Choosing your niche and why it is important
Finding your niche is one of the most essential first steps to successful brand collaborations & growth. I am sure you have heard this over and over, but why is that? Today lets delve into the reasons why niching down is the best thing you can do for your personal brand and social media.
Why niche down?
One of the most important things when trying to grow on social media & find brands to work with is finding your niche.
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense! When someone comes onto your profile they want to immediately see what you are about and how you can benefit them.
Let's take a look from and audience perspective....
It only takes a few seconds for someone to decide if they want to follow you or not. And it all comes down to ONE THING: How does following you benefit a potential follower?
Can they learn a language from you? Can they get travel inspiration and secret hot spot tips? Is your style to die for? If you do not have a clear solution to someones problem, they will not follow you. Why would they!
For example: when you come onto Leonie Hanne's profile you instantly see that you can find colourful fashion inspiration here.
So if you are someone who likes that you are likely to click follow!
Same goes for Sarah Day. within a few seconds you can understand that her page is all about fitness, wellness and mum life. Hence, she will be likely a great person to follow if you are trying to get healthier, get into a fitness routine or like mum blogs!
“If you try to please everybody, somebody is not going to like it.”
Now let’s take a look a this from a brands point of view….
Brands look for target audience & organic fit.
When brands are looking to work with influencers they look for two main things first:
Does your vibe fit theirs?
Is your audience the one they are trying to reach?
Let take a deeper look into this:
First the obvious, KitKat is unlikely to work with a fitness influencer. Duh, right?
But, let's say Dior is trying to find an influencer to work with. Who do they go for. A fashion influencer, correct! But just any fashion influencer? Definitely not.
Let explore this example!
Let's say dior is looking for an influencer for their new bag collection.
Step 1: Of course they will need a fashion influencer.
Step 2: They need to find an influencer who's style fits these bags. A very minimalistic influencer who only wears nude colors will not be the right choice.
Their audience follows them for nude, minimalistic style, so they probably don't even like colourful stuff, and are unlikely to buy it. But even if they do like it, they will find an endorsement of these bags "weird" coming from this influencer, and hence not credible. Again, they are unlikely to buy it.
Step 3: audience & style need to match the brand.
@laraadkins
For example @laraadkins is a really cool influencer with a very colourful style.
Yet, dior is unlikely to choose her for their campaign, because she herself does not use many luxury brands, and her audience is on the young side, usually not the main target audience for luxury fashion. Let's be real, not many people in their early twenties can buy a £3k bag each season.
Step 4: Last but not least, as brands usually want to make the most profitable choices when choosing an influencer, they often look at their image aesthetic. If the aesthetic closely fits the brands, they can reuse the images on their own social media, website or ads.
So to summarise, when looking for an influencer, a brand looks at:
Clear niche
Style & vibe
Audience
Aesthetic
This means that if you have a very clear niche, very clear style and audience to go with it, you are more likely to secure brand deals!
Let’s delve in a little deeper:
Imagine there are two really great influencers.
One has 100k followers and posts about lifestyle and luxury colourful fashion and also does beauty reviews.
Another influencer has 60k followers but only posts about luxury colourful fashion.
Which influencer is more likely to land the Dior Collab? Yep. The smaller influencer! The brand will have a better fit with this influencer and will have reason to believe that a really big proportion of his / her audience loves products like theirs, while with the bigger influencer this remains a bit questionable.
In other words, if you have a clear niche, you can even more chances at really cool collaborations than influencers who have more followers but are less clear in their niche.
Choose a niche you are passionate about
Now that you know why it is so important to choose a niche and stick to it, you can probably guess that choosing a niche that you are passionate about is vital! You can not post day & night about something you don’t really care about. But if you have real passion for the niche you choose it will shine through in your content and your audience will love you for it!!!
Task:
This assignment will help you understand what niche to choose for yourself! Take the time to really think about this!
Write 10 things you are passionate about
Here are a few questions to help prompt your answers:
How do you spend your free time?
What do you like talking about with your friends?
What topics do you like to learn about?
What clubs/organizations have or do you belong to?
What are some things that you have a talent for?
What is your favourite pastime?
Cross of the topics that do not have a good market
A common misconception is that you have to find an "untapped" niche so you can reap all the rewards of being the only influencer in that space. However, competition within your niche is actually a good thing! It means people are actually selling and buying on this market.
Be an expert in your niche and always provide value
Being passionate about your niche is not the only thing that counts. You also have to be able to translate that passion to your audience and share your knowledge or experience with them. Providing value is such an essential part of becoming a successful influencer. Being able to gain attention and build a connection of trust with your audience is one of the best ways to stand out in this industry.
You might think that this only applies to “coach like” influencers or edutainers but NO, this applies to everyone!
For example:
For example @theasianusher on TikTok is in the niche of comedy and the value that he provides to his audience is entertainment. He is good at making people laugh!
@thenikkirossi is a fashion influencer, her niche is romantic fashion and the value she provides to her audience is pastel coloured, romantic fashion inspiration. If you are her follower you can be sure to know all the latest romantic fashion trends.
Last but not least, Narrow it down!
Ideally, you want your niche to focus around 1-2 topics. For example if you are plant based and a personal trainer your niche can be plant-based fitness! If you love travel and are a student who lives on a budget, your niche can be affordable trips.
Things get a little complicated with lifestyle niche (usually 4-5 topics).
Lifestyle niche covers a broad spectrum of topics, but you do still need to create a specific brand for yourself. For example, luxury lifestyle blogs can feature food at high-end restaurants, luxury fashion and top-tier travel.
Mum lifestyle blogs can feauture food for kids, children’s activity ideas, travel ideas with kids, DIY projects and mums organisation tips.
Remember! Your content needs to resonate with your audience!
There's this saying in business that if you speak to everyone, you speak to no one... and this is SO true in the influencer world as well! If you are marketing to everyone, then your message will be so generic that you are not appealing to anyone. Nobody will feel spoken to and no one is going to hear you.
That's why it's so important to stick to 1-2 topics - or if you're a lifestyle influencer make sure all the content fits under 5 categories that are related to each other and is cohesive with the lifestyle you're showing to your audience.
