You did the thing every marketer has been telling you to do: stop trying to talk to everyone and choose an audience. So you clarified who you serve by putting a qualifier in front of your audience or separating your audience into categories. “Women business owners.” “Families, business owners, and individuals.” “Moms.” You chose a more specific audience, shaped your offer around them, and expected your marketing to finally start bringing in the right people.

But you’re still getting inquiries from people who technically fit the niche and still aren’t the right fit. They need the thing you sell. They may even say the right things on the inquiry form. And once you’re actually talking to them, you realize they aren’t as right a fit as you thought.

Wrong-fit clients rarely come with a blinking sign that says “Here I am!” They’re close enough. They seem to get you, say the right things, and their inquiry hits your inbox in a slow month. You notice the hesitation but justify it as just nerves. You say yes because that week, the income matters more than their red flags. You don’t realize they were the wrong fit until you’re three sessions in and the work feels like dragging a boulder uphill.

The problem is that niching only gave you a category. It never told you how to talk to them so they’d listen.

That distinction matters because “right-fit” clients respect the process. They trust you, and they’re far more likely to refer people who value your work the same way. That changes your entire business experience. 

So if you niched down and still aren’t getting the right-fit people you expected, the answer isn’t to keep slicing your audience thinner and thinner until it sounds so specific you’re talking to .0001% of the population.

It’s to fix the message foundation underneath it, so you know how to talk to your audience in a way that actually gets their attention. Because you can’t talk to a startup CEO the same way you talk to a 7-figure one.

In this post, we’ll look at why niching alone often falls short, why talking broadly to a category of people is not the same as talking to a single person, and what your message needs to do if you want the right people to pay attention and think, “That’s me.”

Strategy 1: Stop talking AT your audience

If you’re thinking, great, so you’re telling me niching is useless?! No, niching is not useless. It can really be helpful in giving your business direction. And choosing a more specific audience can absolutely strengthen your messaging.

But talking at a group of people isn’t the same as talking to them.

When someone tells you to niche down, the promise is usually that once you get more specific about your audience, your marketing will become effortless. And sometimes it does. But often it becomes more specific in theory only.

In practice, you still have the same problem with more words.

You go from saying, “I help business owners,” to saying, “I help women business owners,” to “I help established women business owners,” to “I help 7-figure female service providers.”

Each iteration gets more specific, which is great.

But as specific as “7-figure female service providers” is, you still have to figure out what to say using her own language in a way that makes her feel you understand exactly what she is dealing with in that moment.

This opens up an even bigger can of worms because we often choose a niche based on an aspirational caricature of who we want to serve. Not one based on who we’re equipped to serve. Keeping your niche broad allows you to avoid admitting you don’t know how to speak your audience’s language.

Broad messaging leaves you talking to the start-up founder and the 7-figure CEO the same way without realizing it. Then wondering why neither woman is paying attention. 

A startup business owner may be trying to get her first few clients and wondering whether anyone will ever pay her for this work. She doesn’t have the same level of confidence as someone who has provided her service to a few dozen people and has more testimonials and Google reviews than she knows what to do with. And trying to hype her up on #bossgirl hopium only keeps her stuck avoiding the work she needs to do to land her first client. 

A 7-figure business owner who’s booked out with a 3-month waiting list doing 1:1 work is exhausted because she’s hit a productivity ceiling and wants to help more people but can’t do that one client at a time. She loves the 1:1 work, but she’s concerned that moving to a group model won’t give her the same satisfaction.

These two women are nowhere near experiencing the same problems.

And what ends up happening is you’ll attract the startup that desperately wants to be the 7-figure business owner but isn’t ready yet. And you lose the 7-figure business owner because she thinks your offer isn’t advanced enough for where her business is.

This is why you can have a niche and still have content that gets a polite nod instead of a real response. The reader may think, “Yeah, that makes sense,” but doesn’t feel that little twinge of “Wait. That is exactly what is happening.”  That twinge is often the difference between someone clicking your booking button and moving on.

Your niche only solves half your problem.

It cannot give you the words your right-fit client is already using in her head or show you which part of the problem feels most frustrating to her right now. It cannot tell you what she has already tried, what she is tired of hearing, what she secretly worries is true, or what would make her trust you enough to keep reading.

That is message foundation work. It’s knowing she doesn’t want “clarity”—she wants to stop feeling like a fraud every time she opens her mouth on a sales call. Same surface problem, said with actual clarity.

The work the DIBS Method is designed to do. It gets beneath the surface-level category, so the words you can speak directly to the person you want to reach. It does not make the words you already use sound fancier.

Because your right-fit client responds when she feels you recognize her problem and know how to solve it.

Your niche says “I help established service providers,” and your messaging says “You niched down and you’re still attracting clients who drain your energy. Here’s why.” 

A label without recognition can only get you so far. 

Strategy 2: Start talking TO a specific person

Even after you get specific about who, you can still talk at them as if you’re addressing a conference room rather than one person across a table.

It sounds like this: “Many service providers struggle to…” “A lot of you are dealing with…” “We all know how hard it is to…” Technically, you’re talking to your niche. But “many,” “a lot of you,” and “we all” are crowd words. The reader hears them and understands, somewhere under conscious thought, that you’re talking to a group she happens to be standing in—not to her directly.

I grew up one of eight kids (actually, the number is closer to 15, depending on which of my parents you talk to, but that’s a story for a different day). 

My mom would forget which of us she was talking to, so she’d try out one name, then another, and finally give up and say, “Hey, you!” Even though I knew she meant Sara, but said Janis, the name was almost irrelevant because she was looking directly at me.

But your prospective client is one of hundreds skimming your content and making a fast, mostly unconscious decision: does this apply to me specifically?  

You can’t make eye contact with a website or Instagram Reel. She can’t tell you’re looking at her. Your words are the only eye contact you’ve got. Specific enough, and she feels you looking right at her. Vague, and she’s just one more face in a crowd you’re shouting at.

It’s like when someone calls your name in a crowd, and you don’t know if they’re calling you, but your name is Jennifer, so you turn around. Along with the other 15 Jennifers in the room. Once everyone realizes which Jennifer they’re talking to, everyone goes back to what they were doing.  

If she doesn’t feel your message fills a specific knowledge gap, solves her exact problem, or helps her achieve a certain goal she wants to reach, she moves on. 

The key is to speak to the broader group through one particular member of it.

Here’s the standard advice to overcome this obstacle: give your ICP a name. Something fun and memorable, like [desired outcome] + [name starting with the same letter].  Then talk about her surface-level pain points. Her frustration, her disappointment, her embarrassment. I agree you should give your ICP a name and understand her pain points, but it still only addresses the problem with a surface-level solution.

Just because you’ve given her a name and identified her general pain points doesn’t mean you’ve solved your problem of how to speak to her specific flavor of the problem. You haven’t answered which direction her frustration is coming from. Is it because she disagrees with the common advice in her industry and lacks the confidence to say it in an Instagram post for the whole world to critique, or because she knows she’s frustrated but can’t quite say why and needs help pulling it out of her brain? 

You have to pick the one person you do your best work with and write as if she’s the only one reading. Not everyone in the niche. Her.

The DIBS Method digs deeper than asking “who’s your audience.” It asks: what does your ideal client need to hear that she hasn’t already heard from everyone else? Because she has heard it before.

When it comes to marketing, there’s nothing new under the sun. Everything has already been said, and between AI and social media algorithms, we get force-fed the same message over and over to the point that every message sounds the same. The only way to differentiate between you and the other 50 people saying similar things on the surface is context, beliefs, and values.

She can see the same message saying “I help women business owners get clarity,” but what makes you stand out is your individual set of circumstances that got you to where you are, that she can find commonality in. A shared belief system that she knew she wasn’t the only one who believed what she believed in the same way. And a set of values that mirrors her own.

This is what the marketing industry tells you, but then they teach you something completely different. 

They teach you to market by casting a wide net. Get in front of as many people as possible, capture them, nurture them, convert them. It’s a numbers game, they say.

But casting a wide net with a 1:1 service gives you two outcomes, and both of them suck for 1:1 service provider marketing.

Either your net is so wide that you feel like you’re talking to a brick wall, and shooting at a target blindfolded. Or you attract the wrong someone who has self-selected that you must be talking about her because she has convinced herself she’s the right fit, the same way Cinderella’s stepsister convinced herself the shoe would fit. (In the Hans Christian Andersen version, she cut off her toes to make it fit.) Vague copy is a shoe the wrong person will mutilate herself to fit into.

Vague marketing doesn’t just fail to filter the wrong person out. It actively recruits her. When your message is broad enough, she fills in the gaps in her own favor. She reads ‘established service providers’ and thinks ‘I’m basically established.’ She reads the problem and supplies the version of herself that qualifies. The looseness in your copy is the exact room she uses to talk herself into being a fit.

You haven’t defined “established” for her. Does it mean she’s got X number of regular paying clients? Or does it mean she’s been in business for X years? The unfortunate thing is you can “be in business” for 3 years and still be flying by the seat of your pants. 

That’s the close-enough client from the top of this post. She didn’t sneak in. Your message said, “Here, let me hold the door for you.”

You need specificity to be your bouncer. Not because it slams the door on the wrong person—because it removes the gaps she’d need to convince herself. She can’t talk herself into a problem that’s described in detail that she doesn’t actually have.

And the same specificity that locks the wrong person out is what makes the right person exhale. She doesn’t have to wonder whether you get it. She can feel it in how exactly you named the thing she’s been living.

Strategy 3: The goal is recognition, not just accuracy

Getting your ideal client to think, “That’s me,” is necessary, but it’s only the first step. She can feel completely seen by your content and turn around and hire someone else who sounds more sure of themselves and makes her feel seen. Recognition of her problem gets her attention. But unless you can get her to recognize that you share a take on that problem, she won’t trust you enough to work with you.

Going deeper than saying “this is my POV” means not only do you need to know your specific point of view, but you also need to understand and be able to articulate why you believe what you believe.

This isn’t me saying you should just have opinions. Having an opinion is easy. Standing ten toes down behind those opinions is having a POV.

And it’s not just limited to industry-wide beliefs. You inherited rules about what you’re allowed to say long before you started a business. If you grew up hearing “do you think money grows on trees?” or “there are starving children who’d be grateful for that plate,” or “if you want it done right, do it yourself.” Unfortunately, those beliefs became the foundation of your adult beliefs. That translated into: You can’t charge that much, don’t waste anything, don’t trust anyone else to do it.

The advice you got reinforced it: be professional, be palatable, appeal to everyone.

You can’t go from gentle muted color palettes to dropping F-bombs overnight. Swing too far in the opposite direction, and your audience starts wondering if you’ve stopped taking your meds. 

You’re told: Be authentic. Have bold opinions. Which, for the record, isn’t the wrong advice, but notice how no one tells you how they define authenticity unless they’re trying to tell you their course on authentic marketing? 

Every one of them—the be-professional crowd, the be-authentic crowd—is selling you their framework. 

A framework that works partly because of things they never put on the sales page: the size of the audience they already had, the network of business owners already in their phone, the city full of potential clients outside their door. You don’t get told to check whether you have any of that. You just get the method, and when it doesn’t land the same way, you assume you’re the problem. 

Authenticity isn’t a style you adopt. It’s what’s left when you stop performing the version of yourself everyone else approved of. That’s not a course you can buy. You need to excavate it. 

I know this all too well. I grew up hearing “You’re such a weirdo,” or some variation, which I internalized as “Nobody likes you the way you are.” As I got older and started meeting people who liked my brand of weird, I began to question whether the problem was me or whether I made other people uncomfortable because I didn’t fit their interpretation of me.

Now I use it as my yardstick to say: if you don’t like my particular flavor of weird, that’s cool. But I do. So take it or leave it. Those are your options.

Don’t get me wrong, holding that line isn’t always easy. I still need to run it through my internal filter—daily, sometimes hourly. When someone has an issue with my particular flavor of weird, whether they verbalize it or not, I think: Is their opinion actually relevant to me? Am I saying “I don’t care” because I don’t, or because I’m protecting a childhood wound that’s about to be opened up? And if I genuinely don’t care—why not? What do I actually believe that is in opposition to theirs?

My beliefs and values are the filter I run my thinking through, and the clearer they are, the faster the filter works. So when I say if my weird isn’t for you, take it or leave it. I can confidently stand behind that statement because I already ran the math.

Stop asking for permission about what authenticity should look like or what beliefs and values you get to have versus which of your beliefs you absorbed from your friends, family, mentors, and the loud voices in your niche. Decide for yourself which ones you agree with and why. More importantly, does it hold when you push back? If you pass all those checks, say it out loud and notice how your body responds because any hint of discomfort means you need to go back and figure out where you’re not being fully honest.

You’ll know it’s authentic when you say the thing knowing someone will disagree—and someone always will—and you say it anyway. Say the thing you believe to be true, and the right person will hear it in her own thinking. 

The DIBS Method will help you dig into who your ICP is at her core and what you actually think, so she recognizes herself in your message and recognizes that you see the problem the way she does. That’s what makes her trust you. 

You can’t have one without the other.

“So does this mean I have to start over?”

That’s a perfectly logical question. But no. Niching down wasn’t the wrong move, and your past work wasn’t wasted. 

And I’m sure the skeptic in you is still thinking, Sara, this sounds an awful lot like you telling me I need to start over. I can’t afford to start over. 

Breathe.

I’m not going to tell you to rebuild the house. But you do need to raise it and build the missing foundation underneath. That’s it. Just one layer. Because right now there’s a gap between your real voice and your marketing voice. Your real voice is the one you use with people who know you best. Your marketing voice is the one trying to convince a stranger you’re the one for the job. Building your foundation bridges that gap.

Think of it like this: your niche gets her to the right neighborhood. The foundational work in DIBS is what helps you get her to the right front door when every house on the cul-de-sac looks identical.

You don’t have to burn it all down. That’s actually a terrible idea and doesn’t solve your problem. 

All jokes aside, the thing you need to understand is that the reason these other offers felt like a waste of time, energy, and money is that every one of them assumes you’ve already built your foundation correctly. If you’ve been operating under their false assumption, it’s not your fault. You don’t know what you don’t know.  

Here’s your litmus test: Describe your favorite client to a friend. Then compare that to how she’s described on your website. Notice the gap between how you talk about her out loud and in writing. If the friend version gives her a pulse, and the website version gives her a job title, that’s your foundation gap.

Niching was the start. Recognition is what makes it work.

Your niche gives your marketing direction and a better sense of what industries or groups of people you want to work with. 

It was never going to be able to do the work of recognition.

That is the missing layer.

The right person understands the value of what you do. Because she recognizes a piece of herself in your content and shows up to the discovery call already trusting you and making sure you’re a good fit.

Which means you spend less time selling and more time deciding whether the fit is real.

Recognition creates less room for the people who technically fit the niche but drain your energy.

Right-fit clients are not just easier to sell to. They refer people who are more likely to value the work you do, the same way.

Niching down was always meant to be a starting point, not the full message.

Find the missing layer in your message

You don’t need another marketing person to hand you a new shiny object to distract you and call it strategy. You need to start speaking your right-fit client’s language, and applying for DIBS is the next step.

Why an application? 

Because DIBS isn’t a worksheet or a self-guided course — it’s a 1:1 intensive, and the application is how I figure out whether messaging is actually what’s in your way, or whether something else needs to come first. If it’s the latter, I’ll let you know.

The work itself feels less like a fill-in-the-blank formula and more like someone sitting across from you asking questions like “Is that what you really meant to say?” until the answer has a pulse. 

Sometimes that’s a relief. 

Sometimes it’s annoying. 

Sometimes you’ll say something offhand, and I’ll stop you — because that throwaway sentence is the whole damn point, and we’re not burying it under “I help service providers get clarity.” That’s where good ideas go to die.

You already know how to sound polished. That’s part of the problem. I’m not going to hand you more of the same.

So if your niche is technically right but your inquiries are still left-of-center, apply. 

We’ll find the person inside the category and the voice underneath the performance.

APPLY FOR DIBS