How to Choose Your Niche & Attract Your Ideal Patients

Brandy Kinnear, Marketing Strategist for Natural Health Practitioners and Founder of Your Ideal Patients
choosing-your-niche

After consulting hundreds of practitioners and working one-on-one with others who were sure they had already nailed down their niche, it turns out that choosing your niche is one of the hardest things to figure out. But it’s also one of the most important and rewarding.

Niching down, in any profession, is essential to attracting your ideal clients and standing out as a leading expert within your field. It will help you work more efficiently with the people you want to work with and — the best part of it all — you’ll be passionate about it day in and day out.

Getting Clear on Your Niche

Are You Marketing to No One?

Talking about knowing your “ideal patients” is important because having a clear idea of who you want to work with is crucial to setting yourself up for success in all your marketing efforts. Learning that when practitioners don’t feel they have to establish their ideal patients and try to market to everyone, it typically results in the fast train to burnout. If you market to everyone, then you market to no one.

You Get to Decide Who Finds You

Once you decide exactly who you want to serve, niching down will help ensure that those are the patients who will walk through your doors or find you online. Before we start a deep dive into figuring out your niche, I want you to remember that your treatment is not your niche.

Your Tools are Not Your Niche

Let’s say the treatment you most often provide within your practice is acupuncture or chiropractic adjustments, or laser therapy, or counseling, these are not the definition of a niche. These are the tools of your trade that you use to get great results for the ideal clients you want to attract.

So, What is a Niche?

In ecology, a niche refers to the match of a species to its unique environment and resources. Similarly, we often use the same term when we mean someone has found a comfortable position in life that suits them.

When we talk about finding your niche in business, however, we’re talking about the following points:

  • A specialized focus area for your business
  • A field in which you are an expert
  • Narrowing down to only work with your ideal clients or patients

Examples of a Niche

  • Weight loss
  • Fitness
  • Pain
  • Women’s Health
  • Men’s Health
  • Gut Health
  • Chronic Conditions
  • Hashimoto’s (Thyroid)
  • Mental Health

Niching Down

These niches are a great place to start. In fact, one of these may already be yours, but my goal is to get you to dig a little deeper to be able to better serve and provide value to your patients. To do this, the next step is to figure out a sub-niche.

Something very specific that you are, or can become, an expert in for which everyone will come to know you. Whatever sub-niche you land on, I want you to become the go-to expert within that field.

Examples of a Sub-Niche

  • Weight loss: postnatal, menopausal, childhood obesity, keto, intermittent fasting, paleo
  • Mental health: anxiety, depression, ADHD
  • Pain: injury recovery, stem cell/regen, chronic, motor vehicle accidents
  • Women’s health: hormones, fertility, skin, anti-aging/longevity
  • Men’s health: hormones, fertility, peak performance, erectile dysfunction
  • Gut health: irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO)
  • Chronic conditions: oncology, autoimmune, neurological

The Value of Choosing Your Niche

There are a lot of opportunities within niches and sub-niches, and there is never a lack of people to help. Deciding on your niche is not about eliminating those with whom you could have worked, it’s about opening up the world to the people with whom you want to work! Guaranteed that within each niche there are more people who need your help than you could ever serve in your lifetime.