Today we're going to talk about niching down in order to grow bigger. Niching down to grow your business sometimes seems counterintuitive, that you're going to be missing out on the larger group of people or whatever, because you're focusing in even smaller.
This is something that photographers really struggle with. And I am in that boat for the first few years that I had Jennings Photo. I was trying to sort of do it all. And I think now that I am separating my educational stuff from my lifestyle stuff, it's very clear what I'm offering.
I'm also in the process of separating my business and headshot offerings from my wedding and lifestyle stuff. There's going to be three branches eventually of what I'm doing. Right now there's two there's Jennings Photo photo business help. And then I'm doing a branding photo site as well.
Why do this? It sounds more complicated, not less complicated.
Well, I have a lot of offerings and a lot of irons in the fire, and that's just my own thing. But if you are setting out to do weddings or boudoir or kiddos, it might help grow your audience and help you focus your content. If you can just narrow it, narrow it, narrow it down.
If you already have it narrowed down, I'm going to encourage you today to niche down even more.
For example, I could say that photo business help helps photographers start businesses. Instead I say that Photo Business Help helps lifestyle photographers start and grow businesses because that is what I have expertise in. So there's little tiny ways that you can niche your audience down. Maybe it's just by region, maybe it's by category. Maybe it's by something like indoor stuff or outdoor stuff, or whatever.
Thinking about how you can niche down even more is going to help you craft a better message for your audience and also really, really narrow in on your ideal client.
There are a few other reasons to niche.
One is that you end up with a better customer relationship because you know your ideal client so well. So you're going to be able to interact with them, anticipate what they're interested in a lot more if you are focused on one specific type of client rather than five or 10 different specific types of clients.
It's going to help you when you sit down to create stuff to be like, “Oh, I know exactly what I need to do for this particular client.”
You're also going to develop a lot more trust when you niche down because you're going to be viewed as more of an expert. The more you niche down in one single area, the more you are going to gain authority in that area. So you do want to be viewed as more of an expert rather than just a jack-of-all-trades kind of photographer.
Finally, niching down has a defined market. I've already sort of said this in so many words, but defining who you're going to market to, and who you are going to create content for, is the most valuable thing that you can do in your business. Otherwise, you're just confused in your messages and inconsistent. You're putting out stuff one week that doesn't really mesh with what you're putting out the next week, and it just kind of gets all mixed up.
The more you can niche down the better.
