Standing out as an agency is difficult. There’s tons of players in the market. Trying to be something to everyone can lead you to being nothing to everyone. So the question is, should your agency focus on a specific niche? Won’t you miss out on projects by doing this? What’s the trade-off?
These are all questions that we asked ourselves when running our agency. Let’s explore the advantages of niche expertise, tips for picking a niche that will work, and tools for how to help research and validate you niche.
Benefits 👌
Specializing in a niche allows your digital agency to become an expert in a given field. This can help you attract high-value clients who are looking for specialized services.
Taking a niche approach also helps you hone your whole business stack, from sales & marketing, to R&D & hiring and more. Having a clear client persona helps keep your team aligned.
At our old agency, we eventually niched down to focusing on working with very early stage, mobile-app, startups, usually with no product. This focus made our sales, marketing, and hiring very easy. We knew our target persona in and out, and we got tons of referrals because everyone knew exactly what we did and didn’t do.
Tips for finding and specializing in a niche 🔎
Okay, so specializing in a particular niche has all these benefits, but you’re probably now thinking, how do I pick my niche?
Here’s a 4 step approach:
- Strengths: What are your interests and expertise? The more your niche aligns with your expertise, the easier it will be to create high-quality content and provide solid services out of the gate.
- Competitor research: Good to do to make sure you have a solid understanding of the market in general. Competitor research can help you discover ways to differentiate yourself within your niche. Don’t expect to find a niche that has 0 competition, and if you did, that is a bad sign.
- Test the waters: It’s okay to not be hyper focused from the get go. You can start by testing the waters and offering your services to clients that differ from one another.
- Be willing to pivot: Staying flexible and adaptable is important here. In the early days of our agency, we focused solely on early stage, web based startups. We eventually found that market just wasn’t a great fit for us. At the time cross platform tech like React Native were maturing quickly. Sp we started to pivot to do more hybrid mobile app work. This was much more lucrative for us. Being open to pivoting enabled us to achieve much more success.
- Segment your content: Already have a live website and a portfolio? Try segmenting your website into different sections that highlight content and industry specific language to see where most of your web engagement falls.
Tools for finding and specializing in a niche 🛠️
Below are a few helpful tools for doing research when trying to understand more about your potential niche.
- Google Trends - See how the popularity of a certain topic or keyword has changed over time. Catch niches on the rise
- SEMrush - popular SEO tool for researching competitors in a specific niche
- Social media platforms - Can usually search for trends and popular topics in particular industries
- Industry publications and blogs - The deeper you can get into a community, the better. Reading industry specific is a great way to stay up to date on trends and developments
Conclusion
Specializing in a niche can be a valuable strategy for small digital agencies. It allows you to leverage your expertise to grow your business. It helps align and hone your strategy across your whole business stack. While you might miss some deals that fall outside of your niche early on, it will more than make up for itself as you continue to cement yourself as an expert in your field.
