You have a new business and you’re reading all these articles. You need to have a strong brand, know your target audience, and stay in a specific niche. You’re nodding your head in agreement, but in actuality, you’re freaking out.
You don’t have a target audience yet! You don’t have the perfect brand messaging yet!
If you aren’t sure exactly how you’re going to specialize or what your brand voice will be, there are probably two reasons you are struggling.
I am sharing these because I struggled with them as a new business owner and I repeatedly get this feedback from entrepreneurs who think they are ready to have it ALL figured it out… but they don’t yet.
Let’s talk about the two obstacles to gaining clarity in your niche and nailing your brand messaging.
You Might Be Struggling With Choosing a Niche
The first reason that you may be struggling is you haven’t already chosen a niche. Or maybe the niche you’ve chosen doesn’t fit quite right.
Maybe your chosen niche is too broad of a niche. Or it’s not a good use of your skills or you’re not passionate about it. For whatever reason, it’s just not the right choice for you.
If you haven’t already taken my free Build Your Biz Bootcamp, I definitely recommend it! It will help you gain clarity on your niche.
In the very first lesson, I cover how to choose a niche and everything that entails! There’s actually an exercise in the Bootcamp where I walk you through exactly how to choose one.
If you have already picked a niche, but it doesn’t seem like it’s the right fit, you may want to review that lesson and redo the exercise one more time. Sometimes, as your business grows, especially in the beginning stages of your business, you experience changes or things just go in a different direction than you were expecting it to. So you may need to reevaluate your niche.
Even if you’ve already done some sort of exercise where you chose your niche when you launched your business! If you do the same exercise again later, you may find that your results are wildly different.
Maybe you’ve experienced some changes or you feel like the niche wasn’t actually the right fit. And perhaps your answers are more accurate now because they are more related to where you are in your business currently and reflective of everything you’ve learned.
I would recommend the Bootcamp if you are struggling with clarity. Whether you need to choose a niche or your current niche isn’t fitting right.
You Might Be Overthinking It
There is also possibly a second reason for your struggling. You may have information overwhelm or you’re just overthinking the whole thing.
Finding clarity in your niche and nailing your brand messaging are two separate pieces of the same larger process of fully understanding your business and your brand.
If you’re constantly reading blog posts, watching webinars, watching YouTube videos, downloading lead magnets all the time, and you’re consuming, consuming, consuming all this content, you may just have too much information flowing through your brain.
This info overload is stopping you from making a decision or choosing a path cause you’re overloaded with so much advice and tips and strategies and it’s just too much!
The key to this problem is to set those things aside for a while.
- Stop signing up for lead magnets
- Ditch the webinars
- Stop reading blog posts
Not forever, but give yourself a little bit of a break. Even if it’s just a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Let your brain marinate in everything that you’ve already learned and really give yourself time to absorb the things that you’ve read.
You have to give yourself time to figure out brand messaging, and not rely on just one more blog to teach you what to do.
Related: How to Successfully Launch Your New Business
These Things Take Time
It’s so cheesy, but it’s true. Even with a few days, all the information might not fully digest.
Choosing a direction for your business is difficult.
It’s hard and you may just need more time to think through it. So it’s really important to let yourself relax from all of this overwhelm and instead put those things aside.
Listen to yourself. Listen to your heart and your gut and see what your own body and mind are trying to tell you.
Also, if you are still pretty early on in your journey as a business owner, there is a chance that you’re just overthinking it and stressing out about it too much.
I know that there is so much pressure to choose the perfect niche and have the most amazing brand messaging right out of the gate.
But the truth is that is pretty much impossible.
If you pigeonhole yourself into a box too early on, you’ll be kind of stuck in this decision that you’ve chosen. You may end up feeling trapped by those choices you’ve made or even start to resent your business because you feel stuck. Like it’s too late to change your mind and you’re stuck forever doing something that you just don’t resonate with anymore.
So take some time to figure it out, and pivot as you need to.
Wait for the Right Niche to Reveal Itself
I know that you know that you need to have really good, clear messaging because that is what sells clients. But that is so much pressure right when you’re getting started with your business. It’s hard to make the right decision if you’re rushing it. You might just feel like you have to make the perfect decision right now.
If you give in to that pressure, it might not end up being the right choice. You might just be forcing yourself to make a decision, instead of taking the time and doing the work to listen to yourself.
If you force it and make a decision that’s probably fine, but maybe not the right one, it’s not going to end up resonating with people.
When you’re first starting your business, this is a great time to experiment and try new things. Don’t let yourself get caught up in all of the pressure and give yourself a bit more space to breathe.
If you don’t already know the answer 100% right now, it’s probably because it’s not time for you to niche down and get brand messaging finalized yet.
As you grow in your business, as you experiment with what you offer and who you work with, everything will start to reveal itself.
You’ll realize which directions you are pulled and what you feel called to do. You’ll start to discover your niche and discover your brand messaging.
Contrary to what I named this blog about niche and brand messaging, it’s really not something that you decide on one day.
It’s really more of something that you discover or something that reveals itself to you.
The bottom line is that if you are struggling with this, I want you to know that you WILL ultimately gain clarity. It just takes time.
You have to be patient. Let the process do its work. Listen to your gut.
Don’t rush it, because if you rush it, you may make the wrong choice and then you’ll feel stuck.
Let it reveal itself to you. And when it does, you’ll instantly know, that’s the right path for me. The feeling is kind of magical. Don’t miss out on that magic by feeling pressured to make a decision too early.
