As you consider a career change or start to plan the management business, you might want to look around at others who are doing something in the health and wellness industry and wonder how on earth you’re going to stand out.
What will make you get the business of your prospective clients choose you over another health and wellness professional who’s been doing their work for 20 years? How can you attract your dream clients that light you up and make you feel like you’re in exactly the right career?
Before you panic, take a deep breath and know that it’s entirely possible to be a successful business owner in the health and wellness field, regardless of your background. The key to mapping out your road to success is to finely tune your niche.
What is Considered a Niche in Business?
Maybe you’ve never heard of a niche. Or perhaps you’ve overheard business management talk about it and don’t fully understand it. “A business niche is a specialized or focused area of a broader market that businesses can serve to differentiate themselves from the competition.” (www.businessnewsdaily.com).
It’s a smart business practice to find a niche that aligns with your ideal target market in an area that has unmet needs and lots of potential.
Sure, you could just be a health and wellness generalist, doing all the things for all the people. But you’ll struggle more with launching your business, it will be trickier to find clients who understand what you do, and you’ll be challenged every time you sit down to write out some marketing material.
Benefits of Defining a specific Wellness, Health and Fitness Niche for a Business
Choosing a niche allows you to become a specialist instead of a generalist. This will allow you to speak right to your potential clients, charge more for your services, and become known as an expert in a particular area. There are two other big advantages to niching down: reducing your competition and being the go-to expert.
Reduced Competition
Without niching down, you’ll be one voice in a sea of many in a saturated market. When you identify a specific and clearly-defined niche, you’ll put yourself into a truly unique market serving a specific group of people.
By combining the right target audience with the right service offerings or products, you can get granular enough that there aren’t many other major competitors in your market. This allows you to get more attention and stand out in your field.
Become a Sought After Expert
The benefit of reduced competition is that you then get to become the expert!
This is crucial for getting attention, becoming the only option for your ideal clients, and driving visibility. This can greatly help with your marketing efforts.
When you can present yourself as the expert of something specific, you’ll have more opportunities to be interviewed on podcasts, write guest articles, and present at conferences. You’ll be able to not only build a business but to also grow a thriving career.
How to Determine the Right Health and Wellness Niche for You
You’ll be on a much clearer path to success if you can get laser focused on what you do best, who you do it best for, and how you can do it for them in the way that they need.
By being a specialist, you’ll become the only option for a particular type of person and they’ll see you as an expert. You’ll also get to charge more for your services because you’ll be offering something truly unique.
Spend some time thinking about your personal life story. Is there something particular in your personal experience that you’ve overcome that you’re proud of? When you’re talking with someone about a specific topic and you get fired up, you might make a note of what that is.
Typically, the things we can personally relate to and that we feel passionate about are clues to which wellness niches we should consider in our businesses. If you have a powerful story to share, that’s even better. You’ll find that the more personally connected you are with your business niche, the more that clients will relate to you and trust you.
Defining Your Health and Wellness Niche
After you’ve spent some time reflecting on what lights you up, take the time to do some writing and brainstorming to get more clarity. It’s always good to start from a “soft” place of knowing and then work into a strategic place for deeper analysis.
Here are a few questions you can use to dig deeper into your ideal business niche.
What Type of People Do You Want to Help? Who Do You Love?
Get really, really specific with this answer. Dream up your ideal client(s). You’re unlikely to get an ideal client walking through your door every single time. But knowing who that person is will give you a very useful compass for navigating your business decisions. Plus dream clients will keep your passion lit and your energy flowing for your work.
Are You Answering a Need in the Market?
Sometimes needs are pretty obvious and if that’s true in your case, awesome. For those who maybe have to do a little more digging, creative thinking, and research to figure out it, keep at it.
Start listening to the problems people are saying they wish they could solve. Determine if your service offerings could be that thing to help.
What is the Growth Potential?
This one is important because you want to create a business that’s viable and can grow over time.
If you’ve niched yourself down too narrowly, you might solve every person’s related issue in town and then run out of clients. Make sure your niche has the potential to grow!
Does this Health and Fitness Niche Solve a Specific Problem?
Solving problems will help you stay in business and will get you raving fans that will be your best word-of-mouth marketers. Make sure that your service is something that can have a positive impact on people’s lives.
Keep researching and experimenting until you land on the idea that you can put to work in your business to bring clients in and grow your earning potential.
Things to Consider When Finding Your Niche
It’s important to start with your passion, previous life experiences, and topics you gravitate toward. Write these experiences down to help with your brainstorming.
This could look like past experiences of overcoming an eating disorder by gardening and learning to love fresh foods. Or it could be how much you love talking about mindfulness for new mothers or your deep passion for teaching people how to eat an ancestral, whole foods diet.
After you’ve nailed your what and why, it’s time to do some research on the viability of your idea so you can finely tune it. Start doing research online and with people in your local area.
Find out what people are already offering (your potential competitors) and how they’ve defined their niche (or if they even have a niche).
Ask your friends and family for thoughts on their experiences from the client perspective in your potential niche. Talk with people online, engage mentors, and read through forums and groups.
Ask lots of questions and spend lots of time listening. You’ll find that often people will tell you exactly what they need and it might be a slightly different angle from your original assumption.
Your niche will likely evolve over time as you get to know your niche market’s needs better. For example, what starts out as an in-person business could evolve into an online business. Or you might begin your business online and then realize that you really love working with people in person.
Be open to your experiences and know that you don’t need to get it perfectly right when you start your business.
It’s okay to get it generally right and then make small tweaks to your niche over time. The more flexible and resilient you are, the more you’ll become a strong health and wellness business owner with a successful business.
What are the Characteristics of a Profitable Health and Wellness Niche?
Just because you love the idea of a particular niche, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the one that brings in the financial stability you need to succeed. Maybe you want to combine techniques from wellness niches and fitness niches to solve your client’s health issues. It sounds good, but you need to make sure the market will supply enough work to support you.
It’s important to make sure your niche idea has the right combination of ingredients to help you start to build a captive audience.
Your idea absolutely should be something you’re excited about. But it should be balanced with and informed by the reality of your potential audience’s needs.
Here are a few tips to exercise when analyzing the viability of your niche idea:
- Your niche or sub-niche is narrow enough that you don’t have to compete with big competitors or thought leaders in the field (or at least only a very small number of them).
- Exercise avoiding saturated markets by niching in further or combining offers in truly unique ways to make your offerings one-of-a-kind and specialized.
- Your offerings target the exact needs that your target market is struggling to fulfill — they need you!
- You’ve nailed a niche that appeals to people with the income to pay for your services or products.
- Your target audience has the time to spend with you on the types of services you offer.
If you can tick all those boxes, you’ll likely be on your way to a profitable niche that can lead you to business success. If you can’t, don’t despair. Just play with your idea a little more to strike the balance between passion and sustainability. Ask your potential ideal clients for their thoughts on what their true needs are if you get stumped.
Niche Examples in Health and Wellness
It might be easy to understand the abstract concept of a niche, but you might feel a little stumped when it comes to applying it to real world examples.
Rather than choosing something broad and generic, such as “fitness instructor who teaches healthy living and healthy lifestyle techniques”, you can choose something much more narrow to stand out to your prospective clients.
To start with here are two examples that are too broad to be considered a niche:
- Health coach for weight loss
- Health & fitness coach is who teaches healthy eating habits and workout habits
We’ve put together a short list of ideas to help you better understand what a niche looks like in action in the health and wellness field. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means and is just a collection of a few examples to help you better understand how to craft your own niche.
- Personal trainer for local senior citizens who want to have more energy and want to workout
- Yoga teacher for new mothers and their babies
- Nutritionist for middle-aged men in Chicago who are facing a chronic disease or chronic health issues
- Online blogger for holistic-minded families who want to make meal time healthy and simple
- Health and wellness coach who runs online groups for menopausal women who want to feel better
- Meditation teacher for local cancer patients who want to discover calm and healing
- Natural health retail shop owner, selling supplements to support busy professionals
- Whole foods chef for international yoga wellness retreats
You can get a sense of how niches are created from this list, which can be helpful for your own brainstorming process.
You can even niche down further to become ultra specific in who you help and how. As long as you’re filling an area with a true need, this can be a productive option as well.
One other thing to consider is that you can combine specialties for an even more impactful niche. For example, you could become a holistic wellness coach and a meditation teacher who is focused on using mindfulness to help clients find more wellness in all areas of their lives.
The great thing about health and wellness is that you can create a career path that works best for you. At the IAWP, we feel that becoming a health and wellness coach is an excellent foundation for starting your health and wellness career.
As a Holistic Wellness Coach, you can have the most impact, flexibility, and earning potential as you craft a unique business that only you can design.
The Best Health and Wellness Coach Certification
While all health and wellness career paths can be wonderful, you might find health and wellness coaching to be the best fit for you.
By niching as a wellness coach, you’ll have the greatest array of options for how to specialize and work with clients. You’ll find the emphasis on a holistic approach works really well when helping people create life-long changes that lead to well-being.
Check out our thoughts on why and how to become a wellness coach to help guide your journey into your new career.
It’s important to attend a health and wellness coach training that offers support and will lead to an accredited certification. You’ll also want to spend some time thinking about your approach to wellness so you can get the business management support that you’ll need during training and after your program is completed.
We’ve created an excellent article that goes into depth on what to know to help craft your niche that you can read before getting started.
At the IAWP we offer a Holistic Wellness Coach training program that leads to an internationally-respected certification. The training is flexible to fit your current life demands, it’s short enough to get you up and running as a coach quickly, and it’s long enough to make sure that you’re thoroughly trained and supported.
We care about training Holistic Wellness Coaches that make a big difference in the lives of others throughout the world.
You can learn more about our specialized training by clicking here.
