Niching down feels like a major commitment—but what if you could test a niche without overhauling your brand? That’s exactly what we’re talking about today! Discover how one simple shift can help you experiment, attract the right clients, and get paid to test and confirm new ideas—without the stress, money, and time of rebranding.

🎯 You'll Discover:

• The real reason niching feels overwhelming (and how to fix it)
• A clever way to test a niche without changing your overall business identity
• How one client used this strategy to land high-value clients—fast
• The #1 mistake service providers make when trying to niche (and what to do instead)

📝 Resources Mentioned:

• Free Consultation re: Package Your Process™ with the Expert: Want help to create a niche offer that sells? Book a free call with Annie to get started → https://greateststorycreative.com/consult

#niching #branding #businessgrowth #clarity #marketingstrategy

 If you've been in the online business world for any length of time, you've come across this concept of niching finding your niche. Sometimes people say it as niche niche. I don't really know. I do know the phrase is "the riches are in the niches." And if you're anything like me used to hear that and be like, ugh, but I do all these things and that can really never be for me. I don't think it fits who I am, but everyone keeps saying it's so valuable and profitable to pick a niche. And if you've ever felt that way, I just want to tell you that there's a secret way to do it and that's what we're going to talk about today, which is how can you try a, niche without all the heaviness of rebranding.

Welcome to the Establish Yourself® Podcast, your guide to elevating your brand, offers, and systems as a coach, consultant, or service provider. I'm Annie Franceschi of Greatest Story Creative®. I'm a brand strategist, author, former Disney storyteller, and forever Muppet fan. If you're ready for next level success, we'll get clear on your brand, Package Your Process™, and streamline your systems so you can land quality clients, boost profit, and make time for big dreams in your business and beyond. If you're ready for less confusion and more magic, it's time to Establish Yourself.

I was having lunch at cava the other day with one of my friends in the online business world. And we were talking shop a little bit and the conversation turned to branding. And I remember this friend of mine was sharing that she was really considering doubling down on only serving artists, but she felt nervous to make her audience so much smaller than it currently is.

It's currently all service providers. So we had this conversation. I said, you know, You don't have to go all in on that all at once. You could simply create an offer or a program specifically for artists and see how that goes. The look of relief on her face. When I said you don't have to rebrand to try a niche or try a pivot. It was remarkable.

Like I saw her body just literally relax and she looked at me and she's like, thank you for saying that. It's really good to know I can do that. And it occurred to me that maybe other people don't know this. And this is something that I've helped people do. I have an experience I call Package Your Process. And that's where I work with coaches and consultants to not only rebrand a business, but maybe you want to try an offer.

I want to share with you five principles of how you might try out a niche at low risk without having to rebrand with the idea of getting some information and maybe even getting some revenue out of it.

Let's get into how do we do that today- how can we let you try niching and get results and build some confidence without having to risk knowing where your brand identity is going.

The first piece of this is the idea that it's an experiment. Think of yourself as a scientist, you can experiment within your broader business. You can come up with a specific offer. It's like putting your toe in the water instead of diving headfirst into the deep end.

I worked with a client named Cathy - a leadership coach and executive coach. And she and I did Package Your Process™ with the Expert together- a VIP day with me plus my system for package your process. So she and I worked together when she had no brand, she didn't really even have a logo. And not having her business perfectly branded felt like a huge hold back for her.

She offers now what we call an executive roadmap- helping people get promoted to their next role and figure out whether it is time to stay or go. What we were able to do just by making the decision of we're not going to brand the business overall, we're just going to get an offer together.

I even threw together a quick business logo in Canva during this experience so she'd look the part. But putting together that one page website and that clear executive roadmap offer, that's a game changer. That's something that she can use literally the next day to start figuring out if this is a problem, she wants to solve .

What I want to encourage you to do is to start thinking about what does that thing you've really wanted to try that maybe the feeling of needing a whole new website or the perfect message or the perfect logo has been holding you back. Could you get around that by branding an offer instead? Coming up with a name for an offer, putting out either a one-page website or even just a one-page PDF.

This is what I help people create. This is what I include as Canva templates in my Package Your Process with the Expert™ experience. So you can create a one page PDF that explains a simple offer that solves a clear problem for your ideal client or maybe a subset of your ideal client.

Okay, so you're going to brand your offer instead of the business. What's the other piece you need to understand? Clarity attracts clients.

When you try to speak to everybody, nobody hears you. But when you get clear and specific, the right people know your offer is for them. Could you get way better results if you were being way more specific? So, you know, when you say I coach executives at every level. Versus somebody that's like, Hey, I'm going to help you get promoted to your executive role and figure out whether you should stay or go in your current one. That is way more specific and is going to speak more directly to that person. You know, for years, I've been writing brand voice guides.

I've written over a hundred of them. And I can tell you that I can come up with just about any message that will make you having a very different business, a business that serves lots of different audiences with lots of different services. I can make that sound good. But if nobody connects with it, what's the point. People might understand the words on the page and say, that sounds good, but if they don't go that's me. That's where we lose people. And the best way to get people to say that's me is to be clear.

And when you brand an offer, you have more permission, freedom, and flexibility to put more specific messaging around that offer service or program.

The third piece of this idea of creating a niche offer is I want you to get paid to experiment. I want you to get paid to figure it out. You and I don't know if whatever you're going to put out there is going to get you clients or it's going to make you money. I certainly have experience.

I've seen certain things work. I have a creative mind, you know, all that good stuff. But you and I aren't going to know how this is going to work until you put it out into the world. When you brand just an offer you have the potential to get paid to experiment. I ran a read along of establish yourself my book that this podcast is based on.

And I put it out in the world. It was $19 and it came with a copy of the book. I didn't know if five people or 10 people or 15 people were going to sign up for this, it was going to make any sense, but I put it out there. And we had 83 people sign up and I made over a thousand dollars. Which I was like, dang, that was great. It led to $18,000 in client work on top of that. Amazing. I got paid to figure out whether it made sense for me to do a read along. Now easily could have put it out there and made no money and been like, well, there's no audience for this.

It gave me something to offer in the summer. And it led to me nearly selling out my group version of Package Your Process, which was offered in October. So that's what I mean by get paid to figure it out. It's so much more potentially profitable for you to stand up an offer

you're curious about for an audience you want to try a skill set or a solution you want to try or both because if you're at all right. You know, now we always worry about what if we're wrong? What if you're right? You're going to get paid to have run that experiment. Okay. Even if it's something you decide, you know, Hey, I was curious about this. I didn't love it

so you're glad you didn't go to that huge extent of rebranding. Right? So that's what I mean by get paid to experiment. So I want you to think about, even if it's something small and inexpensive, how could you use a niche offer to get paid, to see if this is a direction you want to go?

One of the other reasons I love the idea of niching, the offer and testing out niching with an offer is that you get to minimize the risk, but maximize the data.

Experimenting with an offer is a much smaller commitment than having to rebrand everything. It is faster. It's cheaper. It gets you data that you can actually trust because it's about your business and the people you already know. The thing that I found is that trying things and having this permission to kind of put out a program, put out an offer, it could even be a one-to-one VIP day, by doing it

you learn how to change that messaging time over time. So, figuring out what's resonating and what's not, and what your clients like and what they don't. You're getting paid to figure that out. You're getting information that's going to make the next thing you do that much better.

Gosh, for years I've had coaches and consultants come to me and say, well, I'm stuck because I don't have the perfect message or I don't have the perfect website.

And, you know, we go through and we create those things. But at the end of the day, they still didn't have something for sale that they believed in, that they were confident about. And I'm really passionate about helping you get a practical win, taking practical action, because in the world of branding and marketing, you can spend hundreds thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars and never feel like you've crossed everything off.

Never feel like you've done enough. And there is a time and a place to brand your business. I certainly still offer those services. I do done for you branding. The time to brand or rebrand and to invest in a professional to do that is when you are clear on what you do, you have an offer that is working for you and it is compelling and it's the audience you want to get and you want to increase your rates, get more of your favorite clients, and put out with clarity and confidence, what you are all about. By all means.

Come talk to me. I can help you with the brand story solution to help you come up with your clear marketing message, your consistent visual brand and that compelling website. However, if that didn't resonate with you, if you're at a place where you're like, I'd like to be there, but I still need to experiment.

I'm still not sure about exactly the audience I want to serve or what I want to offer them. Or what problems I want to solve. That is the time to package your process. That is the time to brand an offer and not risk all the work and all the spinning of wheels that happens when you rebrand a business, because if you rebrand your business, but aren't clear on what you're offering, that's potentially an enormous waste of time, money and resources.

Niching your offer instead of your business brand first is hugely flexible, hugely nimble and so valuable. Everyone already has a niche, but it's just a question of how specific you want to be. You don't have to decide everything up front. I wish someone had told me that because I resisted niching for so long because I thought, well, I have all this value to offer others, but I will tell you that I 3'xed and quadrupled my revenue and at least tripled my profit and my marketing became dramatically simpler and easier when I went from serving all small business owners down to service business owners. Now to coaches, consultants, and service providers. It's not even crazy specific. It's not just leadership coaches, for example. You get to pick where this is, and I'll tell you that I only got to the niche that I'm currently in through experimentation and through learning who have been my favorite clients, who have been the easiest to work with, who need me the most.

So that's what I want to share with you today is if it's been on your mind at all, or it's been weighing on you that you feel like you're stuck on how to test out specificity and all of its potential value, then I want to encourage you.

Let's try branding an offer. I want you to get clear about a specific offer that solves a specific problem. I want you to get paid to experiment. I want you to have low risk. And maximize the information. So that you know what to do next, so you don't stay stuck and you take that all important messy action.

I know niching can feel really overwhelming, and that's why I created package your process with the expert.

This is a VIP experience where we brand your next offer together. You get clear on what you're offering, who it's for and how to sell it confidently without the stress of a full rebrand. So when we work together, I as a concierge will help you create this niche offer wherever you want to go. Whatever you want to test, we're going to come up with something you can go sell tomorrow. And you're going to get access to the entire package your process system. That's having me on demand and short videos and all my Canva templates and all my marketing templates that work like Madlibs. So we work together to get that first experiment up and running and then guess what? You get the repeatable step-by-step system to brand and sell all of your offers with confidence going forward.

If this sounds like it could be useful, I do offer free consultations. So if you want to hop on my calendar, there's a link here in the show notes, or you can just head to greatest story, creative.com and click the big red button in the top

right corner for free consult, and my calendar's right there. I'd be happy to talk with you and help you figure out is it time to try an offer. I just want you to know when it feels like you can't do anything without risking and going all in on a rebrand.

There is the secret answer c. You can try a niche, start by branding your offer. I'm here for you if you need help. And until then I'm wishing you all the opportunities to get paid to figure it out.  

  Hey, do you like surprises? Here comes the show's credits, but just like a Marvel movie, stay to the end so you don't miss something fun I put in just for you. Thanks for tuning in to the Establish Yourself® podcast. I'm Annie Franceschi and I want to hear from you. Follow me on LinkedIn. Share your favorite takeaway from today's episode as a comment on my latest post.

Mention your favorite Muppet in your message so I know you're a fan of the show. And for expert branding help, a free consultation and more resources, visit greateststorycreative. com / slash podcast. Now here it is your moment of magic.  

   So when I was in college, I took this class that was all about genetics and literature. And we had an upcoming paper and we had to read this like super dry 400 page novel that I had absolutely no interest in reading. So I went to the professor and I said, Hey, have you seen the movie, Lilo and stitch? It's a Disney movie.

If you haven't seen it, stitch is a genetically engineered character. He's an alien, but he's been experimented on and created by a scientist.

I said, this is a movie that's all about genetics and literature . Can I write the paper on Lilo and stitch instead of this book?

And he said, well, I haven't seen the movie, but sure. And that is how I talked my professor into letting me write a paper on Lilo and stitch instead of a 400 page novel. So I share that with you to say for tops, there's always a secret answer c, another way of doing something you hadn't considered or just something that feels a little bit easier for you to pull off.