A Situation Where the Standard Advice Does Not Apply

The Advice Everyone Repeats

If you have ever sat through a marketing workshop, you have heard the line: know your niche, then stay in it. Pick one audience, one message, one channel, and repeat it until it sticks.

For a lot of businesses, that is good advice. But I work mostly with small businesses and independent brands, and for a specific type of client, that advice can quietly work against them.

Where It Breaks Down

The clients I mean are the ones whose business is genuinely two things at once. A caterer who also teaches cooking classes. A designer who sells furniture and also takes on renovation projects. A boutique that sells products but also books out its space for events.

Standard marketing advice tells them to pick a lane. Narrow the message. Make it simple for the algorithm and simple for the customer.

The problem is that these businesses were not built around one lane. They were built around a founder who saw two things that reinforce each other, and the revenue often depends on both. Telling that client to "focus" is really telling them to cut something that works.

What I Do Instead

Rather than narrowing the business, I narrow the audience for each message. This sounds like a small distinction, but it changes almost everything about how the content gets built.

Instead of one feed trying to speak to everyone, I split the content by intent, not by product. Some posts are for people who are ready to buy right now. Others are for people who are just discovering the brand and need to understand what it does before they need anything from it.

A cooking class post does not need to mention catering. A catering post does not need to explain the classes. Both live under the same brand, but they do not have to share a message just because they share a founder.

I also pay attention to which platform is doing which job. A local audience discovering a business for the first time behaves differently than a past client deciding whether to book again. Trying to write one caption that works for both is usually why the caption ends up saying nothing at all.

The Part That Surprises People

The part that surprises most clients is that this approach is not more work. It is less. Trying to force two different offers into one unified message usually means writing generic copy that technically covers both but excites neither.

Splitting the message by audience actually makes each piece easier to write, because you are not trying to hedge. You know exactly who you are talking to and exactly what they need to hear next.

When To Actually Narrow

None of this means "never focus." If a business has two offers that do not reinforce each other, that is a different conversation, and consolidating might be the right call. The test I use is simple: do the two things bring the same kind of client back to the business, even if they arrive through different doors?

If yes, I build around both. If no, one of them usually needs to become a smaller part of the story, or a separate brand entirely.

What I Tell Clients Who Feel Behind

Clients in this position often feel like they are doing something wrong, because every marketing article assumes one clean niche. They are not doing it wrong. They built something a little more layered, and the marketing just has to catch up to that, instead of trying to flatten it into something simpler than it actually is.

The goal is not to make the business sound like everyone else's tidy one-line pitch. It is to make sure each part of the business gets a message that actually speaks to the person who needs it, instead of a compromise that speaks to no one in particular.