When To Expand Your Niche | 115

I  was on a 1:1 coaching call with a Creative Biz Launch student this week, and towards the end, we started talking about niches. Specifically when to expand your niche into other markets.

When we start our creative business, we need to pick a niche.

Most creatives make the mistake of going too broad too early and then complain they can’t land clients.

When we start out, the goal is to go hyper-specific. I’m going to use myself as an example here.

In 2020, I built a product photography portfolio. But product photography wasn’t my niche. I went deeper. I decided to do CPG (consumer packaged goods) product photography.

But that was still too broad. We went deeper into food and beverage CPG product photography.

Most of my public-facing portfolio consisted of a specific style of photo. Action beverage product photography.

I would take these photos of cold brew brands with coffee beans falling in the background - frozen in time. Photos of water splashing across a bottle of water. Beer pouring out of a can into a pint glass.

My portfolio was hyper-specific because I didn’t have any paying clients yet.

The reason for this hyper-specific portfolio was that I was planning to get my clients from outreach. All my leads would come from outbound efforts, so I catered my portfolio to the types of companies I would reach out to.

Sure, if an inbound lead from a different niche came in, I would work with them. But my outbound process was specific to one type of client.

The reason for this was simple.

I put myself in the client’s shoes and asked myself the question: “If I were going to work with this photographer who reached out to me, what would I want to see in their portfolio?”

I simply wanted to envision my product inside their work.

If I emailed a cold brew brand, and they saw an action photo of the cold brew being poured over ice, that made it easy for the client to envision what kind of work I would do for them. If they saw me cracking open a can of beer with liquid flying everywhere, then again, it made it easy for them to picture what I would photograph for their cold brew.

Now, I should mention something else here… I didn’t have any other client work on my website. I didn’t have testimonials. I didn’t have case studies. So, my trust was low with clients. If I didn’t have that credibility, I had to make up for it somehow.

I made up for it by having a hyper-specific portfolio of the brands I was targeting.

I did this until I had 5-10 clients, and then I expanded.

After working with 5-10 clients, I asked them for reviews, for case studies, and I slapped every client project on my website on a separate page.

With this client work on my site, I had built up trust. Meaning I could expand my portfolio to a wider niche.

So, I incorporated other beverage photography and new food product photography as well.

And I could only do this because I had built up trust in other ways.

Sure, a client may not be able to picture their product in my portfolio 100%, but they did see other brands have great results from working with me, so I still had trust. The wider niche in my portfolio was fine since I built trust in other ways.

I repeated this over and over again, and within 2 years, I had worked with over 50 brands, all through cold outreach.

Start with a hyper-specific niche and expand as you gain credibility.