Agency Forward

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey, everyone, today I wanted to do a solo cast on some of the different ways that you can niche your business. I think a lot of agency owners get stuck in thinking, I just need to pick a certain vertical. I just need to pick a specific problem. But there are actually a lot of different ways that you can do this, so I want to take some time to highlight all of those ways. In today's episode, no

Unknown Speaker 0:22
one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested, and right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join a dynamic agency dot community,

Unknown Speaker 0:55
and now let's talk niching.

Unknown Speaker 0:58
It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. All

Unknown Speaker 1:16
right, so I wanted to do a semi short episode on just niching. Because I think a lot of the people that I talk to, a lot of the agency owners, they get stuck in this focus of like, I have to cut everything in order to be able to have a niche. And while subtraction will eventually get you there, what we're actually trying to do is just own a piece of mental real estate. And so there's a lot of different ways that we can actually do that. Sometimes we actually add to what you're doing in order to carve out a very specific spot. We combine things, and that's what makes you more memorable. And so wanted to do an episode on on all the different ways that you could actually niche and so that

Unknown Speaker 1:59
you have more ideas, rather than just having to to keep subtracting right narrowing focus is a vehicle, but that the end game is actually owning a word, a space or something that just gives us this real estate within the prospects mind. So bear with me as I have a cold today, but I wanted to get this episode out, so I'm gonna go through a bunch of different ways, probably about 10 different ways that we can niche our agencies. And feel free to dive into any of these.

Unknown Speaker 2:30
First industry, it's the most common, right? You serve a vertical. So we can talk dentists, we can talk SaaS, talk med tech. I think the challenge that a lot of people have here is that they don't get focused enough, right, like SaaS. And I bring that one up deliberately, because I hear people using it all the time, tech and SaaS, that is not narrow enough of an industry that's pretty huge. However, it does have a good focus. Because the way you're going to market for a SaaS company, or the things you would do for a SaaS company would be different than, you know, like a brick and mortar shop. And so there is importance in that differentiation, but we still it's not anywhere near as tight enough as it should be. So within your industry, niching, you actually want to go another step deeper and find a sub industry within that right, like cyber security. SaaS, maybe we work with luxury e commerce. You want to get even more narrow. If you use NAICS, the North American Industry Classification System, you can find the higher end industries and click into those to find all of the different subsets of industries within it. And that could actually help you with finding some more ideas for where your skills would actually best fit a sub industry. And now it's not a huge leap from anyone that you're currently serving, but you can get a lot more specific. What's nice about this? You get this fast credibility, because when you start working within an industry, you have shared lingo, right? You're able to use certain terms, you're able to reference certain things that everyone within that industry is paying attention to so it makes it pretty easy for you to be able to engage with people. Number two, you can look at niching your service. So your service niching requires you to now specialize in one discipline. So we could do SEO, we could do paid media CRO, but

Unknown Speaker 4:18
I would actually recommend we go even deeper and you focus on one tactic within that, so you get to do the strategy. Still you're coming in for that, but you get to be an expert at delivering something very specific, like LinkedIn ads, right? So we're not just a paid media companies like no, we actually focus on doing this on LinkedIn or meta. And so just narrowing that focus, again, gives you that mental real estate more easily, but it's not the only way to do this. But we want that depth of expertise, because that's what signals mastery within our clients, and so we want them to be seeing us that way. All right, next, we can talk problem niching. I love this one because people think in problems when people are looking for.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Right? You can't have a solution unless you have a problem. And so all of the agency websites you see that just say solutions, and then they list all the different services they offer. Those are wrong. You cannot do that. You have to have a problem that you solve. And when you can get really specific on the problem you solve, you start attracting a lot of people who have that problem, right, because they know, hey, this person is speaking to the exact issue that I have. Means you can do all of that within your marketing, you can get very specific. Any conversations that you're having with people get a lot more specific, and you start becoming like the aspirin for their headache, right? Like they want you. They're seeking you out because they need a solution to that problem. And so whether you're the agency that fixes churn, will help you get funded with, like, a pitch ready deck, right things like that, that is where you want to start focusing on the problems

Unknown Speaker 5:51
next. You can focus purely on your audience, or, like, the persona for your niche. You could define it by role. I consider this horizontal niching. Some people would actually put your service as horizontal, but if the industry is a vertical, and I would say the horizontal is all the different people that work within this. And so you could define by a role like, I help CMOS do this, I help founders do this, right? And you start defining by the psychographics

Unknown Speaker 6:19
for that individual. So what challenges do they have? What are the things that they're thinking about? When you can speak directly, right, to how they see themselves, you actually gain an advantage. And so you can take a take a community, and I know this isn't an agency, but take like exit five, right? They work with B to B marketers, and that is their role. So anyone in the B to B marketing space, no matter what industry you're in, that actually works as a niche for them that they were able to anchor to.

Unknown Speaker 6:47
And so that's something else you could use.

Unknown Speaker 6:50
All right. Next, you can use the stage of business. This

Unknown Speaker 6:54
one's nice because it gives you a lot of external triggers that you can use as well. So we're talking if someone is pre launch, if they're early stage scaling, if they're enterprise,

Unknown Speaker 7:04
we're able to look up like you can set Google alerts. You can look up news stories. You can do different things in order to find the companies that just got a funding round right, different things like that that are actually going to put you

Unknown Speaker 7:16
in front of them at the right time, because they're actually moving into a different stage of their

Unknown Speaker 7:23
business. The what's nice about this is that, you know, when you're focusing on the stage of business, you get to learn a lot more about the companies at that stage. And it's, it's still hard. You can't really use this one on its own. And just say, I work with only enterprise businesses, because there, there is so much that differs between enterprise businesses, right? Like Microsoft is going to have different problems than Toyota, right? Both would be considered enterprise businesses, but they're just doing completely different things. So it's not enough on its own, but it is another way that you can layer this in.

Unknown Speaker 7:56
You get to, I would say the advantage here is that you get to meet them right, exactly where they are in their journey. So especially when you're getting, like, early stage funding rounds, like, you know exactly what problems these types of companies are going to face, especially after you've worked with a bunch of them. And so you can actually use your expertise to help show them the path. And you can kind of almost call things out ahead of time, like, well, you're probably going to see this when you go through your next funding round, and then when it happens, they're happens, they're like, Oh, the Oracle, right? They, they just assume you're a magician, but really, it's just, you're an expert in this, because you've seen it so many times. Okay, moving on. You could, you could do channel nicheing.

Unknown Speaker 8:36
There's a potential downside. I mean, there's downside to potential, potentially any of these, but with channel niching, right? We just want to own one distribution medium. And so you're looking at like YouTube, Tiktok, LinkedIn, right? You're picking one platform. It could be email. So it doesn't even necessarily have to be a platform that people build on. It could just be whatever that channel is.

Unknown Speaker 8:56
When you become like synonymous with performance on that channel, then you have found a good niche for yourself. The problem is that sometimes channels will go away. We saw it recently with Tiktok right where there's all this debate within the market of well within the US government, is Tiktok going to stay? Is it going to go? A lot of agencies were feeling very tense during that period, because they could have lost all of their livelihood right all through that one thing. So it a lot with vine was a there were agencies that worked solely on Vine, and then overnight it just disappeared. I think it was Twitter ended up purchasing it, right? And it just went away. And so all those agencies had to find something else to do. So there was a huge danger here,

Unknown Speaker 9:38
where, say you were looking at industries for your niche, there's a chance that the industry is not just going to disappear overnight,

Unknown Speaker 9:46
right there were, there could have been a marketing company for horse drawn carriages, and then when Ford created the automobile, they eventually disappeared. But it wasn't an immediate thing. They had a little more time to figure it out. And.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Generally, what's going to happen with any industry. So you could use channel matching, I would just be be wary of the channel next. You could use geography, right? This is, this is actually one that I've been paying more attention to lately,

Unknown Speaker 10:14
because, well, let's get into it. So you have the city right that you could target could be a region, a country you just you're able to build, like, more local relationships and find better cultural fit with this type of method. What I find very interesting with this is that you get to market differently through these people. And while you can say that with pretty much any of the different opportunities that we've brought up so far, I think with geography, like if you're local enough, you can literally go door to door and just knock and talk to people show up in their offices, ask questions, right? Put a face to whatever's happening the especially as our inboxes get flooded with this AI driven content where it's all you know, the same message people not doing research, but trying to fake us out by saying they know they're super excited with everything we're doing. Like, yeah, it doesn't work, right? But going in and actually talking to someone, taking someone out for coffee, that does work, going knocking on the door, talking to someone, and saying, Hey, here's exactly how I can help you that that will still work moving forward. And when you start looking at some of the ideas of around AI, right? Tech companies want to be at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, so they're exploring all this internally. When you start getting really local with your marketing, you start looking at like mom and pop shops and different things like that. Yes, they have way less budget than maybe some of the bigger tech companies, but they're not touching AI right now, like, not in the same way, right? Because they're, they're focused on their day to day. They're they're just trying to continue doing what's what's currently working. And they're not necessarily looking for, how do I start adding more technology into my current workflow in order to make all this stuff happen? So there's a huge opportunity there, I think, for someone to come in and help local businesses actually start leveling up all of their like, their AI systems, because they generally don't have those AI systems yet. But so you come in and you can do that, if anyone wants to try doing that. I forgot this all modeled out and stuff like, we can, we can talk about how to make that work for you.

Unknown Speaker 12:22
But so geography is another one. It's also talking methodology, so you can niche based off a specific framework you have. This one is hard to do.

Unknown Speaker 12:31
It's great because you it's harder to copy what you're doing if you have like, a certain method, but people need to be bought into that method, and so often this has to get paired with a problem, because if they don't have that problem, then they don't care about the actual framework for what it's going to solve. And so you can do this. You can you can just be someone who focuses on playbooks for like generalized problems. But I think this one becomes way more valuable if you pair it with a very specific problem, and you are selling the framework.

Unknown Speaker 13:01
Next, let's do so, values, values, philosophy, niching, this one is possible, but very hard to do, because it's really hard to find people with similar values, unless you have certain communities that you're targeting, right you have, you have to be very overt with what you're doing.

Unknown Speaker 13:19
A client right now, has done a lot of work with B Corps, and that's awesome. It is a very

Unknown Speaker 13:27
B Corp. They have a very specific path you have to take in order to get, like, certified, where you have to meet, I mean, I don't even know half of them, but there's all these different requirements in order to be considered a B Corp, where you're actually leading your business with values, rather than just looking at profit.

Unknown Speaker 13:45
And so, like, they can target businesses that way and work with them, because they both have aligned vision and aligned mission to be able to help them grow. But if you're looking at other means of values, like, Hey, I like people who value X or Y, it is really hard to find them, and so you got to get really specific with your content or building communities and doing things that would bring them

Unknown Speaker 14:10
in. Then I guess last let's do platforms so you can martech has done a great job of owning agencies by doing this right. You can be a HubSpot agency. You can be a Salesforce agency. You can just build websites on Shopify, Webflow, right all these different platforms, and this is awesome, because they often have databases and directories for all of the different people who work on their platform, and so you can get, you potentially drive a lot of business through that directory. Now there's a couple issues with this one in in some of our research at partner hub, we,

Unknown Speaker 14:47
like coined the term the starving sibling problem, where you often see with these platforms like HubSpot, right as they start getting into 1000s of partners, it was the partners who were there early and are much larger and have their system.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Systems for acquiring new business that take most of the leads from that that platform. And so if you're a new entrant into this market, you're probably not going to get as much business as you might might initially have thought.

Unknown Speaker 15:16
And so it does become harder to just focus on that platform, because they start to over saturate at some point.

Unknown Speaker 15:26
The other challenge here is that while you do get the credibility of the platform right, like someone moving on to HubSpot, it's I can say, Yes, I'm on the HubSpot platform. They say, well, that's where I'm going right now, it's easier to have that, like unified

Unknown Speaker 15:40
conversation, but if HubSpot decides to change their direction, you are at the mercy of wherever they're going. And so if you have, if you are a web development agency, on HubSpot, and now HubSpot launches all of these kind of WYSIWYG right, like, do it yourself. It's like website builders. It's now you're also competing with HubSpot. We're gonna start seeing this with agencies who've been running ads on meta. Meta is trying to launch their own AI ad platform in order for people to go directly through meta and to cut out the middleman. And so it's like they're you're kind of at someone else's mercy, and I don't know that that's the best thing to do with your business, but so I just gave you, I don't know, probably about 10 different ways that you can niche your business, but I would actually recommend that you use a hybrid technique in following in niching, right? None of these on their own are going to be strong enough now, because agencies are a dime a dozen, right, and you need an internet connection and a laptop, and you can be sitting in your mom's basement and become an agency owner. And while that's awesome in a lot of ways, because it gives us the ability to let more people who have potential expertise get out there and help others, it is a detriment to the people who have already been doing some of this work and could do it better now, they're just getting kind of overshadowed even by people who may not be performing as well, and a lot of those smaller when people start making these big claims, right? You see, it was with bro marketers all the time, make massive claims, and then they're not actually able to fulfill on it, but people still hear those claims, and then they believe that anyone should be able to do that, and so it kind of hurts the space as a whole.

Unknown Speaker 17:21
But okay, I went on a little tangent there, coming back the what we want to do is start to pair these things up, right? And so what I do with my practice is we first focus on an audience, narrow that way, and we focus on a problem that they have, and then we focus on our solution. And so we're actually getting like five different methods of niching within there right the audience slash persona, but

Unknown Speaker 17:45
that's going to be based off whatever vertical we've chosen. And so the vertical, the horizontal, then we get into the problem, then we get into their the methodology. And so we got four right through that, and that's what lets us create this core offer that we can put in front of people that's incredibly appealing, and we know exactly who to put it in front of if we want to actually get those wins. And so you can do any variation of this. Sometimes we will add the locality thing. We'll add geography because it's super easy to focus within that. Maybe we'll add the martech as an additional layer. But I try to avoid doing that if we can. There are tons of ways you niche is just really important to know, to remember that niching is it's not a limitation, right? It's not about just limiting what you're doing. It's about creating memorability. We want people to know exactly how we can help them, because that's what's going to put you in this little box in their head, and no one else should be in that box.

Unknown Speaker 18:41
We don't want to be everything to everyone, right? We want to be the obvious choice to the right someone. So when we can figure out how to put get into that box we're talking about, right? We want to be in that our own box in their head. That is what's going to open their wallet. And so that is what we want to do here. Now I have created a tool that is completely free to use, no email required or anything. If you just go to agency, niche design.com,

Unknown Speaker 19:09
we have a it's a custom GPT, but we've tied it together with a bunch of different APIs, so you can, like, using NAICS, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Clutch.co. It's going to give you feedback on your positioning right your niche as you're going through this. And so you can just work through that live, because I don't require an email for you to use this. It does not save your work. So copy and paste whatever you get at the end if you ever want to reuse that.

Unknown Speaker 19:39
And and, yeah, we're gonna do more of the solo cast coming up. Hopefully my cold didn't kind of make this super annoying to listen to. And I hope you got something from this. But if you got any ideas for topics, do not hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn, and we will get some more content headed your way.

Unknown Speaker 19:59
That's the shit.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Go everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward.

Unknown Speaker 20:22
You

Transcribed by https://otter.ai