Do you need a niche? The guide to getting clear on your purpose & mission

Meredith Hill once said, “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.” The goal of having a business or brand is reaching someone, right? But if you're not clear on your main purpose and mission - how do you know who you’re trying to reach? If you are ready to get some clarity, keep on listening!

Before diving in too deep, we really need to determine “what is a niche”?

What is a niche?

It’s a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.

One great way to describe a “niche” is that a niche is the problem you solve. It’s the specific topic that you talk about on your various online platforms and you would be considered a leader or knowledgeable in this topic.

… but what is the importance of having a niche?

Importance of a niche?

There are many reasons having a niche is important. One of the most important reasons is being known for something. When someone thinks of you or your business, what do they think about? Being known for something can help you become the go-to person for that specific need or topic.

Another important reason to have a niche would be to attract your ideal audience. If you are all over the place with the topics you talk about on your platform, you are going to attract a variety of people - which might not seem so harmful, until you decide to work with brands or sell your own products. You need to make sure you’re building the audience that would be interested in the products you talk about or create.

This really brings me to the third important reason to have a niche, and that is securing brand deals and affiliate programs. If one of your goals as a business is to have brand deals and affiliate marketing as a revenue stream, you have to make sure your audience aligns with the audience of the brand you intend to talk about. These brands or affiliate programs might not want to work with you if your audience isn’t aligned with theirs.

Now that you understand what a niche is and the importance of having a niche, let’s go over the four evaluation stages that will help you get clear on your purpose and mission.

Evaluate yourself.

You have to dig deep and determine topics that you're not only passionate about, but feel knowledgeable in as well. You could always make a list of things you are passionate about and a list of your skills - are there any connections there? If you are scratching your head and having trouble coming up with anything, here are some prompts to help get you started.

What is something you look forward to doing each day?

What types of media do you like to consume the most?

How do you spend your free time?

What are your hobbies?

What do your friends or family come to you for help on?

Hopefully, these questions will get those juices flowing - once you come up with a few potential topics - it’s time to evaluate your audience.

Evaluate your audience.

Something I have said many times before is the importance of finding a topic you’re passionate about that your ideal audience would also relate to - but before you can do that, you have to evaluate your audience. As a fellow people pleaser, I know the feeling of wanting to please everyone - but when it comes to your brand and business - you can’t reach everyone. But how do you determine who you are targeting? Well, of course, this is dependent on the topics you decided on while evaluating yourself - with those topics in mind, you have to ask the following questions to help determine your ideal audience.

What do they enjoy?

What do they do for work?

What are their struggles?

What media do they like to consume?

What resources or info are they looking for?

Now that you have determined the topics that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about … and who your ideal audience might be. It’s time to evaluate your market.

Evaluate your market.

“Is there a market for this topic?” is one of the first questions you have to ask yourself once you come up with a niche. It’s not enough to have passion and skills in a topic - does anyone else have interest in it too? The goal of doing this market research is attempting to determine if you could grow in this niche before taking up a lot of your time to do it. Before diving into market research, you first need to determine what it is you are researching - what information are you hoping to uncover? In my opinion, the most important objective of this market research is simply seeing if there is a current audience for this topic within the specific platform you are planning to use to discuss this topic. This is very important, because there might be an audience for this topic on YouTube, but not on Instagram. Go to the platform and try finding others who are doing something similar, do they have an audience? If you search for your topic on Instagram and find a few pages doing something similar, but they only have 10 followers - might not be a good sign. But, if you see someone with 10k, 100k, or more - and they seem legitimate - then I say GO FOR IT!

Now that you have stumbled upon your competition while doing your market research, it’s time to evaluate the competition as well.

Evaluate the competition.

Since at this point, you have found other people in your niche - it’s time to start digging. There are a few things you need to look at …

What are the folks in their community saying in the comments?

What are their biggest strengths?

What are their biggest weaknesses?

What other platforms do they use?

Do they sell products, do brand collaborations, affiliate marketing, etc.?

Finding out the answers to these questions can help you determine what they are doing right, but also - what they are lacking. It’s like in the product business - one of the best ways to determine how you can make your product better than your competitors is by reading their reviews and listening to their existing buyers. The same goes for building a business online - if you can determine what your competitor's audience wants from them, that they aren’t already offering - you could step in and offer it yourself.

Okay… now that we have completed the four evaluation stages, let’s take it a step further.

Narrow down your niche.

Now that you have solidified your main niche, let’s narrow this down into content pillars. This will help provide you direction when you are creating your content, products, or services for your business.

What is a content pillar?

I have said this a lot … and I mean A LOT. But… creativity thrives under constraints. Which just means that having some limitations can help you better reach your target audience and keep consistent.

Your content pillars don’t need to be restricted to simply subtopics of your overall niche. What I mean by that is, when you start writing out your content pillars, you don’t want to just write down a list of more specific approaches to your main subject. You want to write down several different subject areas, or ways you can provide value to your audience - the point is, the overarching theme among your content pillars doesn’t have to be your niche - it has to be your target audience.

Your niche will be the result of your content pillars, rather than your content pillars being determined by your niche. For example, if you have an organic, vegan soap business - you’re not going to want your subtopics to be soap, how we make our soap, how does our soap work …. You get the idea. You would want to imagine the person who would buy your type of soap and ask yourself, what other topics would THEY enjoy. These topics might be self-care, veganism, etc.

Now that you have determined your niche and the various subtopics you would want to talk about on your platform - it’s time to test your niche.

Test your niche.

This is truly one of the most important parts of this entire process - we have all heard the saying, “you won’t know until you try” and it couldn’t be more true. You can brainstorm for days and do all of the market research - but that doesn’t guarantee that your niche will be successful. I believe in the 3-month rule. I recommend always giving it about three months and then evaluating your performance. If after 3-months you don’t feel like this niche is working for you, then I suggest either giving it a bit more time or restarting this process and giving it another shot. It’s up to you, but at least give it 3-months.

I am a multi-passionate person and making the decision on what main topic you want to talk about day in and day out can be hard - but hopefully this episode helped make the decision a bit easier.