Regardless of how unique this pretty standard marketing advice is, it’s especially true for our agency right now as we are in the thick of applying it in our marketing campaigns towards dental practices.

We’ve spent (and wasted) thousands of our own dollars, and hundreds of hours trying to target everyone over the several years that we’ve been in business. So we know from first hand experience just how important it is to have a niche & how much more valuable you become when you sell to less people.

in 2021, when I was working to acquire my first clients for whhat was to become Creekside Marketing, I stuck to this obviously good advice by going after lawn care and other local home service based businesses, because I had experience marketing for my own lawn care business, and knew I could relate to them more closely.

But as time went on, we started to stray from this. We recognized (or so we thought) that there were other businesses who needed more than just google and meta ads. We could provide everyone with websites, SEO, organic social media, etc. anything and everything to try and capture more dollars from an ever widing supply of customers. It was genius.

What we noticed was that our messaging became flat, and so did our sales calls. why would anyone sign up with just another digital marketing agency? What made us unique? And most importantly, what good is a mediocre jack of all trades but master of none, when you could simply work with a master in each piece of the digital marketing puzzle.

So Cade and I went back to the drawing board, and recognized something that should have been obvious way sooner than we noticed it. While we were helping several businesses with everything, the only reason they signed up with us to begin with was that we knew how to make them money with Google and Meta, and everyone of our clients we were either doing Google or Meta.

So we doubled down on that. No longer the average digital marketing agency, but the Google and Meta ad experts, me heading up the Google piece, and Cade with the Meta

On top of that we turned a limitation into a selling point. I still remember one of the first sales calls we had after this switch where we emphasized that’s all we did, the prospect explicitly said that made them want to work with us more, because he knew he’d be working with the master of one, rather than the jack of all trades.

Now having some experience in those other fields has definitely been benificial as we consult clients, because while we may not be experts, we know more than most business owners and can at least help point them in the right direction, even if it’s not with us.

After making that simple change about 2 years ago (and obviously some other large changes to our sales calls, outbound strategy, pricing, and more which I’m sure I’ll go over in future emails) we went from doing $5k a month on a good month to doing over $70k last month.

Which brings us to where we are again today, niching down once again to focus on a specific industry. Not to say we won’t continue to be the google and meta ads experts for all types of businesses, because we feel that expiernce across different fields allows us to stay on top of platform trends better and to see problems from a unique angle that other 1 niche ponies might miss.

Just some of the benifits of a niche:

1. selling becomes easier. The more wins you get in a specific catagory, the easier it is to show a prospect what working with you could look like

2. delivering on your product or service is easier. instead of having to customize for each different type customer, or keep dozens of products in stock, you can have less overhead assocciated with delivering on your services/goods

3. you can actual charge more for the same product, because it is easier for the prospective customer to see the benifits of working with you.

4. easier to market. let’s use my agency as an example. In the past, when we tried to run ads, we would target audiences like “business owners“ with the message “we help businesses make more money“. Now we target dental practices, and say “we help dental practices make more money“. you could do this with literally every niche. This is a pretty basic example, but very easy to tell which as is getting more clicks

This isn’t mind blowing stuff, I get that, but some of these pieces are often glossed over by business owners who have the skills to help everyone, not realizing the benifit of helping less people.

This also not to say every good business only helps one niche, but it is to say the ones who’s marketing outperforms (the majority of the time) are the ones who’s customer journey makes the prospect feel like their are in expert in the prospects specific domain.

If you are like a lot of businesses, and you do have multiple products & services going after different audience types, make sure your customer journey/funnel reflects that. Your ads, creative, copy, landing pages, emails, audience targeting, keywords, all of it should be customized & segmented for each buyer and their needs.

Your prospective buyer wants to know why your solution is the best solution for them, not why it is an ok solution for just about everyone.

And this has been a masterclass how you turn a basic, 1 sentence piece of advice into a weekly edition of my newsletter without a name. Thanks for joining

On the beach,
pete