#515: Niching for the “Un-Niche-Able” - #Tashmas Day 6 - Tash Corbin, Heart-Centred Business Podcast

Full article and show notes available at: tashcorbin.com/515

Ever felt like your business just can’t be niched? Maybe you’ve been around for a while and your offers now sprawl across all sorts of topics, or maybe you’re just getting started but the thought of putting yourself in a box makes you want to run? I call this the “un-niche-able” dilemma, and you’re not alone when it comes to niching.

Today on the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, I want to make niching feel waaaay less restricting and, honestly, a whole lot more helpful (if you actually need it at all).

And stick around because, in true #Tashmas style, there’s a little gift for you at the end.

Wait… What is #Tashmas?

I do it for both my birthday (1-12 March) and pre-Christmas (1-12 December) every year! Every day from now until my birthday on 12th March, there will be a new daily podcast episode, with a hot tip or practical strategy as per usual… but you ALSO get a gift! I love sharing the birthday vibes, and what better way to do that?! The daily gift could be a freebie, a special offer, a competition… but there will be something for YOU every single day.

Let’s Talk About the “Un-Niche-Able” Feeling

No matter where you are in business, “niching” can bring up all sorts of resistance. Maybe you’ve been doing your thing for ages and now your messaging covers heaps of different audiences and offers. Or you’re new in business, bursting with creativity (and ideas for days), and you can’t stand the thought of narrowing yourself to just one area.

Sometimes it comes from loving what you do so much that you want to help absolutely EVERYONE. Suddenly, every conversation about niching feels like someone’s trying to put you in a cage. You don’t have to feel boxed in! Here’s how I see it: being the “un-nicheable” just means you haven’t found a style of niching that fits you… yet.

...read the full article at: tashcorbin.com/515

Join us in Noosa at the Heart-Centred Business Conference on 2-3rd September!

Find out more and secure your ticket at: tashcorbin.com/conference

Transcript

0:30

There are so many reasons why business owners might consider themselves to be a little bit un-nicheable. Whether it's because you've been in business too long and your messaging and offers tend to sprawl across multiple niches, or perhaps you're early in your business journey but you don't want to feel like you've been caged in, or you've got a modality that you feel like could help everyone, it can feel like there's no way that you can select and niche down your business without feeling like you're really boxed in. So I'm going to call that the 'unnicheables,' and in today's episode of the Heart-Centered Business Podcast, I'm going to share with you how to niche when you feel like you might be an unnicheable, and also address the question, do you really need to niche in the first place? Because this is a Tashmas episode, I also have a special gift for you at the end of today's episode, so make sure come and check out the show notes at tashcorbin.com/515 because this is episode number 515 of the Heart-Centered Business Podcast. Let's dive into niching for the unnicheable. Hello, I'm Tash Corbin, a business strategist and mentor based on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. The mission of this podcast is to help heart-centered entrepreneurs to make more money and in doing so, change the world for the better. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Gubbi Gubbi and Jinabara people. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. So as I said at the start of this episode, it generally feels like it's mostly more advanced or established businesses that struggle to stay within a niche and that can feel like potentially their business has expanded and sprawled and therefore finding a way to retroactively umbrella over people they've helped before, areas that they've covered before, products they've offered before, topics that they've touched on before, can then feel like things just get broader and broader. It can also impact newbies as well though. And so this can be if you've got a modality that feels like it can help everyone, or you're just a creative person who has lots and lots of ideas and you struggle because because you feel like you don't want to box yourself in. Niching can feel like you're trying to narrow a previously sprawling approach or a wild eclectic mix of offers, passions, and modalities, and therefore niching can feel quite restrictive. But let's remember, number 1, your niche is the type of person that you are focused on when you are marketing. And so ensuring that we're clear on that definition and that we are really painting a picture of your ideal clients when we talk about niching, who you are focused on, can help to just ensure that we're not making this about you and you being boxed in and that we're focused on trying to address the right problem. Which takes me to my first point. Let's answer the question, do you need to niche? And the answer is no, you don't have to niche. And especially not if you are happy with the rate of audience growth that you are achieving. If you are happy with the rate of lead generation and sales that you are making, you do not need to niche. We don't need to do anything if there's not a particular issue or challenge to solve. So if you are happy with your rate of growth, if you're happy with the rate at which your audience is growing, if there are other ways that you can address those problems and even if you're not happy with it and the one thing you don't want to do is niche, you can absolutely go without niching. And there are lots and lots of different cases for why you might not need to be specific about who it is you're focused on when you're marketing. One of those is you have a large-scale marketing budget. If you have a big budget, you can advertise far more broadly and your, your need to be very hyper-specific about who you're speaking to won't be as significant. And so if you've got a big marketing budget, you don't need to be as niched. If you focus on a geographic area, if you provide services that are in person, if you, for example, you're in a regional space and you're one of only 3 practitioners in the surrounding 200 kilometers, like you don't actually need to be as narrow with your niching. And as well, as well, if you are happy to be more of a content creator or personality-led business and you make the business about you, you also don't need to be as niche. You don't need to focus on your niche. You just need to focus on being yourself and making sure that you are centering yourself in your messaging. And so we see things like people who are influencers, content creators, people who came through in early blogging as well, because their entire business is centered around them sharing stories, them sharing about themselves, them sharing what's going on for them personally. And so you naturally do have a niche in that certain people will find you very appealing and attractive and magnetized to learning through your stories, and other people will be repelled by that. That's the job of your messaging. That's the job of showing up. And so there are certain business models, there are certain personality types where if you're happy to be the main character of your business, your main reason for people following you on social media is you, not your service or how you can help them, but instead it's the you show and then there happens to be a product or service that is an aside or it's an endorsement or it's you have a a wide range of ways that you help people, and it's literally just, well, this is what worked for me when I tried to do X, this is what worked for me when I tried to do Y. And so that, like, follow it, follow along with me model of business can be one that doesn't require as specific a niche as one where the main character of your messaging is your client. The main character of what you're doing is you are the guide, you are the sage, right? You're not necessarily the main character. And I've talked about that a little bit in previous podcasts episodes where if you're not the main character, then we do need to be niched because we need to know who is the main character then. So you do not need to niche if it doesn't work for you, and you— there are lots of different cases in which we can work without being as specific. We can be a little broader, or we can just focus on highlighting and spotlighting something else that means it naturally resonates with a certain sub-niche. However, if your content isn't getting the traction you would like, if your message is not as resonant, if the sales are not coming in, if you want to center your clients in your messaging, i.e., what is the transformation you help them to experience and accomplish, then niching is one of the most effective improvements we can make in your business foundations that makes everything else so much easier. So when your niche is nice and specific, your messaging is far easier to craft. It's easier to create grounded, practical examples, especially where your work is a modality, it is something that might be a bit esoteric, it might be that the work that you do is quite broad and varied. The way to make the messaging land is actually to be hyper-specific about who you're writing it to and for. But when I say we need to be hyper-specific about who you're writing it to and who you're writing it for, notice that I don't say you need to tell your audience who your niche actually is. And that can be one of the ways that we help to niche the un-nicheable, is recognizing and realizing that this isn't about saying to the world, I help women aged 35 to 45 who love doing yoga, blah, blah, blah, right? You're just describing a person. You're not actually speaking to the person, and that is very different. So you may not actually know what my niche decisions are behind the scenes, but if you are within my niche, chances are the content I share, the messaging I use, the products I sell, and the way that I sell them If that really resonates with you, if that works for you, chances are you're in my niche. You might be on the edges of that niche. You might be a little bit, you know, on the side of that niche, right? You might be not specifically within my niche, but my messaging resonates enough for you that it makes you want to follow along. It makes you want to continue listening to these episodes. And so ultimately, you never actually have to tell anyone what your niche decisions are. So if niching is simply focusing on a specific subset of people for an extended period of your messaging and marketing, so you're ensuring that you're crafting messages and offers in a way that resonates with that specific niche, then hopefully that frees you up to feel like it's not you that is being restricted. You're not being boxed in. You're just being far more effective at being able to describe the situation situation that requires your help. You're being more effective at creating content that works for that specific audience subset, and also you're crafting and sharing your offers in ways that people within that niche feel like it's created especially and specifically for them. So if you feel unnicheable, how do you squeeze yourself into selecting a niche or making that commitment to yourself? Well, ultimately, as I said, you don't squeeze yourself into a niche. It's not about you. Instead, if you consider yourself that guide, if you consider your ideal client as the main character in your business, then the question actually is, who gets your focus for this period of time? That's all it is. So it's not going out there and making a declaration of exactly who you're working with. It's not going out there and telling a bunch of people they're no longer welcome in your spaces. Instead, what we're doing is making sure we fix your attention and energy on a subset of people that you want to attract and convert into paying clients. And then we set about building your business foundations and your marketing strategy to directly speak to, not about, that niche. We craft content that's going to be very specifically helpful for people within that niche. We craft offers in a way that people in that niche see the value proposition. They see how transformative that will be for them because you can more explicitly articulate what that transformation might look like. So it might be that you just choose one demographic factor. Maybe it is just that you choose a gender identity, or you just choose a work situation. Are they working for themselves or they are working for someone else? You just focus on one demographic factor, just one. Is it age? Is it gender? Is— and when I say gender, it can be an inclusive version of that gender. So it could be women and gender-diverse people. It could be men and gender-diverse people. It could be members of the LGBTQI community, right? So there are different ways that you can talk about it in terms of gender. So it could be gender, it could be age, it could be work situation, it could be parenting situation. You could just choose one demographic. That's totally fine to get you started. And pick the one that feels like it's most aligned for you in the way that you craft your messaging, not in the way you deliver your service. That's where I think people get very stuck is because they're they think then they can only work with those people, or they're trying to box into, "I only help women," or, "My services would only work on women." But that's not what we're doing when we are niching. We are literally just recognizing that the examples and stories I would use to describe what was going on for women may be different to the examples and stories I would use describing men. Or it might be the example and stories I use are different when I describe people who are working from home home because they're self-employed versus people who are going to a job each day. A great example of this to demonstrate the value of doing this is in the work of working in parenting. Because I know that what you teach and share with people, the way that you help people as a parenting expert has nothing to do with whether they're going to a job or they're home with their kids or their kids go to daycare and they have a business that they run from home, right? I know that the parenting strategies and techniques that you would be sharing and that you would be helping people to practice and, and learn have nothing to do with their work situation. But when it comes to your marketing, let's now think about some of the specifics of what your ideal client might be experiencing. So if your ideal client has a 9-to-5 job and they're leaving their child at home every day or dropping their child at daycare every day, they might experience more of that parent guilt. They might resonate more with messaging about you don't get a lot of time with your kids when you're working, right? They might be, you know, there's only limited windows where you're having an impact on providing services and providing care and love and that kind of thing. And then a lot of those service providers are influencing and co-parenting your child because your child spending time at daycare or staying home with your partner or your, you know, you don't have as much time with them. So now let's think about the types of examples and stories and problems and challenges that you would be highlighting and spotlighting. So if the parent that you're niching towards is in a full-time job, then there might be some bigger concerns for them about other people's influence and the way other people treat their child. Than if the person was home with their children most of the time. So see how the stories and examples, the areas that you focus on in your marketing and in the way that you message your work, are going to be different even though you could help every working parent, every situation. You could help whether they're home with their kids or they're leaving their children at childcare. You can help whether they are, um, the primary parent or they are not the primary parent, they don't do the majority of the childcare, the messaging you would use would be so much different based on those different situations. It's not to do with the work, it's to do with the way that you message and market. So you just need to pick one, even if I just get you to pick one demographic, it's gonna make a big difference. The second thing that I'd get you to choose is one psychographic. So psychographics is what's going on in their brain. What is it that they are wanting? What is their goal? What is their challenge? What are they, you know, what are they wishing for themselves? What is the big shift that they are worried about at night before they go to bed? So even just picking one thing, one goal or one challenge, let's just focus on one thing, one goal or challenge that they're trying to take action towards working through, but they're stuck with something. Which brings me to the third demographic, or the third niching decision, which is on sensographics. Now, I've totally made that word up. I mean the 5 senses. So if that person has that one demographic factor and they've got that one psychographic factor, what is in front of them? What can they see, hear, smell, touch, and taste? What is one sensographic that is telling them you're not able to do that? So you're not able to achieve that goal, you're not able to overcome that challenge. They've hit a barrier, right? And the reason why I call it a sensographic is because it's real, it's tangible, it's in front of them. They see it, they hear it, they feel it, right? Like there's something in front of them that feels like it's a barrier. Now, all 3 of these decisions are in their words. Right? It's how would they describe that psychographic factor and how would they describe that sensographic factor. Now, I won't go and do a full niching class here because this podcast is about niching for the unnichable, and I think the two big takeaways that I want you to remember are that number one, you don't always have to niche. There are lots of factors that mean you can get away with with a looser niche or not niching at all. And number 2, if you do decide that you want to niche or that you'd like to experiment with niching, it's not about putting you into a box or limiting or restricting you. It's actually just a focal point. By being focused on a specific subset of people, you can speak far more tangibly and specifically to what their goals are, to what the experiences are that they're having, to what might be showing up for them, and therefore your messaging and content can be far more resonant and useful. And also what we see when people are really clear on their niche and they translate that really beautifully into their messaging is that people are far quicker to take action and decide to work with you because it feels like you know exactly what they need. You are describing exactly what is going on for them rather than painting painting a broad brushstroke of saying, oh, you're feeling a bit unconfident about your parenting, like what parent doesn't feel that way at times, right? Instead, if you can be painting a far more specific picture, it feels like what you do is the exact thing that we need. So it prevents us from going and researching other providers. It prevents us from thinking, oh, maybe there's a book about this that I can go and read. No, I want to work with you because you get it. You understand me. What you are teaching, what you are sharing works exactly for me. And it's very difficult to do that. You may have heard the marketing phrase, if you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one. That is the power of niching. It allows you to be very specific about who it is that you're speaking to, not by telling them that this is for them, but instead by crafting messages messaging, offers, and marketing strategies that are going to be far more effective for that specific niche. The beautiful thing is, is that sometimes you only need to be hyper-specific in your niching for the very early stages of your business. The longer you're in business, the more money you have, the bigger your advertising budget gets, the more well-known you become, the less niched you really are required to be. I've actually found myself over the last year working with a few more people who are in the more established stages of business where in 2020 to 2024, they found they could keep expanding their niche, being a little bit more broad, and they were still making great sales. They were experiencing great growth because we did see more buying capacity. We saw more economic growth over those years. Especially for countries where there were stimulus packages post-COVID, all those sorts of things. But also people were home more. We saw more people open to purchasing online courses and programs, that sort of thing. So we saw this sort of expansion. And in 2025, more than ever, I was engaged by more established businesses who were experiencing that contraction because of the economy, because of cost of living pressures, because buying capacity of individuals was starting to shrink. Also because we've seen a huge amount of market saturation with online courses and really poorly crafted online courses and those master resell rights courses and all those sorts of things really flooded the market and it made it a bit blurrier. And so I have been engaged by, I would say, over a dozen now very established business owners where I've helped them to just re-niche for a little while. And so they recognized that the contraction in their growth, whilst it might be due to economic factors, it might be due to other industry and market factors, in order to see those sales and that conversion rate grow again and to get back into business expansion, what needs to happen first is that validation and more clarity around their foundations. And we've started with niching, and it has been spectacular to see and see what that does for that person's audience growth, for their messaging, for the products that they're focused on marketing and how they market it. Just that little bit of extra narrowing, and even if it's just for 6 to 12 months, can really improve cut-through of the messaging, improve that viability of the products and services, because the more specific your niche is, the more specific your messaging is to that person, the more your offer feels like it's exactly what I need right now and the less it feels like, oh, that would be lovely, or that feels like it would be a nice thing for me to do. The more specific we make the niche, and specifically if we're getting strategic around those psychographics and sensographics, we can really see far more cut-through and resonance with the messaging and shorten that buyer cycle as well. So people are far more likely to buy from you quickly compared to if your messaging and niching is very vague and broad. So this isn't just for early stage businesses, this isn't just for advanced businesses either. It's an opportunity to make a decision about right now, are you experiencing the audience and sales growth you'd like? And if not, is it worth editing experimenting with or just making some baseline decisions about how you narrow your messaging and marketing to a specific niche because you aren't the main character. You can be in your business if you want to, but if you don't want to be the main character, if you want to main character— let's use that as a verb— you want to main character and center your ideal client, then we need to know who that is. We just need to get a little bit more specific. Specific. But as I said, we don't need to go and just tell your audience who that niche actually is, which brings me to my special offer for you. Today is day 6 of Tashmas, and I've got a new and improved updated Nail Your Niche training. And this has been updated recently, uh, just to get a little bit more specific based on some of the things that I've been doing with my clients and inside the Takeoff Program and some of the niching strategies we've been playing with inside the Takeoff program to help some people who might feel like they're a bit unnichable or struggle with getting really clear and specific in their niching. But also, one of the things I observed with my old Nail Your Niche training was that a lot of people did make those niching decisions and then they just started telling their audience and posting on social media, this is who I work I work with. But just because you tell me who you're niched towards and I happen to be in that category does not actually give me any of the insight, information, or messaging that I need to know whether I actually want to work with you or not. It might mean that I follow you, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I will buy from you. So in the new Nail Your Niche training, there's a little bit extra on how that then gets applied to your messaging. Your job is not to describe your niche back to them your job is actually to translate those niching decisions into far more specific, tangible, resonant messaging. That's the critical piece. So, you know, I've seen examples at the moment. There seems to be a prolific group of mindset practitioners who are fixated on saying they help, um, business owners who want to go from 6 figures to 7 figures, and they're a mindset practitioner who does that. Well, just because I'm a business owner who wants to go from 6 figures to 7 figures does not mean that you telling me that means I think you're the right mindset practitioner for me. It actually tells me that you are struggling to make sales yourself, and so you've decided that people who are already making 6 figures are easier to sell to because they've got more money. And rather than you working on clarifying the value proposition and transformation that you facilitate, you've just decided to fixate your messaging on talking about this shift from 6 figures to 7 figures. Not to say that if you've said that, that, that, that's a problem, but I need to hear more substance than that. I need to understand that you actually see the specific mindset challenges and barriers that pop up, the way it, um, then is showing up in my day-to-day existence as a business owner. What are some of those pop-up thoughts that are keeping me awake at night? If you cannot accurately explain or describe any of my lived experiences, a process that I truly believe will get me across that, that line or paint a picture of what it's going to feel like afterwards for me specifically that I resonate with, then I'm not going to buy from you. And, you know, I see this sometimes even in the supermarket, and you'll see there's like, um, yogurt now that's for women who, um, are busy and stressed and tired. And but it doesn't actually explain why that specific yogurt is any better for me. Like, I think maybe there's like special minerals or additives or something that helping, I don't know, right? But just because you describe who the yoga is for doesn't mean I then magically buy it because it's for people my age. I don't understand. So it's the translation of those niche decisions into messaging and marketing strategies and decisions that actually helps you to create that resonance and get people excited to follow you, to engage with your content, and to buy from you. So come on over to the show notes of today's episode at tashcorbett.com/episode corbin.com/515, and you'll have all the instructions there to access the new Nail Your Niche training. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centered Business Podcast, and until next time, I cannot wait to see you shine. Bye for now.