154: {Summer Remix} Niche down, profit up: 5 surprising benefits of picking a niche (and why your small business needs one in 2025)
Welcome to episode 154 and the next episode in my summer remix podcast series.
Confession time: I used to be a full-blown nature nerd.
My university degree was in environmental science and communications. I once wrote and performed musical theatre about duck migration and bear scat. (There’s even a CD out there. No, I won’t tell you where to find it.)
But lately, our backyard has become a little ecosystem of its own.
Crows, magpies, and even a baby woodpecker have taken up residence.
Watching them reminded me of one of my favourite episodes from the Ill Communication archives: To Niche or Not to Niche.
So today, I’m bringing this one back as part of my Summer Remix series.
Because when it comes to content creation and business strategy, sometimes the smartest move isn’t reinventing the wheel…it’s remixing what already works.
And in today’s noisy online world? Having a well-defined niche is one of your biggest competitive advantages.
Wait, what even is a niche?
A niche is the specific space you occupy in your market.
It’s who you serve, how you serve them, and what makes you distinct from everyone else shouting into the internet void.
And fun fact? The word niche comes from the French word nicher, which means “to nest.”
Your niche is where your business makes its nest, and where your right-fit clients (your bees 🐝) know to find you.
Why do you need a niche in 2025?
Let’s be honest: the market is saturated.
Everyone’s got an offer.
Everyone’s running ads.
Everyone’s posting on Instagram.
If you want to stand out, your message can’t be for everyone.
It needs to be laser-focused and deeply resonant for your people.
And here's the truth: niching isn't about boxing yourself in.
It's about creating clarity—for you, for your audience, and for your sales strategy.
Here are 5 surprising benefits of picking a niche:
1) You save time and energy.
No more spinning your wheels trying to speak to everyone. A niche helps you focus your content, offers, and energy in one direction.
2) You become more referable.
Specialists get remembered. Generalists get forgotten.
3) You elevate to expert status.
When you focus on one audience or one type of transformation, you sharpen your skills faster and stand out as the go-to.
4) You create loyal customers.
Your messaging becomes more specific, more relevant, and more emotionally resonant—which keeps clients coming back.
5) You can charge more.
People are willing to pay premium prices for someone who gets them and solves their specific problem.
But what if you’re afraid to niche down?
Totally normal. Most entrepreneurs resist niching because they’re afraid of leaving money on the table.
But in my experience (and with nearly every client I’ve worked with), niching up is what actually moves the needle.
You get more traction. More momentum. And you finally stop second-guessing every piece of content you create.
Plus, your niche isn’t permanent.
You can refine it over time (as I have).
When I started, I focused solely on high-ticket coaches.
Now? I work primarily with Gen X women in business.
I let my niche evolve with me, and you can too.
Free resource: Content Remix Strategy
Feeling tapped out? Remix your content instead.
If all this talk about niches has you fired up but your content creation energy is running on fumes, I’ve got something for you.
👉 Grab my Content Remix Strategy —a free 8-page Google Doc filled with ways to repurpose your best content so you can take a break without disappearing.
You’ll learn how to:
Turn your top-performing content into fresh, seasonal posts
Create space without ghosting your audience
Stretch your creativity without burning out
🎧 Plus, it’s the same strategy I’m using for this Summer Remix podcast series!
📝 Get instant access at kimkiel.com/remix
Thank you for reading, and see you next time.
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[00:00:00] Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Ill Communication Podcast this summer. Quite a few different species of birds have nested in or near our backyard. Early in the spring, I watched as a pair of mag pies built a large twiggy nest in a tree above our yard. Throughout the last several weeks, a pair of teenage crows have been hopping around our yard eating ants from the lawn picking berries.
[00:00:29] And quite honestly, shitting all over our deck. And last week I saw an adult and a baby Northern Flicker, which is a type of a wood woodpecker hopping along our fence, eating the insects trapped between the boards. I was really surprised to hear the young Lings call, it's a sweet little squeak, more like a mouse than the cackling call of the adult, but.
[00:00:52] Despite the calling and pooping, I really love that our yard has become home to several different species of birds that several have chosen to nest, right where we nest. And it reminded me of this older podcast episode I aired several years ago. It's an episode about the benefits of niching in your business.
[00:01:14] And while some of them are very obvious. Some of the benefits you might find a little surprising. Now, this summer on the podcast, I've been handpicking episodes to help you refine and sharpen your messaging and sales in 2025. And this episode about niching is especially important in today's market that is completely saturated and super noisy.
[00:01:40] So if you want to stand out and sell more in 2025, make sure you've dialed in your niche. Now, let's get into the episode.
[00:01:49] Welcome to Ill Communication, copywriting Tips and Sales Strategies for Small Business. I'm [00:02:00] your host, Kim Kiel. I'm a copy coach, sales strategist, and direct response copywriter. It's my mission to help women leaders and change makers amplify their voices. Through copy. It's why I am dishing out all the juicy tips, writing prompts, and sales formulas to help you generate more leads, book more calls, and get more high value clients on repeat.
[00:02:23] Sounds pretty good. It's time to ditch the overwhelm you might be feeling and find confidence in your copywriting so you can get your message out there and attract more soulmate clients. Let's get started.
[00:02:42] Hey there. Welcome to episode 54 of the Old Communication podcast. Today I'm diving into a great debate in marketing and sales, tan niche or not to niche. We'll weigh the pros and cons of nicheing in your business. We'll talk about how nicheing affects and influences your marketing and sales, and I'll give you some questions to ask yourself if you wanna define or refine your niche a little.
[00:03:08] So something I haven't talked too much about is how I used to be a bit of a nature nerd, and if I'm being honest, I pretty much still am, but my university degree was in environmental science and communications. In one of my summer jobs, I worked as a park interpreter in the mountains west of Calgary in Alberta.
[00:03:29] I was actually a singing and theatrical interpreter. I wrote 45 minute long musical theater plays about different kinds of animals or plants to teach campground visitors about the natural world and to develop an appreciation for it. I wrote and sang songs about duck migration to the tune of like the Andrew Sisters.
[00:03:50] Uh, I sang about how Frogs fornicate, and I even wrote and sang a song about bear scat, which is the technical term for bear poop. And yes, I did [00:04:00] sing it in the style of a jazz scat beat poet. There's an entire CD of songs out there called Heavy Petal, and if you find it, you'll hear me sing a few songs on there That I digress because what I really wanna get to is telling you that the part of that job was leading nature walks and teaching guests about the plants and trees and insects.
[00:04:21] And one of my favorite lessons was about how bees see how they see their world, how they see flowers in particular. See, bees don't see colors the same way we humans do. They see within the ultraviolet spectrum, so they can see things that are imperceptible to the human eye. When we see a flower, we see some pretty petals in the center of the flower, maybe for paying really close attention.
[00:04:52] We can see the veins in the pedals, but it's not very obvious. They look the same color to us. But when you look at those flowers through a UV lens, the flower looks completely different. The faint veins on the petals turn dark and bold. They look like runways or arrows pointing to the center of the flower.
[00:05:16] And the center of the flower is a bold contrast. It looks like a bullseye. The outside of the flower is pale and the center is dark and bold. So if you could imagine. If you're a bee flying over a field of wild flowers, how would you know which flowers are for you? Some flowers are adapted for butterflies.
[00:05:38] Some are adapted for tiny flies or ants, or even hummingbirds. How would you know if you're a bee flying over this field, which flowers you should visit to get the nectar? Well, flowers advertise to the bees using. These arrows and bullseye that are visible to the bees in [00:06:00] so doing the flowers are advertising their nectar to the bees, but it doesn't just serve the bees because when the bees land on the flower to collect the nectar, the bees are also collecting pollen, which they carry to different flowers, which helps pollinate the flowers and continues the species.
[00:06:20] It's a win-win relationship. And it's because the bees and their flowers share an ecological niche. Now, niche is a term we use in marketing to talk about who your audience or your market is. And the word niche comes from the French word niche, which means to nest so the bees nest or make their habitat where their flowers are plentiful and flowers nest or make their habitat where the bees are available.
[00:06:50] And the flowers market to their niche audience, the bees. And what if we viewed our businesses through the same lens as ecologists? What is your niche? Where are you choosing to make your nest? What kind of clients do you need to sustain your business? How do you advertise and attract your right fit bees?
[00:07:19] See, niching in business is multi-directional. It's a symbiotic relationship. It doesn't just help you grow your business. It helps the people or your clients, or your bees within your ecosystem find you and choose to work with you so they can sustain their role within the ecosystem. If you don't proclaim a niche, you will not be able to help the people you're meant to serve.
[00:07:45] They will not be able to find you. They will find someone else and maybe someone who can't help them as effectively as you could. So a business niche is the area of focus for your business within your [00:08:00] industry. Take for example, coaching. Within coaching, there are many different niches. There's mindset coaching, career coaching, health coaching, and within health coaching, there's fitness coaching or nutrition coaching or weight loss coaching.
[00:08:18] The same is true in entrepreneurship. There's marketing as a niche. Within marketing, there's visual branding, like graphic design or there's copywriting, and then within copywriting there are further niches like content or blog writing or sales copywriting. A niche market identifies who you deliver your services to, as in who are your bees.
[00:08:44] So, for example, I am a sales copywriter for Gen X women in business. There are email copywriters for e-commerce companies or blog writers for mompreneurs. There are nutrition coaches for postpartum women. There are wellness experts for vegans and vegetarians, and there are wellness coaches for people with autoimmune disorders.
[00:09:08] Now, when people first start out in business, it can feel scary to pick a niche. Because you're worried about excluding any business, and I get it, but I have to tell you, I think one of the best things I did when I started my business was I claimed a niche right away. I decided to focus on sales and conversion copywriting.
[00:09:30] I could have also written blogs or podcast show notes or weekly nurture emails, but instead, I narrowed my niche to sales copywriting. And the niche audience I claimed was businesses selling high ticket services or products. So when I first started out, I positioned myself as the go-to sales copywriter for coaches who sold programs or services valued at more than $3,000.
[00:09:56] Now, over time, I've played around with my niche. I've [00:10:00] explored what different services I wanna offer and who I want to offer those services to. And you may have noticed that I have refined my niche instead of exclusively serving high ticket service providers. I now serve Gen X women in business. And as I've refined my niche, I've discovered a few surprising benefits.
[00:10:24] The first benefit is having a niche helps you focus. It helps you focus where you want to build your skills. It helps you focus on getting to deeply know your audience. You know where to do your research, you know how to build your skills because you've focused on a particular audience or a particular skillset.
[00:10:46] You know how to focus your services or products. You can more easily focus on what kind of content you create, where you share your content, because if your niche isn't hanging out on TikTok, no need to be there. All of this helps you cut down on overthinking, makes you more efficient, and it saves you time and energy.
[00:11:08] And at least that's been my experience and one of the website copy clients I'm working with right now. Is shifting her niche from people who are just starting businesses to more seasoned business owners to help them scale up from multi six to seven figures. By claiming this new niche, her content team is now focusing, creating content that will appeal to that higher level audience.
[00:11:32] They're not gonna be creating content that appeals to a wide variety of audience. Now they're narrowing their focus to serve that more seasoned audience. Another benefit of niching is it helps you stand out from your customers, makes you more recognizable, makes you more memorable, makes you more referable, and you just are more distinct and different from everyone.
[00:11:56] It's like the flower in the field of wild [00:12:00] flowers. You're advertising yourself. A friend of mine, Rebecca, is a sleep and stress coach. Now, a lot of people need help managing stress and sleep, but instead of helping everyone, she's niching into helping women in midlife or Gen Xers. So if I'm looking for a sleep coach and I'm choosing between a generic sleep coach or a sleep coach for Gen Xers, guess who I'm choosing?
[00:12:26] I'm choosing the specialist. Another benefit of niching is it creates loyal customers. Your message is gonna be so dialed in, you will speak more directly to your ideal audience, and they will feel seen, heard, and understood. I. You'll demonstrate you care about your audience and customers. You become more referable and you will attract and work with repeat customers because you are speaking their language.
[00:12:54] Another reason why niching benefits your business is it elevates you to expert status. You can devote more time to becoming a true expert instead of spreading yourself to thin learning, all the things you can focus on where and what you wanna study to improve your skills. Plus, as you are focusing on that particular service or serving that particular audience, you are naturally going to refine your own ability and become super badass at it.
[00:13:23] You will also deliver a higher quality service, a higher quality product. You'll be viewed as the go-to in your niche market, elevating you to that expert status. And the last way a niche helps you is it can increase your profit. Because customers want to work with specialists and experts. They're willing to pay you for someone who gets them, someone who understands us and who can show me that you can solve my problem.
[00:13:55] When you have niched, you can effectively [00:14:00] target and advertise and promote to that specific audience a little bit better, which is more cost effective. You'll have higher conversions when you're speaking to the right audience of buyers. You may have a smaller audience, but it should take less effort to sell to them, and you'll actually have higher conversion rates.
[00:14:19] It might not just be a financial profit, but it might be a time and energy and creativity profit, because now that you're speaking to a more defined audience, you can expand and play with your creativity. You may find it faster to create content for your niche market than if you were creating content for a wider market.
[00:14:40] So check in with yourself. Who or what is your niche? Where in this ginormous business ecosystem are you making your nest? Who are you welcoming into your nest? Have sales been a little sluggish? Maybe you could experiment with targeting your marketing or offers to a more specific niche. So if you want to refine or define your niche, here are some questions to ask.
[00:15:06] Take a little bit of time to think about these questions. Maybe you wanna journal on them a little bit, but the questions are. What niche or market has a problem I can solve? Who do I absolutely love working with? Who will I absolutely not work with? Does my niche know they have a problem and is my niche willing to pay for solutions to solve that problem?
[00:15:34] Because here's the thing, it is too hard to market and sell to people who don't know they have a problem or are unwilling to pay for it. Now, the caveat, if there are underserved and underprivileged audiences who cannot pay, but you still wanna serve, I. You can choose to create free content, choose to offer free workshops or provide scholarships to help those who [00:16:00] cannot access your level of service.
[00:16:02] But in general, it's unwise to build a business to serve a niche market who is unwilling to pay or don't know they have a problem. So find a niche that will pay, wants to pay, needs your services, and who you love to work with. At a final note about niching, have fun with it. Play around with it. You can just pick a niche that interests you and experiment with it, or you can sit down and do a little research to find a niche that will be lucrative for your business, both in terms of money and in terms of enjoyment and quality of life.
[00:16:38] Go ahead and update your social media bios with your new niche. Experiment with your email and newsletter. Experiment with your blog and podcast content and create some social media posts to test and explore that niche. See what kind of response you get because you have to know this. Your niche is not permanent.
[00:16:58] You can, and you will evolve and change your niche as you play and experiment and grow your business grow. So my friend, that's today's episode to niche or Not to Niche, do you have a niche? What would happen for you if you refined that niche or chose a new niche? I know for myself, once I started creating more content around Gen X women, I had more engagement, more dms, more people reaching out and saying they appreciate it, they relate to it.
[00:17:29] And for me, that's as good a reason as any to niche. So thank you for joining me in my little ecological niche for nesting with me every Wednesday or whenever you listen to this podcast. I'll be back next week with a special announcement, so make sure you're following, liking and subscribing to the podcast so you don't miss it.
[00:17:49] Bye for now.
[00:17:56] And that's a wrap on today's episode of Ill [00:18:00] Communication. Hey, if you're picking up what I'm putting down. I would love if you would leave a rating and a review to let me know, and don't forget to follow the show so you never miss out on the tips, prompts, and strategies I share in every episode. They're designed to make you an ill communicator too, as always.
[00:18:19] You can check out all the links and resources from this episode on the webpage. Just head over to kimkiel.com/podcast. I'll chat with you again next week.
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