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Get narrow. Go niche and find your audience π― Wednesday Win
Published about 1 month agoΒ β’Β 4 min read
If you aren't finding traction with your idea, your product, or your company direction, the first move to make is to get more focused. Don't aim first for a larger audience. Go niche instead. It may feel backwards, but fixing this will power you out of the noise of the world and allow you to resonate with a well-defined community.
Why does this work and how can you apply it to your work? Let's explore:
1. Why go narrow and niche?
The world is a big place and your ideas won't reach anyone if they are trying to reach everyone.
As a leader or a business owner, your time is your most valuable resource. It will always be in short supply so don't waste it by trying to serve an endless array of customers with varying needs, modes of operations, or expectations from you.
By being focused and clear, you not only help the people you want to reach know they are in the right place, but it also helps eliminate the wrong audience, too. That might seem counter-intuitive: don't we want as wide an wudience as possible? Not really. We don't want to waste time and attention (or advertising spending) on irrelevant audiences. Make it easy to opt-in (or opt-out) for those that discover what you are about.
Get narrow to be able to reach a consistent community
Simplify your operations by having a clearly defined target customer
Concentrate your time and attention on a smaller audience that you can super-serve
Even more clearly than with a mission statement, help your team know who they are serving
2. What's your Goldilocks niche?
How small is too small? And, when have you failed to get truly focused? What's the Goldilocks, or "just right" level of niche focus?
Tim Ferriss has a great example he used to explain this principle. Wanting to build a community around yoga was far too wide for him. Too big of a population with too many different interests, elements of focus, and overlapping priorities. Instead, he opted for rock climbers who also do yoga. He could clearly create unique content for this audience, identify relevant products and services for them, and create a space where this focused group could communicate together.
Now my suggestion on getting more focused doesn't only apply to topics, but also for mechanisms you use. Years ago, in my deals and discount ecommerce business, my partner and I were severely time-constrained and had to find ways to produce our content fast and efficiently. And under those forced constraints, we developed a unique editorial style and pattern of content creation which didn't match our initial vision, but did find a fast and enthusiastic following. And as we started racking up consistent month over month growth in audience and revenue, we doubled down on the format and style and made it the centerpiece of what we did even as we added new features like a weekly podcast and third-party syndication.
Everytime in my own businesses that I've opted to go more narrow and simplify my priorities to fewer elements, I've seen a surge of growth in response. There are times to expand into new areas to find growth, but always be looking for ways you can simplify and focus your efforts before opting to pile on more. The is especially true for small businesses and individual teams.
Find the "just right" level that works for you
It's more narrow than you'll first think
Deep focus applies equally well to business mechanisms as to product and service choices
Constraints, whether voluntary or not, can be helpful in driving you forward faster
3. What's essential for making this work?
Nothing matters more than consistency.
The more success you've had in establishing your niche and building your community, the harder it will be to keep that focus and not start drifting. You'll be tempted to stray into topics of personal interest but irrelevant to your audience's reason for listening to you.
If you've built up a community around your private label ecommerce home goods brand, for example, don't start talking to them about politics or your local NFL team.
And even if you are confident that your audience is alined with your views or preferences, don't drift off-topic. Even the ones who agree with you will likely be annoyed at the added noise.
You build trust by delivering for your community again and again.
Don't make your audience chase your topics
Maintain niche focus even when it feels like you are repeating yourself
Be the very best within your specific focus
Reinforce your brand; don't dilute it
Speak precisely to exactly your audience and theyβll engage.
4. A caution
Always remember, in going more focused and adopting a narrow niche, you must be sure to target a real audience that actually exists. We aren't trying to go to riduculous extremes, but instead are looking to find legtimate audiences that be super-served.
Always test to confirm that your audience will respond to your offers. And while it's useful to try to identify possible problems and solutions for them, don't fool yourself by only building based on your own imagination. Talk in depth with your target audience to identify and confirm their priority problems and your best opportunities to respond.
Test your ideas to confirm your niche
Talk with your audience to find the right products and services
The goal is to get narrow, but still an identifiable, reachable audience
Create avatars of your target audience and then go talk to people who are very much like that imagined target
Action Summary
Get focused in terms of both audience and operations in order to move faster and get more done.
Be clear to yourself who you are serving
Make it easy for potential customers to opt-in or opt-out
Get narrow (but not too-narrow)
Test your audience and engage them to verify how you can best serve them.
What do you think? How has increasing (or losing) focus had an impact in your work? Reply to this email and let me know.
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