Should You Specialize? How to Choose a Specific Niche & Make Finding Clients Easier

Michelle Leotta:
Welcome to the Health Coach Power Community Podcast. I'm Michelle Leotta, ex-corporate girl turned certified health coach with over 15 years of experience growing a successful online practice. I started out with no idea what I was getting into and learned a lot of lessons along the way that have given me the freedom to do the work I love and raised two boys as a single mom.

I created a Health Coach Power Community over a decade ago to make it easier for health coaches to build a career they love and make the world a better place.

Hey there, health coaches, should you specialize in your practice or should you work with everyone? Today, we're talking about the benefits of niching down and what to do if you're just not sure. I spent the first several years of my health coaching practice trying to reach everyone and burning myself out in the process.

I don't want that for you. So stick with me, and we're gonna get into it. This episode, however, is dedicated to Mariah. 'Cause Mariah texted me and she asked this question. She said, do you have any insight on orienting one's private practice and work toward a specific niche? I'm considering a niche that caters primarily to older men.

I don't wanna be highly specialized, but I do want to niche down a bit in order to be able to develop my marketing in a relevant way. I think it's a great question. I'm glad you asked, Mariah, and for all of my listeners, if there's a topic that you would love for me to cover in an upcoming episode, text me like Mariah did.

It's really easy. Go to HealthCoachPower.com/Text. Now, I think especially initially, there can be some real resistance to choosing a niche. Mostly because we don't know what to choose, and it's just kind of terrifying. We're gonna make the wrong choice. And then what if we change our mind later? And what if we're leaving people out?

The very first time I can remember thinking about this, you know, I was attempting to choose a niche because they told me I should, you know, when I was in school, I figured, okay, I can target people working in corporate America, like the nine-to-five grind. But then I didn't know what to do with that idea.

Like what was the point of having said that, I didn't, I didn't know how that then would help me make decisions, and it didn't. But listen to today's episode, you'll get a better idea of how this is supposed to actually work. And if you have some thoughts on a niche and, like me, you're questioning it.

You're not sure how to move forward. Keep that thought in mind. Sometimes your gut instinct is your best bet, as you'll see in the story I'll share with you today. Just wanna back up. To be clear, a niche market, which is the same as a niche market, you'll hear it pronounced both ways, and sometimes we also call it a target market, all the same thing.

When you have one of these, it does not mean that you ever have to turn away clients just because they don't fit that niche. Like, if you do specialize in working with corporate nine-to-fivers. Say one of your clients refers their 75-year-old mom to you, her mom needs help with, you know, whatever health issues, you can absolutely work with that mom.

So if clients fall in your lap or referrals are coming your way, by all means sign them on if they're somebody that you wanna work with. The niche thing, or like the whole idea of having a target market, is a marketing tool. It's for when you are actively out there looking for clients, you are marketing yourself.

It doesn't define who you are actually allowed to work with. It just means you're gonna focus your energy on marketing yourself to this specific group of people. You're gonna become known for something, hopefully, rather than trying to broadly appeal to everyone. Like, for example, this podcast is for Health coaches.

Yep. You got it. Not life coach. Well, life coaches are welcome to listen, not personal trainers. Personal trainers might be tuning into. We're not here to talk to all health professionals. We're here to talk to health coaches about the business of health coaching, and that's probably why you're here.

That's why you're listening. That's why you're watching. You're either a health coach or a nutrition coach or something very similar, right? So this show makes perfect sense for you. See where I'm going with this. We'll use another example. So if your niche is corporate nine-to-fivers, how would that direct your efforts?

Well, you're gonna hold. Lunch and learns at various, uh, corporate settings. You're going to hold workshops like at five o'clock, you know, when they're getting outta work. You're going to write articles about thriving in the workplace, and with some effort, you're gonna become known as the go-to in this niche, which is super, super valuable.

You aren't committing forever. You are choosing a direction to focus your energy on for now, because you, like me, like we're human. We had the same 24 hours, and every day you're a solo person running your own business. You can only do so much. It's easier to get known for one thing than for all the things.

I'm tired just thinking about it. So I hope that takes away a little bit of the fear like you are not pigeonholing yourself. This doesn't have to be forever. You're simply giving yourself a chance to shine in a particular area. Because health and wellness is like a really saturated field, it's easy to get lost in the sea of various health and wellness practitioners.

This is a way for you to stand out. You wanna be a big fish in a small pond. You know what? Even though I floundered around with what my target market would be as a health coach and I didn't commit to those corporate nine-to-fives, it's very close to where I ended up later. I just wish I had gone with it in the beginning, but instead I was out there, probably like you, chasing every single different opportunity, nearly burnt myself out, trying to be everything to everyone, and do all the things so.

If you're listening, you know you're watching to this, I want you to write down for yourself what niche or target market is coming to mind first for you. Like what pops into your head? What group of people are you already feeling drawn to, who you know struggles with their health? That's kind of important since we are health coaches, and maybe just, maybe you can cut straight to that instead of going in circles like I did.

Maybe I wish that for you. So here's what happened. You know, in my case, I started my health coaching business in 2009. I first thought I would target those nine-to-five corporate employees. I did some corporate workshops, and they went well. But gosh, I also like the idea of maybe targeting yogis because I was super into yoga back then, so I tried that too.

And then there were moms. Moms always seemed interested in their health, and I thought, Hmm, I should work with moms then. So then I tried offering workshops and things for moms, and then other, like random opportunities would come my way. This will probably happen for you too. Like, you know, somebody offered me a table at a farmer's market that sounded pretty good.

It was held at like 2:00 PM on a Tuesday, so no corporate types are gonna be there. If I had stuck with my original plan of working with the corporate nine to five crowd, I would have known better. I would've said, no thanks. This doesn't make sense for who I'm trying to reach. But instead, I was like, yeah, sure, I'll do anything.

I'll do everything. I will sit for hours and hours all summer at a table. Not really sure why I am there, and that's what I did. And I got about 10 random people on my mailing list that way, all summer. 10 people. And I was just wasting so much time. I was trying to just do everything. I wasn't really getting anywhere fast.

So many years of this kind of went on this circling around, not committing to anything. Maybe you know the drill. Maybe you're doing the same thing right now. And I was having a conversation with my now ex-husband. I was in the middle of running a mini program at the time. It was very similar to the five-day jumpstart that my fast-track members do now.

Anyway, I was feeling a little bit overwhelmed that day. It was like one of those good problems. I had a decent-sized group and everyone was super engaged. Again, a good thing. They were asking a ton of questions. It was like a very intense group. These women wanted all the info, and they wanted to ask me about every little detail, and they wanted to do everything perfectly, and I could barely keep up with their questions, which is why I was starting to feel overwhelmed.

I wouldn't say they were driving me crazy, but they were slightly driving me crazy. And my ex-husband, you'll see why he's my ex-husband in just a second, he said. Your clients are just like you. Yeah. So we're divorced now. But anyway, it was a really keen observation. I choose to see the best in it, and he was right just like me.

Most of my clients in this mini program and in my Practice were these type A high achievers. And you know, I started thinking about all the clients I had had through the years, whether they were young or old, or they worked a nine-to-five job, or they definitely didn't, or they were trying to lose weight, or they were dealing with, who knows what, had so many various clients through the years.

But all my best clients, all my favorite clients, they had this type A thing in common. And that's why we got along so well. That's why we kind of gelled in a coaching relationship. Like we loved color-coded spreadsheets and to-do lists, and we never miss a meeting because we live and die by our highly organized calendars.

We like to do everything exactly right. That's just what it means to be a Type A, you know, if you know, you know, and these clients. I'm sure this won't come as a surprise. They were all suffering from like different health issues. But again, looking at it through this lens, I was like, oh my gosh. All of these health issues that clients usually came to me with a lot of stress-related symptoms, a lot of HPA axis dysregulation, if you will.

And it was all very, very much aligned with my own health journey. You know, it kind of a similar thing that I went through that led me to health coaching in the first place. And. Boom. It was like the lights came on and my niche revealed itself to me. And from there on, thanks to my ex-husband, I marketed myself on purpose to those high-achieving women, which is a little bit funny as a way of defining a niche.

So I just wanna talk about that. Sometimes we define a niche based on age or life stage, you could say like young adults, millennials, retirees, you know, that's one way to slice the pie. You know, when it comes to just narrowing in on one particular segment of the population, sometimes we define a niche based on profession, like teachers or accountants.

Sometimes it's about a particular health issue, right? Like maybe you work with clients who have type 1 diabetes or celiac disease, or it could be a religious affiliation. You know, you only work with whomever. You know, you can define your market so many different ways. Maybe they all have the same hobby.

You work with salsa dancers. Any of those could make for an excellent niche, but defining a niche by personality type, I never heard of that before, and I don't even recommend it necessarily. It's a bit harder. Like, alright, if you come to me, you're like, Michelle, I listened to your podcast episode. Thanks so much for talking about niche markets.

I'm going to choose. My niche will be happy people. What I would say to you, what you need to think about, is where would you find these happy? People like are they at the Happy People Club? So I had that same quandary. Like, okay, I wanna work with these type A women. I do really good work when I find them, but where in life, like literally where in the world, could I connect with Type A high-achieving women?

And that basically brought me back around the horn to those nine-to-fivers, or in this case, more like nine-to-eighters or nine-to-nine women who had those kind of jobs. So, maybe go with your gut. Like I said, I ended up right where I started. If you can think of a group of people who you really understand, who you have something in common with, and you know that's not necessary by the way, that you have something in common with them, but it sure helps.

So that is a good place to begin. And if you know where to find them, if you can at least think of a handful of places that you could find this type of person. And again, they have a health problem that they wanna solve. This could be a very good niche to start with. So if you're not sure, here are three questions that could help and, uh, tell us in the chat if you're watching on YouTube or Facebook, who do you enjoy working with?

That could be formally, you've had coaching relationships with people, and there are some that you enjoyed more than others. Um, it could be just informally, when you're helping people, you know, health coaches are always doing this informally, talking to people about their health. Are there particular types of people that you just enjoy more?

For example, I've worked with both female and male clients. I enjoy working with female clients better. So there's that next question. Who seems to get the best results? Because if that coaching relationship is working well, not always, but chances are that means that the client is moving forward. Everybody's happy.

And then third question is, who are you naturally attracting already? Like, who's knocking on your door? Which of your friends is like, Hmm, I wanna pick your brain. I know that's annoying, but it does show you that certain people are already attracted to what you're doing, so pay attention to that.

You wanna swim with the tide, not against it. And I have a simple formula to help you define your niche. Like earlier I said, you could tell me that your niche was happy people, and that would be difficult as discussed, but it's still only half of how you would define any niche. So the way I want you to think about your niche is that you help, you could say I help, and then define that specific type of person.

Even if it was happy people, which hopefully it's not, but I help this specific type of person get this specific result that they want. That's it. And uh, when you do this, by the way, what I notice is that health coaches will. Try to fill in those blanks with a lot of flowery language and what was one simple sentence turns into three paragraphs.

So don't do that. You'll be missing the point. You wanna fill in those blanks with as few words as possible. No fluff. We need a concrete demographic detail and a specific health result that they're after. So, Mariah, remember she texted me the question that inspired this whole episode, and she said that she's considering a niche that caters primarily to older men.

So if we were to flesh that out, if Mariah were here with me, you know, we'd wanna make this a more usable target market. So we'd wanna say something like, I mean, I don't know what she means by older men. Is it over 50? She could say, I help men over 50 get more energy. Then we know who they are and what they want.

And maybe it's like, I help retired men get strong and lean. It's just ideas here. I don't know what she has in mind or what she has heard from this population about what they want. Maybe it's something like, I help men 60-plus get their blood sugar under control. That's possibility too. It's like, what do they want most?

Because you always wanna focus on helping any group of people get the thing they want most. Because if they don't want it, they're not gonna hire you to get it. They're not gonna spend money on something that they don't really want. Makes sense, right? So here's how it starts to unfold. Like, once you even have a rough idea of who your ideal client might be and who you might be targeting.

Your next step immediately should be starting to build a mailing list that is full of these exact people. Like Mariah would want a mailing list that's full of men in their fifties and sixties, and that's where the List Growth Lab comes in. It's my brand new workshop to help health coaches grow an audience, build that list of the right people, turn that list into paying clients.

It's exactly what we need. Yes, go sign up. It's at HealthCoachPower.com/List lab, and I promise you, like cross my heart, hope to die. Stick a needle in my I. It's gonna be so much easier to write emails to your list and to market yourself in general when you know exactly who you're talking to. Like, you can write about issues relevant to their lives, like maybe these retired men are really into golf.

Mariah, I hope you have a lot to say about golf, 'cause that'd be a great thing to write to them about. You can also write to them about the exact health issues that you know they're worried about and the result. You can help them achieve. And then you can write about hyper-specific topics, too. Lik,e if you really understand these people and they're all very similar to each other, you won't sound so generic, like just another health coach, just another, you know, health and wellness person.

One of my favorite emails that I ever wrote. As a health coach, it was actually about my new designer bag, and my audience loved it. I got so many replies, and I was able to write about something that was kind of fun. It wasn't like the expected, like, drink more water, eat more vegetables. I wrote about this bag that I had purchased, and I was able to draw parallel between investing in a good bag and investing in your health, and that made a lot of sense to these women.

So when you choose a niche and you talk to them about the things that they care about, even if it's a handbag marketing, it becomes more simple, it becomes more focused. I think you can have more fun with it. And gosh, I know, listen, like I'm just listening to myself throughout this entire episode, and I know some of you are like.

But I don't know. I just don't know. And now I'm stuck because Michelle says that I should have a niche. Listen, it is possible to move forward in your business without a niche. I'm always going to encourage action over thinking yourself into a knot any day of the week. So, look for clients, run programs, offer freebies, do all the things.

Do it with or without a specific niche in mind, but it will be less effective, right? It will be more effective when you are targeting one particular group, but better to go broad for now and do stuff than to just do nothing and shut down. Okay? Promise. Also, if you're like, I'm not sure. Once again, your niche is not forever, and it doesn't have to be perfect.

Maybe it's still a bit broad right now. Just pick something that makes sense with the type of coaching that you want to offer and the people that you most wanna work with, and just start leaning into that. Because then you can start saying yes to the ideas and to the opportunities that are most aligned.

You know, are you gonna say yes to that farmer's market table, or are you going to say, no thank you, and then you can really get to know that one particular audience and make. All your marketing efforts smarter instead of trust me harder. So much harder. That's it for today, everybody. Thank you for joining me. I'll see you soon.

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