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Converting Clicks to Customers through CRO Summary
How to Niche Down Your Business: A Strategic Guide to Finding Your Focus
If you’re trying to be everything to everyone in your business, you’re probably struggling to explain what you do and who you help. It’s a common challenge – I’ve been there myself. But here’s the truth: the path to growth often means narrowing your focus.
Why Niching Down Makes Sense
Keeping your options open might seem like a smart business strategy. After all, more potential clients means more opportunities, right? Actually, the opposite is often true. As Rachel Honeyman puts it: “You will be able to actually help more people if you get clearer on who you help. If you continue to try to be everything to everyone, you’re going to be nothing to anyone.”
Finding Your Business Niche: A Strategic Approach
The most effective way to find your niche is to look for patterns in your work and life. What themes keep emerging? What types of clients do you most enjoy working with? What problems are you uniquely qualified to solve?
Sometimes the answer is right in front of you, but you might need an outside perspective. As Honeyman shares from her own experience: “Sometimes you need an outside perspective to tell you the most obvious thing.”
Implementing Your Niche Strategy
When you’re ready to niche down, follow these steps:
- Start with Services: Begin by focusing your core service offerings. You don’t need to advertise every capability – concentrate on your primary expertise.
- Define Your Audience: Get crystal clear on who you serve. Whether it’s female entrepreneurs, tech startups, or local restaurants, specificity is key.
- Align Your Brand: Ensure your messaging, visuals, and content speak directly to your chosen niche.
- Be Patient: You don’t need to have everything perfect at launch. As Honeyman advises: “It’s okay to let go a little bit and understand that it’s not all going to happen perfectly… It’ll all happen over time.”
The Hidden Flexibility of Niching Down
Here’s something many people miss about niching down: your public-facing marketing can be focused while your actual service offerings remain flexible. As Honeyman explains: “I work with men, I just don’t market to them… I think what’s important in terms of niche is that outward facing piece of like, who am I actually marketing to? Who is my ideal client and how am I positioning myself as the ideal person for that client?”
This approach allows you to:
- Maintain a clear, focused marketing message
- Build authority in your chosen niche
- Keep options open for additional revenue streams
- Serve existing clients who might fall outside your niche
Understanding Your Ideal Client
One crucial element of successful niching is truly understanding your ideal client. “If you do not have a deep understanding of that person, you’re never going to connect with them in a way that’s… they’re going to feel. It’s always going to feel fake and forced,” Honeyman notes. If you’re not your own ideal client, make sure you have someone close to your business who represents your target audience. This insight is invaluable for creating authentic connections and meaningful services.
Moving Forward With Your Niche
Remember that niching down is an iterative process. As you gain experience with your chosen niche, you might need to:
- Adjust your service packages for different client segments
- Refine your messaging based on client feedback
- Develop new offerings that better serve your niche
- Continue evolving your brand to match your market position
The key is to remain flexible while maintaining your focus. Your niche isn’t a prison – it’s a platform for growth.
The Bottom Line
When you get clearer on who you help, you actually end up helping more people. It might seem counterintuitive, but narrowing your focus often leads to bigger opportunities. The key is to be strategic about your niche selection and patient with the implementation.
Are you ready to find your niche? Start by examining what you do best and who you serve best. The answer might be clearer than you think – you might just need someone to point out the obvious.
Converting Clicks to Customers through CRO Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is the founder of HoneyBeBold, a branding and web design agency focused on building bold and impactful brands and websites for mission-driven female entrepreneurs.
She’s been in the content marketing space for over 16 years. She’s a martial artist and a woman’s self-defense instructor, and lives in Long Island, New York with her husband and their two pet rabbits, Luna and Lupin. So I’m guessing a big Harry Potter fan.
Today we’re going to be talking about the power of niching down – something I find myself struggling with these days – with Rachel Honeyman. Rachel, welcome to the podcast.
Rachel: Thank you so much. That was a great intro. Thank you.
Rich: Once I saw the Luna and Lupin, I’m like, I think I recognize those names.
Rachel: Yes, and it did used to be Tonks and Lupin, but unfortunately Tonks passed away and we got a new rabbit. But she was very old. She lived a long, good life.
Rich: Long, magical life.
Rachel: Long, magical life.
Rich: So what came first, branding or self-defense?
Rachel: That’s an interesting question, because it’s not so simple. Branding has been this constant through my work over the last 15, 16 years. Without even knowing it, I think that I focus so much on content marketing and the content strategy side of things, and I didn’t necessarily put a label on it as brand. And it wasn’t until maybe a year or so ago where I was like, no, branding is this constant part of what I do. So technically branding came first, but martial arts has been a part of my life for about nine years now.
Rich: And how did you get into martial arts and self-defense?
Rachel: The long story short is I was followed back to my car at night by a man. Thankfully, I got away from that situation physically unscathed, but it really shook me up and made me realize that I wanted to have the skills and tools to defend myself and then learn how to teach that to other women. So that’s become a really huge part of my life.
And as we get further into this conversation, I think it’ll tie together, because it is very tied to some of the work that I do, even in the branding space as well.
Rich: As that question was leaving my mouth, I was reminded by every TV lawyer trope I’ve ever seen where they’re like, never ask a question you don’t know the answer to. So I’m so glad that it worked out and actually inspired you to not only learn self-defense, but also teach that to other women. Thank you very much for that.
Talk to me a little bit about what your business was like before you started niching down and then what that transition was like and where you find yourself now.
Rachel: Yeah, so it’s interesting. Actually, as we’re recording this, today is my official two-year anniversary of going full time into my business. I’ve always done this on the side, but most of the work that I did over the last 15 years on the side was just freelance writing and content strategy and pitching in on projects as needed. And then I had worked for other people in a content director type of role for most of that time.
But I officially went out on my own two years ago, and my goal was always just to run my own business, but I didn’t quite know what that would look like. And so for the first year that I was running my business I did that where I was just like whatever came my way, any projects that came my way, I would take them on. So I was doing some freelance writing and some editing and some content strategy work and just doing whatever came my way. So some social media, some email marketing, there was just like a whole hodgepodge of things that I was doing.
And then I had one client who came to me and really changed the game for me. She found me on LinkedIn, I didn’t even know that we were connected. It’s one of those people that I just had been connected with for a while. And I was really active on LinkedIn, and she reached out to me and said, “I really love what you’re putting out there. I’m planning to start my own business and I have nothing.” I have a name for my business. She had a logo, but she had nothing else. There was no brand. There was no website. There was nothing. Can you do this for me? And I said, sure, I can do that.
And I really found that I loved the experience because of this perfect convergence of all these different things that I had done over the years. Because I had a couple of roles in my career where I was just a one-woman marketing team. Even though I was focused on content, I wore a lot of hats and I had to gain a very broad skill set, including technical web skills, and branding, and design, and strategy, and SEO and UX, and just all the pieces. And going through this process of building someone a brand and a website from scratch really allowed me to use all of those skills in one. And I loved it and that was the start of that shift.
Rich: And so as you were thinking about this the idea of you working with female entrepreneurs seems like an obvious fit, but was outside of this moment of serendipity, was there a decision process that happened, or was it just this is good, I want to do more of this?
Rachel: Yeah, I actually avoided niching down for a very long time. I really loved the idea of working on a broad range of projects and a broad range of clients. And I really didn’t want to niche down. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through that where they think that by keeping myself open to everything that I’m opening myself to so many more opportunities. And so I had that mindset.
And then I actually hit a point in my business. This time last year, I didn’t know yet that I was heading into a really, really dry spell. And for about three, four months, I didn’t book a project. And I spoke with a lot of entrepreneurs during that time and after that time, and I think that it was a pretty common thing that small business owners were going through. It was just a really rough time in the economy. But it was this eye-opening period as an entrepreneur where I said, I’m really struggling to explain to people what I do, who I work with, who I help. Like all the things that I tell my clients that they need to be better at and that I helped them go through, I couldn’t do myself.
And so I actually met with a friend who’s in this general space and we had this kind of deep dive session. And she said to me, “Rachel, female empowerment is this constant, the most important thing that runs through every part of your life. Why would that not be your niche in your business?” And I said, duh, like, why didn’t I think of that? But sometimes you need an outside perspective to tell you the most obvious thing.
So I actually went through a full rebrand of my company. I was formerly Honeyman Creative Solutions. I really didn’t love that name for the whole time that I had it, it just didn’t sit right with me. And I knew that I wanted to do something really bold, really impactful, and really attract that client that is my ideal client. So I basically used myself as a case study and I said, “I’m going to position myself as my ideal client”.
And so I rebranded myself as HoneyBeBold. I rebuilt my website. Everything about my brand is so exactly my ideal client. And I went through this in April of this year, and it’s been very transformative.
Rich: That’s awesome. I have so many questions about that, but one thing is you had the benefit of being your ideal customer persona. What advice would you give to somebody who says, yeah, that’s great for Rachel, but my ideal customer persona, my buyer persona is not necessarily me?
Have you run into it? Because you obviously work with a lot of people who are setting up their own brands. Do you have any advice for that problem?
Rachel: So I think that for the most part, I would say that most, especially if you’re a solopreneur or a very small business owner, you’re at an advantage if you do identify very strongly with your ideal client.
If you don’t for whatever reason, because that can happen, right? You have a product that maybe you can’t use, but you’re, there are plenty of people who can, and they’re a different persona. I would say, make sure that you have someone in the room with you, someone who is a decision maker, someone who’s really deeply involved in your business, who does fit that ideal persona. Because one thing that I see a lot and I’ve seen a lot throughout my career, is when there are companies that are trying to speak to a persona that they don’t understand, they just don’t get them. And you can build this theoretical buyer persona, right? And it’s this fake person. But if you do not have a deep understanding of that person, you’re never going to connect with them in a way that they’re going to feel. It’s always going to feel fake and forced.
So if you, for whatever reason, don’t fit that, make sure that you have someone very tightly linked to you. And you should be joined at the hip with this person who really does understand that persona.
Rich: Awesome. Now you niche down by audience, but you mentioned that you also pulled in all of these skills that you had developed over the years, branding, web design, UX. Did you ever consider also niching down by service and being like, I’m only going to offer brand design or I’m only going to offer this? Or how did that work out for you?
Rachel: Yeah. So actually that was the first place where I niched down is I said, I’m cutting away all the content marketing, content strategy, email marketing, social media, all that stuff that I have been offering. I’m cutting that away. It doesn’t mean that I don’t offer it as an add- on to clients when it makes sense. But outward facing, I offer branding and web design. That’s what I do.
And so that was actually the first place that I started. And then when I went through my full rebrand I said, okay, I’m only offering this, or at least publicly only offering this. And I am only speaking to female entrepreneurs running mission driven companies.
Rich: It’s interesting also the words ‘outward facing’, because I think a lot of businesses misunderstand this piece. Where it’s like if you say that I’m only doing branding and web design for female-run companies or whatever your niche may be, we often will be willing to take on adjacent work, especially for clients.
Like, we are a digital agency at flyte. We don’t do any print work except when we do. And that’s one of the things we don’t talk about it. It’s not on our website, but for clients who need that print job done, need the brochure, need the business cards, whatever. Of course, we handle that too, because we also do design and branding.
How do you handle the balance there? Do you just, as you’re working with your clients, say “Hey, you also need some SEO, or you need an email newsletter written. I can offer those services” Or is it something that comes up more organically?
Rachel: Yeah. So I start every project with, I call it my ‘bold foundation’. And it’s basically this 90-minute deep dive. We get into the strategy, we get underneath the brand and really figure out who are you, why do you exist, what’s the impact that you want to make in the world, why should your ideal clients choose you over your competitors?
And what comes out of that is I put together a really clear brand strategy brief. And part of that is saying, here are the things that you need to get from where you are now to where you want to go. And I don’t know, going into that deep dive session, I don’t know exactly what they’re going to need. So when someone comes to me and we have an initial call and they’re asking about my prices, I tell them these are generally what my packages are, but I will tell them straight off the bat we’re going to start here. And I will tell you after that conversation what the price is going to be for what you actually need. And I’ll give them some options. But this is my recommendation.
And so I just had this with a client. I’m actually publishing the website on Monday. They came to me, they needed a brand, a website, they’re launching a new business, but they really needed some of the other kind of strategic pieces as well. So they really needed a foundational social media strategy. They needed a lead magnet and a welcome sequence. They really needed those pieces to be successful with this launch, and they were ready to pay for that. So that was important for them. Most of my clients, we just do a brand and website, it just works out that way. But here and there I have clients who need more, and so I’ll pitch that.
But one other thing on that topic, I actually just had a friend reach out to me the other day and he said, “Do you work with men? Because I have a project that I need your help with.” And I said, yeah, I work with men. I just don’t market to them. I still have that where most of my clients, because I’m marketing to women, most of my clients are women. And that’s who I want to be working with the most.
But if I have someone who comes to me and we’re aligned on other things and they happen to be a man, I don’t care about that. It’s just I think what’s important in terms of niche is that there is that outward facing piece of who am I actually marketing to? Who is my ideal client? And how am I positioning myself as the ideal person for that client?
Rich: Yeah, I agree. And that goes back to that whole outward facing. It’s not that you’re not going to offer services to certain people or whatever the case may be, but it’s how do you market and how do you position yourself.
So you went through this full rebrand, getting back to that point, and you’ve obviously helped your clients through this rebranding process for their own businesses. That means you had to create new content. It means that you maybe had to come up with new visuals. Any advice on that process? If somebody finds themselves and they’ve been meandering, they’ve been kind of everything to everybody and they’re recognizing that the riches are in the niches. And I know you say “nee-ches”, but you can’t say reaches. What is some advice that you might have from what you’ve learned on how to go through that process of finding the new words, finding the new message, finding new brand voice, for those people looking for that kind of advice?
Rachel: Yeah. One thing that I experienced going through this is very much, coming back to that the content copywriter side of me, the old saying, “kill your darlings”. When I was going back through all the content on my old website and saying okay, what do I want to actually port over. And there were some really good blog posts there that just don’t fit with what I’m selling here. Like it just doesn’t work. So I’m going to table that, and there might be some way to repurpose that later, but I think it’s really about being very clear.
I take a very values driven approach to branding. Getting very clear on who you are and what you stand for, and then making sure that everything that you put out into the world is affirming that. If I don’t know, if one of my core values is transparency, I keep things close to my chest in my content, and am very, hard to read. That’s going to just send a really confusing message to my audience. So I want to make sure that everything that I’m putting out there is aligned with who I am as a brand and as a person. And so I think that one part is being ready to let go of the things that don’t serve that anymore.
And then really going through the process of defining what are the messages that I want to put out there. What are the core principles and the pillars that I want to dive deep on and that I can really stand up as an authority on? And then, the kind of most important message I think when you go through this process, it’s a big deal. Like you said, it’s a big undertaking. Be patient with yourself because it’s going to take time and it doesn’t all have to happen perfectly at once. And this was a very hard message for me to absorb personally, because I am a perfectionist. I think a lot and a lot of my clients fall into that category as well.
And I’ll just give one example. One thing that I did not, I’m still in the process now of working on it, but I never transferred my case studies to my website because I knew that it was going to take time to make sure that I was setting those up in a way that was going to align with my new niche, and making sure that the case studies that I have on my website are like perfectly constructed to send that message. And I said, you know what, if I wait until that’s ready, I’m never going to launch this website. So I just launched it without that.
And now it’s been, six, eight months, and I’m finally getting those pieces in place. And hopefully by the end of the year, I’ll have some case studies launched. But it’s really, you have to let go a little bit and understand that it’s not all going to happen perfectly. And you’re still going to have your logo, your old logo in some places, and it’s okay. Like it’s okay. It’ll all happen.
Rich: Beyond that point, it sounds like things are going well for you. It’s easier for you to market because you know what the message is and you can stay on point. You’re attracting the right type of clientele, but there still must be challenges when it comes to niching down. What are some of the challenges that you’ve run into since you made this shift?
Rachel: Yeah, the biggest thing that I’m actually grappling with currently, Rachel Honeyman. I keep saying, as I’ve talked about this topic with some people, 2024 was defining my brand, defining my niche, defining my brand, getting really clear on that. And I think I’ve done that really well. 2025, I think, is going to be defining my packages and offerings a little bit better.
And I think that if anything, because I got really clear and I said, okay, I offer branding and web design, that’s great. And I think that’s probably still going to be what I offer. But in terms of what that looks like for different clients, I think that is something that I still have to figure out.
And so as an example, I have two categories of rebrand. They’ve been in business for a while, and something just isn’t clicking or their website sucks or whatever. And so they need some help with the rebrand and redesigning their website. And then I have a fair number of clients who are just getting started, they have nothing. Sometimes they’re coming to me and they don’t even have a name for their business. And so we’re going through that exercise and building that foundation from the ground up.
And up until now, I have charged the same prices to those two audiences. And I’m realizing that may not make a lot of sense. There may need to be a different offering and a different price point for those two audiences. Someone who’s pre-revenue versus a little bit more established. I think that’s one of the challenges is figuring out, understanding that when you niche down, it’s going to take time to experiment. You’re not stuck in one thing just because that’s what you decided at the get go.
I think entrepreneurship is a constant experiment and figuring out what’s working, what’s not, what’s going to stick with your audience and what’s not, and how to make things work in the best way for you and your clients.
Rich: It sounds like you’ve shepherded through quite a few women who are going through this rebranding process. What have been, in your experience, some of the biggest sticking points that maybe you’ve had to coach them through when it comes to refining their brand or narrowing their niche?
Rachel: I definitely run into a lot of challenges with some women who really do want to be everything to everyone. And I think that’s probably common for all entrepreneurs, but I see it a lot with female entrepreneurs because women do tend to be, it’s a generalization, but we do tend to have more of that kind of natural nurturing tendencies.
And so we want to help everyone and that’s a great thing, but it can be very challenging. And I have had some clients who are a little bit more resistant to that to that idea of you will be able to actually help more people if you get clearer on who you help. And if you continue to try to be everything to everyone, you’re going to be nothing to anyone, right? That’s the old saying and it’s really true.
And so I think that has been a challenge, but I have been able to in most cases, I’m not going to say in all cases, I’ve had one or two examples where that didn’t go so well and I work with them anyway, obviously, but there’s sometimes a little more resistance to that than I can actually kind of breakthrough.
Rich: Awesome. Rachel, this has been great. I’m sure a lot of people have learned many things about the power of niching down from our conversation today. If they want to learn more about you, maybe end up working with you, where can we send them online?
Rachel: Yeah. So my website is honeybebold.com. And you can always email me at hey@honeybebold.com. You can find me on LinkedIn @RachelHoneyman. And I also have a freebie for your audience.
I’d love to offer along with a free strategy session. So if you go to honeybebold.com/AOCP you will be able to download a free brand blueprint, which really is a super helpful part of niching down and defining what it is that you offer, what it is that you stand for, and going through those initial steps of defining what your brand is.
Rich: That’s fantastic We’ll of course have links to that and everything else you shared with us in the show notes. Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Rachel: Thank you.
Show Notes:
Rachel Honeyman has turned her HoneyBeBold brand into an agency that helps mission-driven female entrepreneurs create bold, impactful brands and websites, with over 16 years of experience, she combines her expertise in strategy, design, and storytelling to empower women to build businesses they’re proud of. Be sure to grab her free Brand Blueprint, and connect with her on LinkedIn.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.