Picking a lane: Content Creator Edition
Are you creating content that’s lacking engagement? Do you find yourself struggling to resonate with your audience? Let’s fix that! As content creators, we’re used to wearing a million hats at once. We pride ourselves on being content queens of doing all the things, but sometimes specializing in one thing is important.
You’ve probably heard coaches or other influencers tell you that you need to pick a niche and stick to it. LinkedIn penned it best by saying “Trying to be everywhere with your social media plan will result in not being anywhere with substance. Narrow your focus…” Today we will be chatting about what a niche is, why it's important, and the benefits you and your brand will see from creating content that provides value to a certain audience.
What is a Niche?
The word niche can be defined as a specialized market segment for a particular kind of product or service. When you choose a niche as a content creator, you're choosing to promote our product or service that will interest a small specialized section of the population. When you think of a niche you may think of fitness, fashion, or motherhood. However, when choosing a niche, you should get as specific as possible. Since we know what a niche is, let's talk about what it's not.
A niche is an industry. That's why choosing style or beauty as a niche isn't beneficial to your brand as a content creator. With the content creator industry being saturated more than ever, it's important to stand out and do so while serving a specific community. Content Coach Vanessa Lau encourages content creators on YouTube to go three levels deep when choosing their niche. The questions you should ask yourself are who, what, and why!
Let's work through an example! Say you're thinking of choosing fashion as your niche. The next question that you should ask yourself is fashion for who? Let's say that you want to do fashion for moms. The following question you should ask is what do these moms do? They work outside of the home from nine to five. So now that you realize that you want to create content for fashion for moms that work a nine to five, the final question that you should ask yourself is why? You want to create content for moms that work a nine-to-five and don't have time to think about what they are going to wear. Now you have your specialized segment of the market and can create content that will solve their day-to-day problems!
Why is a Niche Important?
Business News Daily confirms that having a niche helps you establish a loyal customer base. This is important because having a solid market niche helps ensure that specific customers will want to buy from your business instead of the competition. A niche will allow them to recognize your product, service, or brand, and know that your offer will suit their needs. At this point, you may be rolling your eyes wondering if niching down is even worth your time. We’re here to tell you that it is! Claire from Oui Create Studio shares a few benefits of choosing a niche:
Establishes yourself as an expert. By choosing one area of interest, you will eventually become a go-to creator in that industry. This helps clients build their trust in you and your brand.
Helps past clients connect you to future ones. It’s extremely likely that the creatives working at one company will have friends at another, and that they’ll be willing to share contacts with those friends. And guess who will fall under their list of best recommendations? YOU! (Since you specialize in it, of course). It’ll be easy for your services to be recommended to a friend because everyone knows exactly what you do.
Test your creativity and expand your horizons. When you’re creating lots of content for the same industry, you’ll be forced to level up your skills and continue to create out-of-the-box content in order to spice things up and provide your clients with lots of value.
Create a style that people will remember. Contrary to popular belief, choosing an industry to create for is not the only way to niche down. You can also choose a niche by narrowing it to a certain style. If you’re someone who has too many interests to choose one specific industry, don’t worry — you can wow your clients with your signature style. And, yep, you guessed it: people will begin to recognize (and desire!) that style and come to you to make it happen.
Clients trust consistency. When you create a portfolio full of consistent work, clients will trust you can produce the same quality and style for them. They feel more at ease hiring you to produce content for them than someone with a million verticals and styles squished into one portfolio. It’s hard to hire someone from the internet you don’t know personally – so make it easy for them!
How to Choose Your Niche
Think of the niche categories that you currently create content around and write them down. Next, take five minutes for each category and do a quick brain dump of all the content ideas that you can create. The niche categories that have the most ideas are the ones that you should gravitate towards. Passion partnered with skills makes for a great match in content creation!
Forbes highlights these steps as additional ways to narrow down your niche for content:
Evaluate Your Passions and Skills
Remember what we said about passion and skills and how they’re the perfect match? We weren't kidding! Don't just choose a niche because you're "kind of interested" in it; to be sustainable, it should ideally be something you can see yourself being passionate about. Can you see yourself still creating content for this niche in five years? Then it just might be the niche for you!
Figure Out if There’s a Market for Your Niche
Although passion is usually enough to get us fired up to create content, it's not enough alone to ensure you'll be successful within your niche category. Research your niche and see if there’s a need for it! If you want to grow and eventually monetize your niche, you need to make sure that there are business opportunities, so your work won’t stay a hobby. One way to start figuring out the market is by doing some keyword research. The Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for this. Choose a few keywords related to your niche, and see which words and phrases get suggested. After that, you can narrow down the suggestions by monthly search volume, competition level, and suggested bid. Pro-tip: stick to 1k-10k searches per month.
Check Out the Competition for Yourself
Now that you’ve done your keyword research it’s time to take a look at the competition! When you’ve googled some of your keywords, a few websites popped up on page one. You'll find one of three things:
There are already tons of well-known sites ranking for those keywords. This niche may be oversaturated and it may be better to find one that isn't quite so popular. This would mean niching down even further.
There are no sites ranking for those keywords. Be careful, this could indicate that there are lots of opportunities, but more likely it means others have already discovered there's no market for this niche.
There are some sites ranking for those keywords, but they're generally smaller or low quality. This is generally a good sign that this niche is worth pursuing. There is likely a market for this niche, and the competition won't be overbearing.
There are benefits to choosing a niche as a content creator! Your audience and your future self will thank you. Not only will you be able to connect with your audience on a deeper level, but you’ll be able to grow and monetize value-packed content that you’re passionate about creating! You now have the road map to niching down and we can’t wait for you to see the results too!
Always In Your Corner,
The Content Queens
