The riches are in the niches.

It's a cliché, but it's true. The more you focus your business on addressing ONE problem with ONE solution for ONE audience, the faster you'll grow.

• Your messaging, marketing, content, and website are able to speak the language of one specific customer group.
• Your offer solves one deeply felt pain that your ideal customers struggle with the most.
• You can systemize your operations, making it faster and easier to take on more clients and scale.

When those three things happen, you attract, resonate, and convert more of your ideal customers.

The riches really are in the niches.

Unfortunately, most founders and marketers don't understand how to effectively niche their business.

They rely on elements like industry or business size, but don't go narrow enough to truly speak to ONE type of client.

Finding the right way to niche unlocks growth you couldn't otherwise achieve.

Let's dive in.

The Psychology of Niching

Niching is a psychological tactic.

When you niche, you're focusing on a specific customer, speaking directly to their desires, and offering them solutions that matter.

It's not about selling a product.

Niching taps into a powerful psychological driver: identity.

When a brand targets a specific pain point felt by a specific customer, an undeniable level of authority is applied to the brand:

They understand my exact world, so they can fix my problem.

Niching often helps reinforce a person’s sense of belonging. By aligning your brand with that identity, you’re not just selling a product—you’re reinforcing the consumer’s place in the world.

This feeling of belonging is a powerful motivator, making them more likely to buy and become a brand advocate.

If they feel like you know them, they trust and buy from you more.

3 Ways to Niche

There are 100s of ways you could niche your business. However, we've found that adopting a mix of these three helps you choose the right niche.

Firmographic Niche

Start your niching journey by looking at the firmographics of your ideal customers. Think:

• Industry
• Revenue
• Business size
• Company type

The easiest way to do this: Pull up a list of your past and current customers and look for trends among industry, revenue, business size, and company type.

A small caveat: You likely won't see trends across all four.

Take Shft, for instance.

We don't niche by industry. We have customers across manufacturing, recruiting, marketing agencies, legal firms, professional services (design, web development, human resources, etc.), coaching, IoT, IaC, software and MVP development, and even a senior housing developer.

But we do see trends in revenue ($1M plus), size (small to no marketing team), and type (B2B).

The trends help you determine the firmographic niches you already have.

Problem Niche

Next, look at the problem you solve.

You want to find one exact, high-frustration problem you can solve better than anyone else.

Look for a problem that is:

• Specific. Avoid broad problems like revenue. You'll compete against any type of business that can increase revenue.
• Painful. Mild frustrations don't get people to buy. You want something painful enough that the cost of change is lower than the cost of staying the same.
• Targeted. It should be a problem your firmographic niche above actually feels. If it's not a problem to them, or a problem they have the authority to solve, it's not the right problem.

The more targeted, specific, and painful the problem, the better.

Take the problem Shft solves:

Losing deals to competitors because you don't know how to communicate why customers should choose you.

Every client we've worked with had a differentiator. They just didn't see it and didn't know how to communicate it.

That's a painful problem.

Format Niche

Lastly, look at how you deliver your solution.

The format of what you offer is a niche in itself, especially when customers are looking for a specific type of solution.

Think through what you offer:

• Standard offer. Service packages or standard products with little to no customization that customers can buy "off the shelf."
• Custom offer. A product or service built around what the customer needs, not a standard package you offer.
• Intensive Sprints. A specific time frame to get your deliverable.
• Monthly Retainers. An ongoing partnership with no end in sight, delivering regularly.

Those are only four of the possible formats of your offer.

Take Shft. Our format niche lies in the operating system we create for our customers.

We don't just create a strategy document. We deliver a system our clients can install to own the position we nailed down in their strategy.

Combining Your Niches

The goal isn't to pick one of the above niches. It's to find the combination of all three that works for your brand and your customers.

Here is Shft's combined niche:

• B2B service companies make $1M plus
• with little to no internal marketing team
• who struggle to explain why customers should choose them over the competition
• and who want an operating system to own a unique position

It's a mouthful, but it helps us streamline our messaging, marketing, content, offer, and experience.

We don't sell branding. We sell brand operating systems.

That one name change helps us resonate with our ideal customers more — because most of them have worked with brand and marketing agencies before who handed over a strategy deck that never got used.

Find your niche.

Start with firmographics.
Move to problem.
End with format.

You'll create a niche you can speak to directly in your marketing, content, copy, sales, and offer.

Which means more of them will buy.

Need help finding your niche? Book the Brand OS. We'll research your offer, ideal customers, and what you do exceptionally well, and create a niche you can speak to.

Or, you know, keep winging it. That's cool too, I guess.

Until next week,

#SassyJason out.

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