Finding Your Niche as a Nutrition Coach
...Getting Specific with Who You Work With
Written by: Dr. Marc Morris CSCS
If you want to make more money as an online nutrition coach, the best thing you can do is niche down. But how do you narrow down your focus?
In today's blog, I'm going to teach you a step-by-step method to find your niche as a nutrition coach. One of the smartest things you can do as a nutrition coach is to get more specific with who you work with—meaning catering your nutrition coaching to a specialized segment of the market. This helps your nutrition business grow for two reasons.
Number one: you become an expert in one area, helping you deliver better results. Listen, it can be very overwhelming trying to help everyone. You need to master helping people lose fat, a peak for competition, manage their hormones, gain muscle, adjust their nutrition as they age, and so on and so on… (I'm getting overwhelmed just going through this list!)
For most nutrition coaches this leaves them stuck. They feel so paralyzed with the thought of trying to help everyone that they end up helping no one. Once you get over the guilt of trying to please everyone, you can start to focus and stay in your own lane. You get to really dig into what you know and who you're comfortable working with. This builds confidence to deliver results and become an authority in one area, but this doesn't just help the results you get as a coach…there's more.
Number Two: it becomes much easier to market your nutrition coaching when you niche down. You become better at communicating what problems you solve for a specific person. Creating social media content becomes easier because you know exactly how these people feel and what they want. Meaning when new people come to your social media pages they know exactly who your coaching is for.
It might not be for everyone but that's okay. You start to stand out because you're solving specific problems for specific people. This is why it is so important to niche down; it allows you to become an expert in a given sub-topic of nutrition coaching, which dramatically improves the results of nutrition coaching and allows you to make more money.
Niching Down
If you're completely new to this term, niching down means having a clear idea of who your ideal client is. Your ideal client is who you are best suited to serve given your experience and unique skills. But also, your ideal client is someone that has real problems and wants and desires that you will be able to solve through your nutrition coaching. Once you better understand your niche, you can start to position your nutrition coaching as the best option for them to go with. Especially if you feel like you leave someone out.
I get it, I've been there. At the beginning of my nutrition coaching career, I resisted niching down and now looking back I can see it really held me back. It really capped my income because I was stuck as a generalist working with everyone like most new coaches, which means I had a tough time standing out. Those are two huge hurdles for any nutrition coach, so it's time to narrow your focus by niching down.
How do you niche down?
There are a bunch of different ways to niche down. You can niche down based on:
- demographics, or
- what this person does for work, or
- who they hang out with, or
- what they have in common with other people, or
- their goals, desires and problems,
- there's even room to niche down based on how they feel or what they want
The possibilities are endless, which can make the process of niching down a little overwhelming, but fear not! I'm going to show you a step-by-step process to find your niche as a nutrition coach, so you can help more people and make more money.
Let's do it.
Step 1. Reflect on your personal experience and passion
Chances are the person that you are best suited to serve is right in front of your nose. Nutrition impacts so much of your life, from how you look, to how you feel, to even what you're able to accomplish. Meaning there are endless ways for a nutrition coach to help someone. The important question for you is what are you truly passionate about? What nutrition-related problems have you been able to overcome in your life? Do you have a personal experience? (Say doing shift work that really challenged the way you eat.)
Is there an area that you've researched and perfected purely because you've always been drawn to it? Chances are something really interests you. A focus that you are drawn to. You'd be really good at where you could help people just like you.
This is the place to start.
It isn't always going to be your niche or where you end up or the exact person that you should be targeting, but it's the best start. Most importantly, it's usually right in front of your nose, but good coaches can help you identify this.
Take my client, Chelsea. She is a former weightlifter and research scientist that left her job to become a yoga instructor. The practice of yoga really helped her slow down and really helped ground herself. Interestingly enough, she started to notice that not everyone that came into the studio wanted to eat granola or go vegan; actually, some of them wanted to
lose weight. Chelsea had a lot of success managing her own weight using a tracking-based approach. You get what I'm laying down here - Chelsea's been able to focus on helping yogis lose weight and nourish themselves.
It's really taken off, and the best part is she doesn't always have to talk about nutrition. She helps people practice yoga, and can just talk about yoga. Her content is on-brand now and people know exactly what they're going to get when they come to Chelsea's page.
The lesson here is following your passion when it comes to picking your nutrition coaching niche; it rarely steers you in the wrong direction.
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Step 2. Validate
People in the niche actually want what you have to offer. Chelsea knew people doing yoga actually wanted to lose weight because people kept coming into the studio asking about it. We need to validate that people actually want the thing that we have to offer. The sooner we can do this the better because it can save us a lot of time and frustration.
So once we have a better idea of who we're best suited to serve, we want to get a better sense of whether they actually want this thing. One way of doing this is to simply have conversations with people that are in the target area. Additionally, it's always smart to see if there are any other competitors in the area.
Here's the deal, it might not feel like it, but you actually want competitors going places, where no one else has gone before—which should be reserved for space travel and nothing else. Because sometimes big holes exist for a reason and that reason is if it doesn't exist it's probably because it's unprofitable.
If there's some healthy competition in the area, there's going to be plenty of time later to find ways to stand out and what sets your coaching.
Apart from now, we want to check out our competitors and assess who their target market is and what problems they're solving. We do this by assessing and taking a closer look at what kind of content they're creating to reach this target market.
They've already done the heavy lifting research. What they're doing and start to think about what you could be doing differently and better.
Once we do this we want to get closer to what people in the target market really truly want.
Step 3. Solving Problems
For your niche, once you realize what lights you up and that your niche is going to be profitable, you need to get closer to what problems your niche is currently facing, then you can discover what they want and what they actually do about what they want. One way of doing this is to see what other competitors are posting about in their testimonials. What are people achieving? Is it weight loss or is it a specific payoff in their performance? This is a great way to see what they want. But we can also use search engines to get a better idea of problems and payoffs even sooner. Amazon is great for this.
Amazon is a powerful search engine where people are doing more than just searching, they're actually buying. So if we go to the platform and search for something like ‘busy mom weight loss’ we start to get results about books that have 5,600 reviews. People are obviously buying it and reading it.
What we do next is start to look at the good and bad reviews and get a sense of what people are saying about reading these books. Through these, I'm starting to see trends about
improving confidence and liking who I am but also losing weight and enjoying new and fun recipes.
Listen to this one: “I lost about 50 pounds just by cooking and
enjoying her off the wagon a little bit over the summer but I'm really looking forward to getting back to it and eating real food with this book.”
Weight loss confidence is real. Food recipes, everything the client wants is right in front of us, having real conversations with the target market. Using search engines, but also assessing what your competitors are doing, gives you the best idea of what specific problems your niche wants to solve.
This is great but others are already doing it, so how do you stand out?
Step 4. Test Your Idea
It's time to see if it works, and the best way to do that is to make an offer on social media. Announce your new coaching direction and tell people how it will help them. You're doing this at an introductory rate for a limited time only. This is a great test where you can gauge interest and validate if it will actually work. But don't worry if it doesn't take off at first; this is something that you're going to need to spend some time focusing on. Sometimes even two to three months to get the right eyes on you, to collect the right stories and testimonials and make a compelling case.
So take your time and be patient and that's it folks a five-step process.
Simple, straightforward, effective
In the process to find your niche as an online nutrition coach remember to be specific and clear.
This might take some time and you may have to try different things before you find something that clicks and works. Give it some time to show up consistently and see what works for you, but niching down is a move that's going to help you make more money and help more people.
So you need to do it and I hope this helps. Now as great as all these tips are if you're really serious about starting a nutrition coaching business, the next thing I'll have you do is check out the social media script I have linked below.
Here is how to get 3, 5, or 10 new nutrition clients on Instagram, so make sure to check it out now and I'll see you next time.
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