How to Find Your Niche in the Wellness Industry

Written by Sinead O’Connor, (she/her) BA Hons, RYT-200. She is a Yoga Teacher, Community Manager, and OfferingTree team member who lives and works in Calgary, Canada.

Expert reviewed by OfferingTree’s Studio Guy, Michael Jay

“What is my niche?” It’s a tricky question not to ask ourselves these days, especially when everyone seems to be a specialist in something or other or part of a hyper-focused community (especially online). But finding your niche — industry shorthand for specializing within your field and/or a specialized market — can be hugely beneficial to your business. What’s more, although finding a niche can feel like a narrow path at first, it can serve as an evolutionary catalyst for you and your business.

More often than not, niche finding and niche building take conscious effort, awareness, and strategy — as well as a little discomfort and risk, not to fear. In this article, we’ll give you the niche basics and walk you through the four foundational steps to successfully identifying, fostering, and thriving in your niche.

Table of Contents:

• Finding Your Business Niche
• How to Find Your Niche in 4 Steps
• Step 1: Identify Your Passion and Unique Expertise
• Step 2: Perform Market Research to Define Your Client
• Step 3: Analyze Competition in Your General Space
• Step 4: Choose Your Niche & Iterate
• Scaling & Evolving Your Business Niche

Why Finding Your Business Niche is Critical

Trying to be “everything for everyone” sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? It’s not only that, it’s bad for business. Being a generalist is important — it allows you to be flexible and meet all kinds of needs and audiences.

But the more general your business is, the harder it is for your potential customers to see what makes you different from your competitors — worth their time, attention, and money. Finding your business niche or niche market is key to standing out.

Finding a niche market means concentrating your focus on a specific skill set or offering and targeting it to a particular segment of customers (rather than trying to appeal to everyone). This is important because it allows you to concentrate your efforts and tailor your offerings, marketing, and operations to best serve that niche.

This, in turn, increases your differentiation in the market, the strength of your reputation, and the potential to establish a loyal customer base who appreciate you providing offerings that align with their specific needs.

The downside of trying to be the right service provider for everyone is that you don’t specialize in anything. If you don’t actually specialize in anything, you can’t set yourself apart.

Its offerings become too generalized, making it hard to excel in any one area. The business also has a harder time with effective marketing when it doesn’t have a defined target audience.

Why Finding Your Business Niche is Essential:

• Understand your target customers and tailor offerings to them
• Establish a strong reputation
• Establish a competitive advantage in a particular area of expertise
• Focus your branding, marketing, operations, and growth strategy
• Stand out in a crowded market of general wellness businesses
• Charge premium prices
• Build trust and credibility as an expert in your niche area
• Provides opportunities to innovate and constantly improve for your niche
• Maximizes efficiency and return on marketing investments with a defined audience
• Creates networking and partnership opportunities within your specialty area
• Opens up expansion possibilities once established as a niche leader

Examples of Niche Markets in Wellness

What if a new restaurant simply offered “Food”? Just food, in general. As a customer, this restaurant comes with more questions than confidence. What if you’re hungry for a specific type of food? What if you have dietary restrictions?

How good will this general “Food Restaurant” be at delivering quality vegan, French, Thai, or West African Cuisine? Most folks would follow their gut to a restaurant that offered more specifically what they were looking for. This is true for customers of nearly all business types.

Even if you aren’t asking yourself, “How do I find my niche market?” — specificity matters. To a potential client, there’s a big difference between a studio that offers just “Yoga” and one that offers Vinyasa, Iyengar, Chair, and/or Bikram Yoga.

Each of those Yoga offerings appeals to a niche market. But the niche can get even narrower by factoring in a specific audience and adding a functional outcome. Here are some examples:

• Chair yoga for seniors
• Corporate wellness coaching
• Nutrition for teenage athletes
• Prenatal massage
• Mobile massage therapy for events
• Plant-based nutrition planning
• Meditation for golfers
• Mindfulness for college students

How to Find Your Niche in 4 Steps 

Is your lightbulb illuminating? If not, no worries. This next section will walk you through four simple, strategic steps to confidently identify and establish a niche for yourself and your business.

Remember, specialization doesn’t have to come at the cost of your practice — or value — as a generalist. Maintaining and growing your general offerings is an excellent practice that should be maintained while you set out to find a niche.

Step 1: Identify Your Passion and Unique Expertise

First, look at yourself. Take a moment to think about your approach, abilities, philosophy, goals, and teaching style. You probably spent some time thinking about these aspects of your business during yoga instructor training, for example, or establishing your business.

But now that your business is out there in the world and you have some lived experience to your credit, it’s a good time to do another evaluation with a niche in mind.

Asking yourself reflective questions is the best place to start when defining what makes — or could make — you and your business stand out in the marketplace. In other words, discover your niche.

• Where do you shine?
• What are your strengths?
• What are your unique skills (niche skills)?
• What specializations in your field are you most drawn to?
• What do you want to accomplish?
• What are you passionate about?

Step 2: Perform Market Research to Define Your Client

Second, look at your potential clients. Knowing what you might want to do is a great place to start.

But how will what you want to do work in your market? Does a niche market already exist? Or is this specialization something the market desperately wants? The only way to know for sure is to conduct some market research.

Market research is critical in defining your target client and finding your niche as a wellness business, allowing you to make data-driven decisions about who you should serve. It provides insights that can inform pricing, positioning, and where/how to reach your ideal clients.

Thorough market research Rather than guessing, you can gather insights into client demographics, behaviors, needs, and more within a geographic area to identify viable niches and underserved segments that present opportunities and where your findings from Step 1 align.

• Analyze local demographics and trends
• Talk with current and prospective clients about their needs and interests
• Use email marketing to gather feedback from current and potential customers
• Map out your ideal customer persona based on data
• Refine your niche further as needed based on research

For more ideas, our article, How to Gauge Interest in Your Business Idea, covers several additional ways to define your niche further.

Step 3: Analyze Competition in Your General Space

Next, look at your competition. Analyzing the competition is crucial for identifying the right niche for your business. Here’s why it matters: looking at competitors helps you see where potential opportunities exist for new niche offerings.

This process lets you identify common services already well-saturated in your area versus growing or underserved spaces.

Researching competitors also allows you to understand pricing, positioning, and target demographics for existing businesses. This provides insights into how you can differentiate and stand out:

1. Categorize competitors by service offering type IE their pricing/packages, marketing, and positioning
2. Identify their customer demographics and niche offerings
3. Note any major players dominating specific segments or specialties
4. Look for gaps or areas with less competition
5. Refine your niche further as needed based on research

Step 4: Choose Your Niche & Iterate

Now, choose a niche. Don’t worry. This is not a FINAL step. At this stage in the process, you have plenty of information to make a confident decision about what niche would be best for you and your business to explore. Like everything in your business, thriving hinges on your ability to learn, iterate, and grow.

After following steps 1-3, you should already have a sense of what niche or niches are the most viable — now it’s time to test them out. By stress-testing your niche in various ways, you’ll be able to discover what works and improve on those things to make your niche offering even stronger.

At the same time, you’ll find areas of your niche that don’t work well. What’s most important at this stage is to keep learning and adapting until your niche feels comfortable for you and your clients — and then grow it.

• Review your findings from Steps 1-3
• Select 1-2 niche directions to test with real customers
• Define your selected niche(s) to the best of your ability
• Create a basic offering or promotion for the niche(s)
• Run small-scale marketing campaigns targeted to each niche
• Gather feedback from customers to validate interest and demand
• Refine your niche focus further based on learnings
• Adapt your positioning offerings to best fit the niche
• Commit to a niche direction fully once validated
• Celebrate your newfound niche!

Scaling & Evolving Your Business Niche

Once you’ve established your business in a particular niche, it’s essential to evolve and scale your niche over time continually. This section will provide strategies for expanding your reach and offerings within your niche to ensure you remain vibrant in your practice and attractive to clients.

And remember, the right niche will grow with you and your business. If you feel too restricted, it’s time to look for a new (or additional) niche.

At its most basic, a niche offering can be a valuable differentiator. Still, with the right approach, you can turn your niche into a powerful new offering, a new evolution of your brand, or even a new direction for your business as you scale.

Niche Marketing Strategies

Targeted niche marketing strategies are vital for scaling your business within an established specialty area. Here, you’ll want to explore a range of tactics, measuring the effectiveness of each to figure out which resonates best with your target audiences.

Strategies like optimizing SEO around niche keywords, speaking at community events, and partnering with complementary niche brands allow you to reinforce expertise and visibility with ideal potential customers.

Niche-focused digital ads and campaigns convert clients because they hone in on specific interests and demographics aligned with your specialty. Content marketing, such as blogs and social media focused on your niche, provides a way to attract and engage the right audience organically.

Ultimately, your niche strategy should grow with you, so don’t worry if something works for a while and then stops. Evaluate, iterate, and evolve!

• Regularly refresh niche keyword SEO & digital advertising
• Participate in community event appearances & partnerships
• Target email promotions for niche offerings to existing clients
• Create shareable content & tips to establish niche expertise
• Utilize the right kind of outreach for your audience, for example, email & SMS marketing

Leverage the Right Business Management Software

Wellness business management software simplifies essential administrative duties like class scheduling, registering clients, and monitoring attendance. This allows instructors more time to dedicate to teaching and engaging with clients.

The software enhances the client experience by facilitating straightforward online reservations, diverse payment methods, and tailored communication. This leads to higher client satisfaction and loyalty.

Additionally, these platforms offer analytical insights, aiding studio owners in strategic decision-making regarding class timings, pricing models, and marketing tactics. This data is also valuable for financial oversight, including tracking income and expenditures and producing comprehensive financial reports.

Key advantages of using top-tier yoga studio management software include:

• Increased client loyalty
• Attracting new clientele
• Strengthening community bonds
• Boosting confidence in your business and yourself
• Enhanced communication with clients
• Data-driven insights for business planning
• Simplified reservation process

At OfferingTree, we cater to the unique needs of solo wellness service providers and studio owners. Our comprehensive platform is designed to manage your business efficiently and from a single location.

Get More Expert Advice from OfferingTree’s Blog

We don’t have to tell you. Starting, running, and growing your wellness business is a challenging task. Every new challenge or opportunity brings a host of questions never considered before. But it doesn’t have to be stressful.

That’s why we at OfferingTree are committed to regularly delivering user-friendly, expert-level insight and practical advice for wellness professionals at every stage of their unique business journeys.

From on-demand content best practices to branding basics (and everything in between), The OfferingTree Blog aims to cover everything you need to take your next step with more confidence than ever.