Why Should You Pick a Niche for Your Agency?

Table of Contents

• Branding & Recognition
• SEO
• Niche Expertise
• Scalable Solutions & Faster Results
• Better Productized Services
• Snowball Success

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I want to start by saying that whether you have a niche for your agency or not does not determine its future success.

Though, I will say that we have found a ton of success in niching down for a lot of reasons. Because of that, it’s my advice to new agency owners to pick a niche for their agency to see the success we had.

We also covered this topic in episode 002 of the Agency Growth Podcast, “Focusing on a Niche for Your Agency“.

Here are 6 reasons you should niche down.

1) Branding & Recognition

There are a million marketing agencies out there. If you’re not niched, your competition pool is that much larger. Your pool shrinks when you narrow yourself to a niche versus serving everyone.

You also have the opportunity to become the digital marketing agency for that niche.

The thing about business owners in different industries is that they talk. They have peers in the same industry they are in Facebook groups with and go to the same conferences.

A lot of them have their marketing agencies but how many of them have a pest control marketing agency?

2) SEO

I’m going into this with the assumption you have some base-level understanding of SEO. If you don’t, I wrote a 4-part series on our agency’s website about what SEO is. I encourage you to read it.

Along the same lines as branding, it will be far easier to stand out in a sea of digital agencies in Google. If you don’t have a niche, you will have a hard time ranking for people searching for “digital marketing agencies”.

You will compete against SEMrush, Neil Patel’s agency, or Thrive. These domains have huge authority.

If you pick a niche, you can focus on the longtail keyword like, “chiropractic marketing agency”. Those results look a lot different than the generic searches.

You will still see niche competitors. Don’t be discouraged.

Niching down doesn’t end competition. It just makes it more manageable.

At the time of writing this, if you search “marketing agency”, our agency is nowhere to be found. But if you type in “lawn care marketing agency”, we’re #1.

This is where about 90% of our clients find us.

We didn’t think people searched for “lawn care marketing agencies”. We were wrong. Tons of lawn care business owners do. That’s probably true for a lot of industries.

Also, here is the Search Console report validating that claim:

The same is true for the following keywords:

• “lawn care marketing agency”
• “landscape marketing company”
• “landscape marketing company”

3) Niche Expertise

Being an expert in digital marketing is one thing but also knowing your niche is another.

Whatever niche you pick, you should make sure to become an expert in it in any way possible.

Clients choose us in the lawn care industry because we speak the language. We know the difference between core and tine aeration. We also know when it’s most practical to aerate lawns depending on the grass type.

We know the type of lawnmowers to use on the website. This doesn’t leave our clients wondering if we actually know the industry.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve talked to prospects who chose us simply because their last agency used the wrong images. Having this level of expertise sets you apart.

When you’re not a niche agency, you reinvent the wheel and relearn industries as you take on new clients.

When a niche prospect comes to us and needs help with their Google Ads and SEO, we don’t have to do keyword research. We already know the keywords that work and the ads setup we need that crushes it.

That’s what makes us 10x better than any other generic agency out there.

Check out episode 059 on how to be an expert in your niche.

4) Scalable Solutions & Faster Results

You can forget about the lengthy onboarding and discovery calls. When you have a niche you get to tell your client what works based on the data you already have.

You don’t have to have a call about what their business model looks like or what services they offer. You can create a templated onboarding document and simply have them fill it out to get started on work.

When you find something that works for one client, you can typically copy it to all your clients. As you learn the industry, your strategies get better with every new niche client you bring on.

Review the image above. We addressed negative keywords on one account that resulted in a decrease in cost per lead. After that, we applied that update to all our accounts. Once we did that, all client ad accounts saw a 12.1% average decrease in cost per lead.

These are things you can only do when you niche down.

You won’t have to hire strategists who know a lot about everything. If your focus is only on roofing, then your team only has to know about the roofing industry. Anything documented and needed to define your services will be scalable and repeatable.

5) Better Productized Services

If you’re using a productized model, your packages will have repeatable success.

Pretend you charge $500/mo for basic SEO services to a house painter. You have the things you do per month outlined. They’re on a routine basis and you spend about 5 hours per month working on that client.

Then you get an e-commerce client that sells beauty supplies. You decide to charge them $500/mo as well. Except now you’re doing completely different things. You’re now optimizing product listings for their Google Merchant account. An addition to the general SEO items you were already working on for the painter.

Now you’re spending 10 hours per month on that client.

For the painter, you are making $100/hr but for the beauty company, you’re making $50/hr. If you cut back the hours you work on the beauty company, you might not get the results you need. If you double the price for the painting contractor, they might not be able to afford you

Now imagine you only worked with painting contractors. You know exactly what needs to be done every month. As well as what platforms and directory websites they should be listed on.

If you do social media marketing, you know exactly what ads work for painters.

Having a niche makes life easier for productized services.

For the record, we highly recommend productizing your services. Check out our podcast episode on that topic: “Finding Success in Productized Services | Episode 033“.

6) Snowball Success

Put yourself in a world where the above has come together.

• Your SEO is on point.
• People in groups of your niche recognize your company’s name.
• You have a defined productized service that’s scalable and repeatable.
• You’ve found success in clients that translates to new accounts in the same industry.
• You know more about the niche than you thought you would and can speak the lingo.

This is where things start to snowball.

I can be a bit slow at first tackling the first two things on this list (SEO & brand recognition). Once you start doing these things, people will start talking and you’ll get found in search results.

When those things happen and you get those leads, your close rates will be higher. Your onboarding will also be faster, and your results will speak for themselves.

You’ll then start documenting these processes. Once they’re documented, you can pass them off to your team and continue scaling your agency.

Do You Have to Pick a Niche?

The short answer is, no.

You don’t have to pick a specific industry or niche. You’re just going to have to try a bit harder to get clients and stand out.

In episode 105 of the Agency Growth Podcast, we talked to AJ Doppke of Marketing Qubed. His niche was the Detroit local market where he’s from.

In one way, that’s a niche. He can speak the lingo and has good brand recognition. He can also target a longtail keyword like “detroit marketing agency”.

It also isn’t an industry niche.

He can’t have productized services because every business he works with is different. He also can’t replicate success from one client to another and his processes aren’t as scalable.

There is nothing wrong with that. That is simply a different style of agency.

Want to Learn More?

There’s so much more to starting and scaling your agency than just picking your niche. At Agency U, we regularly give out free information in these blog posts as well as our Agency Growth Podcast.

So subscribe to us if you want to hear more from us. It’s free.