How to Choose a Profitable Agency Niche Market for ANY Digital Agency
“Choose a niche” is maybe the most common business advice that is most often ignored. We all understand it’s importance to some degree, yet there’s some part of the brain that resists it.
We don’t want to exclude certain demographics, turn away business, or be wrong in our assumptions…
But the opportunity cost of NOT choosing a niche is very real. It makes it exponentially more difficult to scale an agency to any meaningful size. Different market segments need different sales, marketing, fulfillment, and customer service strategies to effectively serve. If your agency serves everyone you will constantly have to reinvent the wheel every time you close a new client.
While it may not be satisfying to sit down a few hours to brainstorm concepts and get inside the mind of potential clients, I can assure you it’s actually much more productive than smashing through your Gmail inbox.
And putting in the hard work now will make growing your agency WAY easier, here’s why.
Make a Well Crafted Offer to a Specific Niche Using Killer Messaging
A great digital agency can be boiled down to the above. If you can choose a great niche, craft an offer that serves those needs better & more specifically than other options, & write killer messaging to communicate that offer to them… you will win.
Niching down allows you to craft your messaging to a more specific target audience, which is always more effective than generalized messaging. Craft a niche marketing strategy!
How to Pick a Niche For Your Digital Agency
It’s just as important not to be too specific as it is to not be too broad. How niche is too niche? Let’s go through some niche market examples.
Kenji ROI’s niche is brands that sell on Amazon, but choosing to serve all ecommerce brands would require us to make our messaging much less targeted.
Amazon sellers have very specific pains, fears, & desires. They’re all petrified of getting their Amazon account suspended, obsessed with keyword ranking, & often no nothing about Facebook ads.
Shopify ecommerce sellers share none of those traits, so all my emails, ads, and sales pages wouldn’t be effective on that demographic.
On the flip side if we went even MORE niche to “brands selling health supplements on Amazon” we would very quickly start to cannibalize our own clients.
The market segment is too small so we have a smaller pool of potential clients, and it would quickly become a conflict of interest once we’ve created Amazon listings for many client brands that are competing against each other.
Don’t forget that niche market ideas can be based around a need and doesn’t need to be related to typical demographics. Try to brainstorm unique expertise you can bring to your service that other’s cannot.
- Provide copywriting services? Be a copywriter for Amazon listings.
- Run Facebook Ads? Run Facebook Ads for chiropractors.
- Provide SEO services? Do SEO for local businesses between $1 & $3 million per year revenue
A good rule of thumb is you should be able to find at least 2 other agencies that serve this niche with your service. This is proof that this niche is willing to pay for this service, and is much safer than trying to come up with something totally unique.
Choosing a Niche Makes Marketing More Effective
Unless you’re Coca Cola, you probably won’t have a massive marketing budget to spend on ads that have no measurable return. As a small business owner, running super tight advertising campaigns is a must if you want to stay in business.
I can guarantee that running Facebook ads to everyone will get you results you will cry to your mom about, so choosing a viable niche gives you clearly definable audiences to run ads to.
My agency Kenji ROI serves Amazon sellers, so we partner with podcasts, YouTube channels, and blogs that Amazon sellers consume.
Sometimes we sponsor conferences for Amazon sellers because anyone who would attend is likely to be a potential client.
In our emails, ads, and on our sales pages we write about the specific pains, problems, and solutions Amazon sellers desire. Getting them on an emotional level to the real underlying buying triggers makes it much easier to convert clients.
So ask yourself, “am I able to target my niche accurately with ads, and is it possible to write very specific messaging touching on their pains, desires, and dreams?” If the answer is no then you’re not niched down enough.
Niche Agencies Have Smoother Operations
If your agency serves any kind of client, it becomes very hard to standardize what you produce. While it may be simple enough for you as a 1 person freelance operation, customizing every single order for different types of clients makes creating standard procedures very hard.
Having “productized offers” makes it much easier to grow an agency because the more you control the process, the more reliably your team can produce consistently good results.
Creating SOP’s (standard operating procedures) and using them to train new team members or contractors is a great way grow operations without compromising quality.
But if you aren’t niche, there will be too many areas that need customization. Different niches have slightly different needs, wants, levels of knowledge and you will find yourself struggling to create much in the way of repeatable processes.
Or if you do, you will have to create 3, 4, or 5 versions to account for the different niches you serve. Why bother when you can just focus on one and make it really good?
A productized offer for a specific type of client allows you to scale operations and get really good at it at that one thing, giving you time to improve your offer rather than creating variations of that offer for different niches.
How to Create Effective Messaging For Your Niche Market
We achieve this by spending a LOT of time filling out worksheets to identify pains, desires, emotions, wants, needs, dislikes, objections, etc of your ideal client.
All students in the $20k Freedom Agency course spend at least 10 hours on worksheets like this in the first week because it’s literally the foundation the entire agency is built on.
Good news is much of that work can be used in sales pages, email sequences, sales call scripts, blog posts, etc. Think of it as your messaging database that will give you a head start for any marketing material you release for the life of the business.
But don’t just do it once and let it sit, continue to iterate & improve based on calls you have with clients and market feedback. What worked really well on a sales call? What fell flat? What email subject lines got amazing open rates?
The more you can hone this in the more effectively you will be able to market, sell, and serve to your dream clients.
Have more questions about niche selection or finding your niche best for your service based agency? Post on our Facebook Group Freedom Actualizers
