My fellow marketers,
We're onto Week 11 of the weekly marketing roundup email.
A series where I share posts from our Marketers Utopia directly to your inbox so you can execute on the value inside.
This weeks content:
How to choose a niche for your agency
Wealth Wednesday Live Call
Weekly Roundup
How to choose a niche for your agency
Does this pattern look familiar?
You’ve been told that niching is the way forward, you decide that there’s a market that you can help, and a service that you’re good at.
Then out of the blue, someone asks you “What do you do?” and your answer is a vomit of every client you’ve ever worked with, and every skill you’ve ever used.
Your carefully prepared pitch of “I do X for Y” goes out of the window.
This isn’t good, but it IS normal.
The fear of losing out on business, any business, is real when cash is short, payroll is coming round and so your sales pipeline is as thin as a drinking straw.
The fear of putting off the person in front of you makes you throw your net as wide as possible again, and before you know it you have another client where you need to learn new processes and get to understand their industry.
But how long has that been true?
If your agency has been struggling for more than a few months, it’s time to grit your teeth and stick to one target for a while.
This article is here to give you a bit of confidence that you’ve made the right choice.
What is niching?
Niching is the process of picking a single market, and a product or service that they need.
It’s the opposite of being a “one-stop-shop”, of doing “everything for everybody” which will leave you broke and exhausted.
Why do it?
Clients want people with experience in their business.
They want someone to roll out a well-practiced playbook.
Once you can do that, niching is nothing more than a maths game.
If you say you’re a specialist in Facebook ads for dentists, you’ll close more dentists than if you do Facebook ads for “Service Businesses”.
You’ll definitely close more than just saying you’re a “Digital Marketing Agency”.
Why doesn’t everyone do it then?
Not everyone is good at lead generation, even marketing agencies.
Niching really works when you know where to find an endless supply of prospects for your business and you don’t get distracted by some random prospect that your mum met at a coffee morning.
Once you know where to find your prospects, there’s no need to go grabbing at every lead that comes your way.
The effect of niching on your business
I already said that prospects want assurance that you can do the job for them. They want a playbook, and they want proof.
There’s no better proof than testimonials and case studies.
Get one case study of one service in one market and your chances of getting a second one go way up.
Get a second one and they go up even higher.
A third, and you’re now undeniably a specialist. Your prospects would be crazy to be talking to anyone else.
At the same time, you’re refining your process. Things you missed the first time you get a second chance at. You make fewer mistakes which mean happier customers AND more profits.
You can document your process for more junior staff to work on while the senior team works out what the prospects on the next level need from you.
You’re on an unstoppable flywheel of referrals and closing new business.
That’s why you need to stick this out until you have at least 2 clients in the same market, that you’ve offered the same thing for.
What a good niche looks like - The market niche
Obviously, you want to pick a lucrative niche to work in so here are a few pointers:
1. People are already spending money in that market.
Look for competitors.
Competitors are good. They’ve done the work of proving there’s money, and all you have to do is find out what they’re doing badly.
Not everyone that has money will spend it.
I’ve done work with law firms who will roll up in £50,000 cars and think that £ 1,000-month ad budgets are “extortionate”.
2. They talk to each other.
If the bar at a conference is busier than the talks, that’s a great sign.
If there are active forums, plenty of blogs, and social accounts, that’s a good sign.
Must businesses are far less competitive than you think. Staff moves around and they don’t want to burn their bridges. Word gets around about good suppliers and bad ones.
3. The prospects are easy to find.
The ultra-rich and A-list celebrities might be dream clients, but they’re near impossible to get near. Likewise, you’re not going to find “heart-centered entrepreneurs” in Facebook’s targeting options.
Look for markets that are easy to spot and get access to.
This is why so many lead-gen agencies target businesses that you can find directories of, or that throw up thousands of results on LinkedIn.
As you get more experience and good case studies, doors to the A-list will start to open up.
4. They need your service.
This sounds obvious but a lot of people get it wrong.
Make sure your service is effective for that market.
I’ve seen people obsessing about SEO and PPC for luxury brands, but they rarely work well compared to a solid influencer strategy. TikTok hasn’t really taken off for B2B brands, but LinkedIn is still powerful for them.
Talk to prospects, see what’s working, and repeat it.
5. There’s lots of them
Again an easy one to miss. If you’re going to work in a really tiny market, you’d better be able to close every deal that comes along, and it had better be worth a lot.
I sold my first agency to another business that said there were probably only 10 deals a year in their market. But they were worth over £10 million each, and they’d get at least half of them.
What a good prospect looks like: Niching your service
OK, so you know the market you want to get into, and I’m hoping you have at least one skill to offer them that you’re competent at.
But you still need to stick to your guns when it comes to how you talk about yourself.
The more you say you do, the less believable you are.
Even if you can do media buying, email, SEO, and social, pick the one your clients are going to need first and talk about that. You can grow with other services later if they’re not a distraction to your main business.
If you’re not sure what you should be offering, ask yourself this “perfect prospect” question:
“If I only got paid when I get my client a result, what would they need in place for it to be a no-brainer to work with them?”
Let’s look at Facebook ads for an example.
I can’t remember the number of times I’ve wanted to work with a client, only to discover that we needed to:
Fix their website
Set up analytics
Get more photography done
Start collecting reviews
…and so on.
None of this generates revenues for a client, but it gets in the way if it isn’t there.
Look out for clients who have the foundations in place, or are prepared to pay good money to get it done, fast.
This exercise also does another thing.
This exercise focuses you on the activity that’s going to get the actual result.
Sometimes that’s not what the client actually thinks they need. Like pretty logos or another website redesign when what matters is their copy is weak.
If you zoom in on the activities that actually make a difference and the clients who have the foundations for you to do just that activity, you can’t go far wrong.
The final cut: Values
I have one more criterion that only came to me through hard experience.
After I sold my first business I realized that there were very few clients with who I stayed in touch. I’d not taken a very big network of people along with me for the next ride.
After some work with a coach, I recognized that I’m more into experiences and learning than owning “stuff”.
But our sales team had been the opposite. Most of our clients had been in fashion, interiors, and gifts. All “stuff”.
They were great people, but we just had little in common that really got us fired up.
The few that I had stayed in touch with were all to do with sports and learning new skills - experiences.
So, for my next venture, I just targeted people with similar interests, and we get on great, I’ve gone abroad and stayed in my client’s family homes, they’ve visited me in London, the whole relationship is more fun.
In fact, if the first venture had been like this, I probably wouldn’t have sold it at all.
So, the final lesson:
If you’re in this for the long haul, don’t just focus on a market with cash. Make sure you vibe with the people you’ll be working with or it’ll be twice the grind it needs to be
My friends! Every Wednesday I host a live call with all Utopians.
In the call they can ask me questions about their business. Our goal is to level up and collectively progress together.
To listen to my last call, click here.
My friend —
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Long Live Utopia!
Much love,
Wiz
