Identifying Your Coaching Niche
In your life coach certification program I'm sure you've heard it dozens of times... "You have to choose a clear and narrow coaching niche if you want to be successful as a life coach". But they often don't go into detail as to WHY this is so important and many programs don't even cover the process for deciding on a coaching niche. In this post I'll cover both.
What Exactly Is a Niche?
Your coaching niche is just the area you specialize in. What you help people with. New coaches commonly confuse their niche with their target market. The target market (or WHO you coach) should be viewed separately and will be covered in another post.
The Importance Of Choosing a Specific Niche
Here are several reasons having a narrow coaching niche is important.
People Will Give You More Credit
It's called the Halo effect. The more specific you get with your niche, the more people will believe you know your stuff. People generally view people as being more of an expert on a topic if they've defined themselves as being specialists in a certain area.
More Effective Marketing
We're very good at ignoring advertisements. After all, we're exposed to thousands of advertisements every day. We're more likely to turn down this filter when an advertisement is specific to something we're in the market for.
Your ideal coaching clients need help in a certain area but they most likely aren't going to pay attention to an advertisement for a "life coach". But their ears will perk up if you advertise yourself as a coach who helps them get results in a specific area they've been struggeling with.
Reduce Your Sales Efforts
If you don't identify a narrow coaching niche, your job as a seller of coaching services has just doubled. You first need to sell them on the idea that they have a need, then you need to sell them on the notion that you're the best coach for them.
By identifying a very narrow coaching niche, you are going to attract people who have the specific problem you've set out to help coach people through so all you have to sell them on is why you're the right coach for them.
How To Choose
One of the top characteristics of a good niche are pain and emotion. People act on pain and emotion. They'll pay money to alleviate pain(especially if the pain is urgent). More general topics aren't tied to a specific pain but when you've identified a really specific coaching niche, you'll usually find that people seeking help in that niche are looking to alleviate some sort of pain. I'm not suggesting that you need to be one of those salespeople who builds up the sense of pain in your sales pitch... I'm just saying that if there's a lack of pain, there's often a lack of buyers.
A profitable coaching niche should also have a pretty healthy number of people already advertising in that area. If you enter keywordsassociated with your coaching niche into Google, you should find a few advertisements on the right side of the screen. If nobody else is buying advertisements in that area, chances are it's not a very profitable niche.
Another sign that a coaching niche has the potential to be profitable is if there are books and blogs dedicated to that niche. If people are spending time and money writing about it, chances are there's a market for it.
Choose Your Coaching Niche
By now you should know the importance of choosing a narrow coaching niche and you should also have a good idea of characteristics that make up a good niche. Brainstorm a few ideas and see if they pass the criteria I outlined in this post. Taking the time to do this now will save you a ton of time and money in wasted marketing efforts in the future.
Coach's First Year is the one resource that's dedicated to navigating you through your first year as a coach. By putting it all together in an easy to follow, step-by-step process we're able to help coaches spend more time coaching and less time struggling to get clients.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chris_M_Chaves
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