don't mean a $20 copay when they go to their doctor or a $10 bottle of supplements, I mean significant money. If they're not spending significant money to solve this problem elsewhere, it's unlikely that they're going to spend money to hire you to help them with said problem. So that's number one. I know we're not all there yet. That's why I want to get through that one first and then move on to like, but what if Michelle, what if I don't know? What if I'm not sure if I want to work with these people or that people, if you're not quite ready to name a specific target market, what do you do? Or maybe you've tried a really specific target market and you're not getting any traction. So what I would say in that case, and there's lots of reasons that your target market may not be working like we just discussed, but first thing I would suggest is what would happen if you widened the circle a little bit? You were just a little bit more vague. So maybe you know that you can help women with digestion even if you're not clear on what type of woman or even what type of digestive trouble she has. I help women with digestive trouble. I help women get rid of digestive problems. That's not super specific.

So you wouldn't get an a plus in target market school, but who cares? It's something. Go with it. If that's where you are right now, it's a start. And I like a start. I like things to be in motion. That's how you figure things out. So if you're a little more vague in the beginning you could just pretend that you're Michelangelo and you've just started carving the David and I just heard all about this by the way. I was in Florence, this Italy and revisiting my art history past and I got to see the David for the first time in person anyway, Michelangelo didn't go straight for the eyelashes, you know what I mean? He starts chiseling the general shape and over time details emerge and your target market can be like that too, where maybe right now you're just kind of general. I'm going to help women with digestion.

And over time you're going to notice, gosh, I really love working with younger women. I relate to them better. These things are going to dawn on you. You're going to have clients that you want more of and clients that you're like, that wasn't a good fit. Or maybe you're going to notice that when a woman has autoimmune related digestive disorders, that's when you can really help. That's when you see that they are the most interested in hiring you and making changes and you feel like this was an awesome client. So maybe that realization hits you and that's going to help you get more and more specific about who you're targeting. So if you're here with me live, are you a little more broad in your target market? Are you like, I kind of want to work with this group. I don't have the super specifics. I haven't carved all the eyelashes yet. That's okay. Tell me in the chat where you're at with this. Because typically what I hear, and this is a big pitfall, it just dawned on me that I should share this too, is I see coaches with pretty vague target markets and because they've been told not to do that, I help women lose weight too vague. They start adding a bunch of other words and fluffy stuff in there. I help women who want to achieve vitality, lose weight and feel their best in the, and they just kind of go on and on with fluff, fluff, fluff. But it actually really doesn't mean anything. Women who want to achieve vitality, that's not a way of targeting someone that's just adjectives for the sake of putting more adjectives in there. So really be mindful of that and pare it down to who is this person, what's the demographics around this person?

And then what is that specific problem? And if you're just in that more vague place of like, I want to help women lose weight or I want to help women with digestion, or I want to help men, whatever, get rid of pain. That's pretty vague. That's okay. I'm saying just live there. That's where you are now, that's at least going to help you narrow down a little bit. If you know you want to work with men who have pain, but you're not sure exactly what kind of pain you're talking about yet, you're not really sure exactly what age group, at least you're focusing on men versus women, that's already helpful to your marketing. So we're going to be accepting. We're going to say wherever I'm at, that's the right place for me to be right now and I can be in motion and I can take steps to market myself.

Okay, now here's a third option. This is where you're not going to choose any target market at all right now. And I also give you full permission if that's where you are at, it's fine. My health coaching business, in retrospect, if I'm real honest with myself, that's where I started. No target market whatsoever. So the upside to just saying, I don't have target market, Michelle, I just don't have one. The upside is that you can keep moving forward and not get stuck trying to figure it out on a piece of paper. You're not going to figure this out on a piece of paper. You're going to figure it out in doing the work. So here's what your business would look like right now. If you had no target market, you're going to offer workshops and content and programs around general topics like sugar. The classic, when I was a student at IN, we were given a talk, we were given a workshop that we could then go out and do wherever we wanted. And it was called sugar blues. So totally generic. We could all do a good old sugar blues talk or maybe you're going to do some type of content or workshops or whatever around meal prep, these universal topics. Now, is it going to be as effective in your business as if you honed in on a specific group of people with a specific problem? No. But what's going to happen is you're going to find yourself meeting a wide range of people, having conversations with a wide range of people, old young men, women, all different health issues. You're going to hear about things that you never even heard of before and you're going to start to see patterns. What are people telling you about? What are things that you enjoy talking with them about? And you're going to feel a little bit all over the place when you go this route of course, because kind of trying to be all things to all people, but it's way better for you to start general and actually start doing things than again to sit down at your kitchen table with a piece of paper and just hem and haw over your target market.

I want more action, less thinking about action. And so in my own practice, what I can say is I made a lot of mistakes, but one thing that I think I did was I just started doing stuff and I wasn't very strategic about it, but every time I just did something, just took a step, just showed up, talked about one topic, talked about a different topic, whatever. I realized by just having these interactions and seeing who is naturally drawn to my work. And to me, I liked working with women more than I liked working with men. Helpful. That was the start. I later realized I was pretty good at helping them find more energy. Gosh, women are really tired. They talk about it all the time. It dawned on me. So this was a start. I'm carving my David statue now. I was just getting closer and closer and eventually it really took years because I was doing this with zero guidance at all.
It took me a while and finally I was like, I really, my best clients when I really do my best work, it's with women who are type a lot like me. They're chronically stressed, they're in high pressure careers. So that's a place that I knew I could find them. And I had a lot of clients who worked in marketing in particular, which of course is my background. I dunno why that wasn't immediately obvious in the beginning. Sometimes it just goes that way. But I had to try different things out. I almost had to let them find me. They were coming to me saying, shell, I want to work with you. You really understand me. You've worked in the ad agencies, you've been in, or you know what it's like to be in a job like this? You know how hard it is. And I was like, oh, yeah, I do.

So they told me and eventually that's how I ended up with a real specific target market. So what I really want you to know today are three things. First, that having a target market does and always will dramatically help you carve a space for yourself in any industry, but especially within a crowded industry like the health and wellness world. You'll get there if you're not there yet, but it will help. It serves as very important marketing tool. That's one. Two, if you haven't settled on a target market yet, just breathe might be better off hanging out in this area of not quite knowing. It's like a gray area. You just sort of get in the feeling of who you should be working with and still do the work. Because taking action is how you become more and more clear about what you should be doing, not by sitting down and thinking about it.

And three, I think this applies to all of us, and I hope I'm demonstrating today, is that I want you to know that your ideas and your methodologies can change over time. So for years, if you went back way into the archives of this podcast, we're now on, we're past episode 300, but if you went down to the early episode, you'd hear me talking about choosing a specific target market as the end all be all solution. And that is what I was encouraging. So I guess you could say I've softened a bit with age, with experience. Sometimes we're like, actually there's other ways to do things. I've been seeing how it can get you stuck. I see the value of working more generally until you figure it out. And I think that's far better than what tends to happen when we're just in our head about it. So my point is, you're going to change too. So this is kind of meta, but in your own health coaching practice right now, you might be a really big fan of a particular modality or particular dietary theory. You might feel like it is the best thing. You might be doing it yourself. You might tell all your clients about it. A couple years from now, mark my words, you'd probably be doing something very different. And that's okay. That's how it goes. When you know better, you do better. And I've been in this industry for 15 years. All I can say is it's going to change. Your business is going to change, and what you teach is going to change. So be open to that and it's part of being human, and it's part of just getting better at what you do.
So get out there whether you have a perfect target market or not. In fact, last week's episode, you guys was full of ideas for you. You can go back in our archives, check out episode number 303. It was called September Ideas for your health coaching business. Get some great ideas that you can put into motion. And if you're looking to add more clients to your practice in the next 90 days with or without a perfect target market, get our free Healthy Profit University blueprint@healthcoachpower.com slash blueprint. And I will see you all next time you guys. Thanks for joining me.