Can a thought leader have two audiences?
My client, a prominent consultant, coach, and business school professor, was worried. Is it a bad idea to invest in thought leadership development when I have two niches? she wondered. Can I address both my audiences, or do I have to choose one and alienate the other?
Dear thought leader: yes, you can have two audiences.
The Problem with ‘Just Pick a Niche’
The business and marketing best practices everywhere will tell you otherwise: choose one narrow niche for your services. The narrower the better, because the riches are in the niches.
It’s good advice. Committing to a narrow niche is a tried-and-true way to position yourself in a category of one. It’s how you become so precisely known for what you do that no one questions whether to buy from you. ‘Competitors’ become irrelevant. You’re the only choice.
But…
What drives me up the wall about this well-meant advice is that it gives no context; it’s prescriptive; and it’s oversimplified.
There’s nothing wrong with you if you don’t follow it.
The Reality for Many Women Thought Leaders
The reality of most women thought leaders and entrepreneurs I work with is that they offer similar services to two related markets.
That is their context: for example, they coach individuals and offer training to corporate groups. Or they coach executives and offer courses for mid-level professionals.
They are applying their knowledge and skills in such a way to impact more people. They’re addressing gender bias systemically (training corporate groups) and individually (coaching individuals). They’re enhancing self-advocacy for current leaders (coaching executives) and emerging leaders (teaching courses). They’re addressing ‘the problem’ from multiple angles.
When you’re able to help more than one type of client and you feel drawn to do so, it doesn’t make sense to ‘just pick a niche.’
It’s the Nike method, and sometimes ‘just do it’ is exactly the right way to go, whether you’re training for a marathon or executing on a marketing strategy. But that’s just it: ‘just do it’ is great for execution, but doesn’t work very well for strategy.
‘Just do it’ is prescriptive and it can limit you, forcing you to pigeon-hole yourself prematurely or artificially.
It also oversimplifies the nuances of your work. ‘Just pick’ implies that the consequences of this choice don’t matter, like selecting between a red or a blue shirt.
But the choices DO matter: they impact how you feel about your work; the type and quantity of people you serve; your bottom line; your thought leadership.
‘Just Pick One’ Doesn’t Have to Force Your Hand
So when you read ‘the riches are in the niches, so pick one’ it makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong by not choosing. So then you think, I either have to:
- Split my business in two to serve both markets simultaneously, which sounds a lot like doubling your workload and the complexity of your business
- Force myself to choose. You know what feels bad? Picking something for the sake of picking something when it’s not as simple as choosing a shirt.
My experience (and that of many women leaders leaders) is that my niche picked me. I didn’t pull it out of a black silk top hat, it slowly emerged and developed from the work I was doing. I love the advice Susan Hyatt gives to new coaches: to ‘coach your face off.’ That’s how you and your niche will discover each other.
There may come a day when you will make a choice. I remember when my coach, Eleanor Beaton, chose to stop offering services to women in corporate and focus solely on women entrepreneurs. Her decision cut off about half her audience and half her revenue stream.
I am certain that was a scary decision to make, but I am also certain she knew she had to make it — not because she was forcing herself to ‘just pick one’ but because it became clear which niche was right for her next phase of growth and impact.
If you are among the legion of wickedly smart, capable, decisive women leaders with more than one niche/audience, you’re not doing anything wrong. But if it’s make you feel unsure of yourself and you’d like to make some sort of strategic decision, you have a few options:
- Keep serving both. This might be the clear choice if you want more experience under your belt, or you want all the revenue streams you can get, or because you want to serve both audiences, full stop. The niche gods will not smite you. You can use language in your thought leadership so both audiences know you’re talking to them.
- Serve both but say you serve one. If your thought leadership feels complicated because your audiences don’t overlap, or if you find yourself more drawn to and excited by one audience, devote your marketing to that one. You can still serve the other as much as ever, especially if you can rely on word-of-mouth to find new clients.
- Serve one. If this is your best way forward, you’ll know.
There is no one right way to build a business — and much of the business advice we’re surrounded by is filtered through a patriarchal, kyriarchal, white supremacist lens because that’s the water we’re all swimming in. If ‘tried-and-true’ advice doesn’t feel right to you, you can trust that. You are the captain of this ship, and there’s nothing wrong with you.
I have two audiences. How do I thought lead them?
I often hear the question, how do I make my thought leadership more magnetic? How do I SAY THE THINGS I’m here to say, especially if I’m trying to impact different audiences?
It’s an important question, so I created a short email course with the answers. The 5 Pillars of Magnetic Thought Leadership divulges the pillars your thought leadership needs to stand out All The Way Out. It’s data-driven, informative, provides examples and it’ll give you what your thought leadership needs to attract the people who want to work with you (whether that’s one niche or no).
Click here: The 5 Pillars of Magnetic Thought Leadership.
It’s free, it’s just 5 lessons, and it’s got exercises, examples, and insights to give your thought leadership as perfectly positioned as cold water after a marathon.
Click here to join the free email course, 5magneticpillars.com.
Image by Brienne Hong via Unsplash.
