If you've been trying to figure out how to market your expertise, who you should serve, what you should be specializing in, or which industry or niche you should commit to, I want to talk to you about something today that I think might make that decision a whole lot easier. Because I know how complicated this can get, especially when you have expertise that could genuinely help several different kinds of people. And I'm pretty sure that you've heard the advice that you need to niche down. You need to choose a specific audience, a specific market, and a specific problem that you're going to be focusing in. And listen, I understand why people recommend this. Because the more focused you are, the more specific your messaging becomes. And of course, that means the right people will recognize that you're talking to them. And theoretically, it becomes easier to attract your ideal fit clients. It all makes sense until you're the one who actually has to make that decision. Because what if you could help several different audiences? Or what if you enjoy solving several different problems? Or what if the audience that looks best in paper, the one with money, the one that you know you can reach, or maybe even the one that you've already gotten results for, isn't the work that you want to spend the next five years doing? Right? What if you choose wrong? You spend all these months building your messaging around that particular audience and you start creating content, doing all types of marketing activities, you're investing time and money attracting or getting in front of these people. And six months later, you realize that you've built a business around the work that you don't particularly enjoy. Now what? Well, if you're like most experts that I know, you do what seems like the sensible thing to do, which is you want to make sure that the decision you're making is going to be as accurate as possible as it can be, which means you end up doing a whole lot of research. You start looking at what other experts in your industry are doing, you investigate which markets are growing, you study where people seem to be making money in terms of markets and industries, or even like all the way down to specific niches within a specific industry. And maybe even you open up your favorite AI tool, Chat GPT or what have you, and ask it to identify the 10 most profitable niches for someone with your expertise. And then, of course, after all of that research, you know what happens? You now have 15 possible niches instead of the five that you started with. Congratulations, you've somehow made the decision even harder. Now, I personally believe that part of the reason this happens is that we're starting with a question that sends us looking in the totally wrong direction. Let me explain what I mean. Let's say that you decide to follow the niching down advice. So let's imagine that you start with entrepreneurs. These are the people that you want to serve, or this is your target audience. And somebody tells you that's too broad, you need to narrow it down. Okay, so now you narrow it down to coaches, but then that's still too broad. So then you end up narrowing down to executive coaches. All right, we're getting warmer. Then you narrow it down to female executive coaches, even better. So then you even narrow it down to female executive coaches over 45 who've been in business for at least five years and want to grow beyond a certain revenue level. Perfect. Now we're very, very specific. And you can keep going. And at that rate, we can keep narrowing until there are like 12 people left in earth who meet those specific criteria. And yes, now you can create incredibly specific messaging and marketing for those 12 people. You know what they're struggling with, you know what they want, you know what keeps them up at night. And so now you can create content that makes them think, yes, this person is talking to me. And I agree, that's really, really valuable. You absolutely want people to recognize themselves in your message, in your marketing. But here's what I want you to think about. What happens when five other experts decide to serve those exact same 12 people? Because obviously they can do the same research that you did, they can identify the same problems and solutions, they can create content around those same challenges. And if you're all diagnosing the problem the same way, offering similar solutions, making similar promises, and talking about the same things, you may have become more relevant without becoming any more distinct or differentiated. And that's the distinction that I think gets lost in the niching down conversation. Hello, and welcome to Marketing Your Truth, the podcast for entrepreneurs who want to grow a fulfilling and impactful business with clarity, integrity, and ease, without performing, chasing trends, or losing their voice. I'm your host, Ellen Atoly, and I'm really glad you're here. Let's get started. Being specific can help someone recognize themselves in your message, in your marketing, but it doesn't automatically give them a reason to become interested in your perspective, in your approach, or in your solution. So then that begs the question of if narrowing your audience isn't enough to create that distinction, what does? What could make two experts serving the exact same audience, solving the exact same problem, create completely different reactions in the people who are listening to them? Because once you understand that, you start to see where your real differentiation comes for. So let's talk about that. Where does that distinction come for? Maybe it came for years of doing the work and seeing patterns that other experts have completely missed. Or maybe it came for your own experience with the problem and what you've learned as you've tried to solve the problem. Or maybe it came for bringing a completely different background, upbringing, discipline, or a way of thinking to the problem. However, you got there, you've developed a way of understanding the problem, what's really going in, what matters, and what you believe should be done about it so the problem can be solved. That's your point of view. And I want to spend a minute in that phrase because I think point of view gets misunderstood. A lot of people hear point of view and immediately think that they need to be controversial, that somehow they need to plant a flag and tell everyone else in their industry why they're wrong. And of course, we see plenty of that online. People who deliberately post provocative content so that they can get a rise for other people. You know, those absolute declaration type of posts, like everything you've been told about X is wrong, or if you're still doing X, you don't understand why. The kind of thing that's designed to create an argument in the comments because disagreement obviously gets attention. So that's not what I mean by point of view. You don't have to become louder or more arrogant or more extreme in what you believe in order to have a point of view. Because your point of view is much bigger than a single opinion. In reality, it's a perspective that you've developed for everything that you've experienced, you've learned, observed, questioned, and come to believe. And how all of that shapes the way you understand and solve the problem for your audience. In a way, it becomes a lens. It becomes your distinct and differentiated lens. And that lens affects what you notice. It affects how you pay attention to the things that you believe matters most. It affects how you interpret what's happening to your audience, and ultimately how you go about solving the problem for your audience. Someone else may share parts of that perspective with you. Of course they will. You don't need to have a thought that nobody in human history has ever thought before. Someone might agree with you about why the problem exists. Someone else might share one of your values. Someone else may have reached a similar conclusion after working with their own clients. But what are the chances that another human being has your exact combination of experience, expertise, values, beliefs, observations, judgments, personality, convictions that has shaped the way you're solving the problem. That combination is absolutely, unequivocally yours and nobody else, no one in earth has that unique combination or shares that unique combination. And so when you make enough of it visible in your marketing and in your messaging, here's what changes. Now your audience, your people have more than a relevant message to respond to. They get to experience how you particularly, how you think, what your judgments are coming for. And that's where preference starts to take shape. Let me show you what I mean by that. Imagine that you've been looking for someone who can help you become a more confident public speaker. And then you end up finding two experts. Both work with professionals who want to become better speakers and land more speaking opportunities. Both have years of experience, both have impressive testimonials, both can demonstrate that their methods absolutely work. And both of them understand exactly what you're struggling with. They understand exactly what's keeping you stuck, and they understand exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Okay. So in paper, they both look like excellent choices. Now I imagine that you get to hear each of them explain how they think about someone should go about becoming a very powerful, confident speaker. So let's say expert A says essentially, uh great speaking is a craft. And like any craft, there are techniques that you can learn and master. There are specific ways that you need to move in the stage, breathing techniques that help you control your voice, places where you should increase your volume or lower it, words that you should be emphasizing, ways that you should use your hands, your posture, your body to command attention. And so this expert believes that if you learn those techniques and practice them consistently, you can become a much more powerful speaker. Okay? Now you listen to expert B. Expert B has a completely different philosophy. This person believes that powerful speaking begins with accessing something inside of yourself, which is your conviction, your truth, and your inner power. And when you learn to connect with those things, your physical expression begins to follow naturally. You don't need someone telling you to move your hand at this particular moment, or when you walk in a stage, start in this end and then walk to that end, or raise your voice at a particular sentence. This expert believes that your gestures become natural. Your voice rises and falls because you're genuinely connected to what you're saying. Your presence becomes more compelling because it doesn't feel rehearsed. Now, I want to ask you something. Which one of these experts is right? Maybe both. Maybe both produce incredible speakers. But imagine we put a hundred potential clients in a room and let these two experts explain their approaches. Do you think everybody would be equally attracted to both? Of course not. Some people would hear expert A and think, yes, finally, just show me what to do, give me the techniques and let me practice them. I want your system. And those same people might hear expert B talking about accessing their inner power and think, what does that even mean? No, thank you. I would rather have something more concrete. But other people would have the exact opposite reaction. They hear expert A talking about hand movements, vocal techniques, and carefully time pauses and think, that sounds like a lot to do. I don't want to feel rehearsed. I don't want to feel like I'm performing. Then they hear expert B and think, that's it. That's how I want to speak. I want it to feel natural. I want it to come for within. I want it to come for me. Now think about what just happened. Neither expert changed their niche, neither one narrowed the audience further, neither one had to manufacture some clever differentiation. They simply made more of how they see and solve the problem visible. And now the buyer has something meaningful to respond to. Not just this person works with people like me, not just this person understands my struggles or understands my circumstances or definitely gets the solution that I'm after, but this is how I want to solve this. This makes sense to me. This is the person that I want to learn for. Now, here's something else that I want you to notice about our two speaking experts. And expert B doesn't need to prove that expert A techniques are ineffective. They each need to communicate their approach clearly enough that the people who align with that approach, align with their way of solving the problem, can recognize that alignment. And that's the most useful way to think about differentiation. But now you might be wondering: well, okay, I understand how making my perspective visible helps people who are in alignment with my approach find and choose me. But how does that help me choose my audience? Because that was the question we started with, right? What if you could genuinely help several different kinds of people? How do you decide where to focus? Well, this is where things start to get interesting. Because now you can start looking for the intersection between what makes you distinctive, the people who would genuinely value what you're bringing into the solution to your approach, and the opportunities that exist in the market. And so when you find that intersection, you begin to see where you can carve out a space in your market that's completely distinctly yours. This is a space where your particular combination of expertise, experience, perspective, and a way of solving the problem gives people a compelling reason to want to work with you. And this is what I help experts uncover through a process I call the positioning lens. And there are three things that we look through. Number one, the very first thing that we do is what I call their why you factor. The second is getting clear about the audiences who would absolutely benefit for everything that we dug out and uncovered about their why you factor. And the last one is with the understanding that we have for what they bring into the picture, the why you factor and their audience, where are the market gaps that they can uniquely position themselves in? And the reason that I look at them in that order is because each one helps us answer a different part of that decision. Let's walk through them together so you can see what I'm talking about here. The first one is the why you factor. Before we start deciding which audience you should pursue, I want to understand what you're bringing into the problem. And I mean beyond your credentials and professional experience. I want to know what your experiences have taught you, what you see that other people might be overlooking, what you naturally do differently, what kinds of problems you find yourself drawn to solving, and what kind of work you actually want to spend the next several years doing. Because those things tell us something important about the value that you bring into the picture, to the problem, and to the solution. And once we begin to understand that, we can ask a much more interesting question, which is who would particularly benefit for this? That's our second lens, your audience. Now we're looking at the people that you could serve, but we're looking at them through a different set of questions. Who is experiencing a problem that you understand deeply? And who is likely to appreciate your specific judgment that you bring in into the way you see and solve the problem. Now we're beginning to identify where your perspective and an audience's need might align. But there's still something we need to understand. Because just because someone could benefit for your work doesn't necessarily mean that there's a viable business opportunity there. Which brings us to the third lens, which is your market. Now we need to investigate what's actually happening in the market. Are people actively looking for help with this problem? What alternatives already exist? How are they currently trying to solve it? What's missing for the conversation? Which market has more demand? And where might your particular perspective create an opportunity to offer something meaningfully different? This is where we bring the commercial reality into the picture. Because you can have a perspective that feels incredibly meaningful to you, but it doesn't automatically mean that there's an audience willing to pay for it. And you can understand an audience deeply, but struggle to communicate why your approach deserves their attention. And of course, you can have both of those things without understanding where your strongest opportunity exists in the market. So we need to look at all of those three together. What you bring into the picture, who benefits for it, and where there is an opportunity for it. Now, I know that these three lenses might sound fairly straightforward, but I want to show you how much they can change in a way someone makes a decision. Because this is where we go back to the original dilemma of having several possible audiences and not knowing which one to choose. Imagine someone has developed an approach to helping people reduce stress through creative activities. Maybe it grew out of their own personal experience. Maybe they discovered how creative expression could change the way someone responds to stress, communicates, or navigates a difficult period of time. They've seen what this approach can do, and now they want to build a business around it. So they start thinking about who they should serve. And of course, if they follow the usual advice, that's the first question they might be asking. Which audience has stress and money? Are there executives, entrepreneurs, health and wellness professionals? I mean, all of them are potentially viable markets. So what do we do? We're forced to pick one, right? Well, hang in. Before we make that decision, let's look through our three lenses. The first lens is your why you factor. What did the person actually discover through their own experience, both personal and professional? What do they believe about stress? What role do they believe creativity plays? What changes have they observed? What kind of transformations are they most interested in helping create? See, we already are beginning to uncover something much richer than I help people reduce stress. We're starting to understand the perspective behind their approach. So once we feel confident that we've done enough digging and searching into understanding the person behind the solution, the why you factor, now we turn our attention to our audience. Where might that particular approach be specifically valuable? Maybe it's a parent trying to create a calmer environment for a child who experienced a world differently. Maybe it's a family navigating an enormously stressful period. Maybe it's a high-pressure professional whose stress is affecting their relationships at home. Of course, these are all different audiences. And by the way, there may be legitimate opportunities again to serve more than one of those audiences. So at this point, how do we go about deciding? Well, that's where understanding the market gaps comes in, which is all about understanding which of these audiences are actively looking for the type of help that this person provides? How are they currently trying to solve the problem? What alternatives exist? Where are the unmet needs? And where could this person's particular approach offer something valuable that people in that market aren't already getting? I want to highlight this one. This is the most important one. Where could this person's particular approach offer something meaningful, valuable that the people within that market aren't getting already for other experts, for other solutions? Now we're beginning to see which opportunities might actually make sense. And here's something that I want to also notice and pay attention to. Okay, this person might end up at the end of the day, say, I want to go with high-pressure professionals. And that's perfectly fine because now this person understands why that audience makes sense for their particular approach. They can see the connection between what they bring into the picture, to the conversation, what those people need, and the opportunity that exists in the market. And there is one more question that I think we need to ask before making that decision, though, which is do I actually want to do this work? Because you can identify an audience that looks fantastic in a spreadsheet. They have money and they have a problem that you know how to solve, except you don't particularly enjoy the work. And now you're about to spend the next several years building a business around it. Is that really what you want? This is something that's worth asking. Because sometimes the audience with the greatest earning potential isn't the audience that you feel most motivated to serve. Sometimes the problem that you've become known for solving isn't the one that you want to spend the next five years exploring. And those things matter too. So imagine that you've looked at three possible audiences. The first offers tremendous earning potential, but the work itself doesn't particularly excite you. The second involves work that you absolutely love doing, but there isn't enough demand to build a sustainable business around it. And then there's a third possibility: an audience whose problem you understand deeply, people who would genuinely benefit for your particular approach, the type of work that you find meaningful, and a market where there is enough demand to build a profitable business. Now you have a much stronger reason to choose that direction. And yes, you might discover more than one promising opportunity, and that's okay. Again, at that point, you can evaluate the trade-offs, you can decide which one you want to pursue, and you can move forward understanding why you've made that decision. And once you make that decision, absolutely focus. Learn everything that you can about that audience deeply, understand what matters to them, use examples for their own world, for their own circumstances, speak directly to the problems that they're experiencing, and make sure your message is specific enough that they're able to recognize themselves in it. But now you're bringing something else with you into that conversation, which is your point of view. Now, before we wrap up this episode, I want to bring this back to you. If you've been struggling to choose a niche, I want to give you somewhere practical to go, which is I want to encourage you to spend some time exploring three questions. And these are the same three lenses we've been talking about. The first question is what am I specifically bringing into the problem and into the solution? I want you to go beyond the services that you offer and the qualifications that you have. Think about the experiences that shaped your perspective, the things that you believe you value, the patterns that you've noticed, the way that you naturally, intuitively, or because of your personality traits, you have approached solving the problem. What have you learned that influences how you see and solve the problems that you help people with? And then after that, the second layer is ask yourself who would benefit most for the way I see and solve this problem? Think about the people who would find your particular perspective valuable, whose needs align with your approach, who would appreciate the things that you are prioritizing, who might feel understood by the way you interpret their challenges. And then once you have a good grasp in that, the third thing is that you want to look at your market. Where does the combination of what you bring into the conversation and where there's alignment with the different audiences, where does that create an opportunity in a specific market? Look at what already exists. What are people already hearing? What alternatives do they have? Where is something important being overlooked? And where might your perspective help you bring something meaningfully different to the people you want to serve? Now, you may discover one obvious direction, you may discover several. Either way, you'll have a much stronger foundation for deciding where you want to focus. And once you do, you can build your entire messaging and marketing around two things that work beautifully together, which is an understanding of the people you're trying to reach and a clear expression of the perspective that makes your work valuable to them. Because remember, your niche can help someone recognize that this is for someone like me, but your point of view can help them understand this is exactly how I want this problem solved. And eventually, this is the person that I want to work with. And of course, if you like help doing this work, this is exactly what we do inside position to be chosen, which is my small group positioning and authority building experience. We work through those same three lenses: your why you factor, giving you the audience clarity, and then looking at your market gaps to uncover what makes your expertise meaningfully different, identify where your strongest opportunities exist, and clarify what you want to become known for. Then we turn that foundation into 12 months of content direction and build your own AI authority engine so you can consistently communicate your perspective without starting for scratch every time you want to create something. I'm currently guiding these sessions live with no more than 10 people in each group. So you can explore the upcoming dates and details at elinatoli.com slash chosen. Thank you for listening to Marketing Your Truth Podcast. If someone came to mind while you were listening to this, maybe an expert who's doing incredible work but struggling to communicate what really makes them different, do me a favor, could you share this episode with them? And if this episode resonated with you, I love it. If you take a few minutes to leave a review, tell me what you find useful about the show, or even an idea for this episode or other episodes that change the way you think about your marketing or your personal branding. I would really appreciate that.