How to Find Your Niche in Digital Marketing: Guide for Marketing Agencies

Are you struggling to see results in your digital marketing agency? Would you like to maximize profits and streamline your growth? Or are you looking for a way to start your digital marketing agency on the right foot?

If so, developing a niche could be a transformative solution.

In digital marketing, a niche is the specific type of business to which you cater your services. A few popular digital marketing agency niches include plumbing, optometry, pest control, painting, cosmetic surgery, and many more.

Instead of generalizing your marketing services for every business type, you can narrow your efforts, develop effective, systemized processes, and deliver even better results for your niche-specific client base.

However, choosing the right niche for your digital marketing agency is essential to your success. Read on to learn our comprehensive guide on how to find your niche in digital marketing.

Why Choose a Niche for Your Digital Marketing Agency?

And we are live in sunny San Diego today. What I want to do in this quick video is talk a little bit about why choosing a niche and being niche-focused is the fastest way to really aggressively grow your digital marketing agency. Here in this Facebook group, I get questions all the time from guys like you saying, well I’m a generalist. Why would I want to choose a niche? Isn’t that going to limit me? Isn’t that going to prevent me from doing the other things that I really want to do? And what I want to say is really, by being niche focused, you give yourself lots of options.

First of all, you’re able to create marketing that resonates. You’re able to put out marketing content, videos like this, information guides and webinars that are to a specific audience and that makes you magnetically attractive.

Secondly, it makes it easier to close once you do get a prospect and once they do raise their hand. They want to deal with someone that understands their business that has experienced working with people just like them, they want to deal with the expert. And if you’ve got one or two clients in any given niche, you’re the expert and it’s going to be much easier to close business.

And really the third most important reason in my mind is that it gives you the ability to, to scale. Right? What most of you guys are dealing with is you land a client, and it’s completely custom from one client to the next. You’ve got to figure out what the keywords are, you got to figure out what the campaign should be built like, and you’re constantly reinventing the wheel, you can’t systematize anything. When you’re niche focused, you can develop a repeatable process that’s going to get results for your clients. And every client you get you know exactly what you’re going to do you know how it’s going to get done, you can put a timeline around it. And that’s how you get a truly scalable, seven figure, digital marketing agency.

So there’s something I want to share with you. And that’s there are five niches that I’ve identified that can be deadly to your digital marketing agency. If you do go down the path in any of these five different niches, you kind of can waste years of time. So if you’d like to know what those five deadly niches are in comments, just type in deadly niches. And I’ll go ahead and hook you up with that I did a quick video on it and I’ll share it. And so that’s it for now. Thanks for joining me this quick Facebook Live. I’ll talk to you later.

Our agency members often wonder: why is choosing a niche so important? Doesn’t it make more sense to broaden your services and reach the most clients possible?

However, while choosing a specific niche may limit the number of clients you can approach with your services, it will actually expand your options within your agency. Within a niche, you’ll be able to create even more effective strategies for your clients, develop a competitive advantage, and grow a lot faster.

Choosing a niche and sticking to it can be highly beneficial for your agency’s long-term success. Here are a few essential reasons to select a specific niche for your digital marketing agency:

Everyone wants to work with an expert in their type of business

Imagine you own a local HVAC business and are searching for a digital marketing agency to work with.

Would you rather hire the generalist agency with dozens of different industries in its repertoire? Or the niche-specific agency that works solely with HVAC businesses like yours?

You’d probably choose the niche-specific agency, of course. Selecting a niche for your digital marketing agency can give you a competitive advantage that leads potential clients to choose your agency over generalists.

Easier to sell and close business

Because most businesses would rather work with an agency within their industry, choosing a niche can make it easier to sell your services and close business with those companies in your niche.

You’ll be able to show potential clients specific, powerful results that you have delivered for companies like theirs, reducing your sales resistance. Then, every client you land can further evidence your success for future clients, allowing you to stack your results and social proof to attract new business.

Your clients will know you’re the expert in their space, making it easier for them to go through with your services.

Ability to build and systemize your process

Aside from helping you attract more business, choosing a niche can also make your job a lot easier.

Instead of needing to reinvent the wheel for every lawyer, HVAC business, veterinarian, and auto dealer who works with your agency, you’ll be able to use systemized processes for each client, saving you and your team time.

Once you choose your niche, you can map out a program, set up a timeline, and develop a client experience that you’ll stick to for every client. Then, you can hand this repeatable process off to your team and focus on higher-level tasks to grow and scale.

Give you the ability to focus and continuously obtain great results

Delivering effective results for your clients isn’t always easy. Whether you stick to a niche or not, your clients will have a lot of competition in their industry, and helping them stand out amongst their competitors is a challenging task.

However, choosing a specific niche can give you the ability and time to focus on becoming extremely good at what you do. You’ll be able to identify the specific keywords, selling propositions, and strategies that work for your clients.

Your potential clients will be able to see tangible evidence of your successful processes, leading them to choose your agency over others. Eventually, you’ll stand out as one of the best agencies in your niche.

Fast and easy way to accelerate the growth of your agency

Without a niche, you’ll have trouble developing an effective strategy to grow and scale. You’ll need to rework your processes for every new client, hindering your success and keeping you in the “average” tier amongst other agencies.

However, selecting a niche gives you the potential to become much better than the generalist competition. Once you get good at your niche, you’ll be on the fast track to becoming a seven-figure agency.

  • By being niche focused you can GO deep with your niche and get really good at generating consistent results for your clientsYou can put marketing in place that resonates with that specific audience & get clients coming to you rather than having to chase them down

  • When they come to you…sales resistance drops and close rates increase significantly

  • Because you are working with one specific niche, you can get really good and delivering results, systemize your fulfillment and truly SCALE

How to Choose the Best Digital Marketing Niche for Your Agency

So let’s talk about how to choose a niche. And you know that the stuff I just shared it I know you’ve all heard this before, you’ve heard that the benefits of having a niche and you know that it’s useful and you kind of probably buy into it, but you’ve never actually chosen your niche. So how do you do it?

Well, some things you want to consider some things you want to think about, first of all, do they clump together or self identify? And so by that, I mean, obviously dentists clump together as dentist and they self identify. So if you say, Hey, I specialize in working with dentists they’ll say, okay, that’s me, you’re talking to me. Now, something that’s more abstract as an example would be healthcare. I work with healthcare organizations. People don’t self identify within healthcare, they wouldn’t say I’m a healthcare provider, they would say I’m a chiropractor. I’m a dentist. I’m a urgent care. So you want to make sure that you’re really drilling down within a niche that way you can speak to a very specific audience.

And I can I can tell you a story about this and why I realized that it’s so important. So we work with plumbing and HVAC companies and we wrote our book The Complete Guide to internet marketing for plumbers. And that’s done extremely well for us because that identity it’s it’s really speaks directly to our target audience. Somewhere along the line, we decided, Hey, you know what, our clients are getting great results. These same strategies would work for any home service business, whether it’s a roofing company, or a pest control company or landscape company. So we tried to make a broad division of our company which was contractor SEO, and it was going to serve contractors for home service contractors.

We wrote a book internet marketing and SEO for contractors, in my opinion, a better book than the plumbing book. We put up the website with great content, training on how to market a home service business. And this fell completely flat. The amount of sales we have on Amazon, the amount of leads that we get through the website. They’re not even close. The reason is nobody self identifies as a contractor, nobody’s looking for how do I market my contracting business? They look for their specific type of business.

So the dentist isn’t going to be looking for healthcare information they’re going to be looking for how do I get more patients for my dental practice? How do I get ranked on page one for my dental clinic, etc? And so really focus on do they self identify and really laser target in that way.

Do they have the propensity to invest? You want to make sure that you choose a niche that is used to spending between $1000 and $5,000 per month in marketing in general, whether it’s yellow pages, whether it’s direct mail, whether it’s radio, they have the propensity to invest. There are certain niches that for whatever reason, they just don’t market. They feel like they can grow their business via word of mouth. They feel like they can grow their business through cold calling, and they don’t really believe in spending money to get leads. And so make sure you think about that.

And you might want to if you have a niche that you’re thinking about targeting, reach out to five or six people and just do an impartial survey. Hey, I wanted to ask you a couple questions. We’re thinking about providing a service to your area. Can I ask you five questions and then just get a couple people that you can ask, you know, how do you market yourself? What’s your average marketing budget, and make sure that you’re building your house on a strong foundation sort of speak.

Now, are there enough of them, you don’t you don’t want to choose such a small niche that if you got 10% market share, you wouldn’t have a big enough business to be to be profitable or to be effective. And so a tool you can use to do this is called info USA. And you can just go to info USA. com. You can choose literally thousands of potential industries, verticals and niches. Click on that particular line of business and run a search. So let’s again let’s say it’s dentist, you can go in there put in Okay, how many dentists are there, run the search, and it will tell you exactly how many dentists there are in the United States. Now, I’m going to suggest you take it one step beyond that, you know, okay, yeah, we know that there’s 90,000 dentists, that’s great. But then you also want to see how many of them do over a million dollars per year in revenue. And this is important. And I’m going to train you throughout this process that you want to be selling to the top end of any vertical as opposed to the middle, middle or low end, you don’t want to be dealing with people that don’t have their act together. You don’t want to be dealing with people that are just getting started, because they don’t necessarily tend to spend or stick in the long term. So you want to see how many of the people in your niche are doing over a million dollars per year in revenue and make sure there’s enough of them to be significant.

Is there an industry association or associations within your particular niche? And so you’d be surprised there’s a lot of industry associations for just about anything you could imagine. There’s a Dental Association, of course, there’s the Bar Association for attorneys. There’s plumbing Association, there’s the HVAC Association. There’s associations for almost every vertical and niche that you can imagine. So just make sure you choose a niche that has an association, and make sure that they have periodic events where they all come together.

So in other words, if you find the association, and you look at the website, there should be an advanced calendar. And usually there’s going to be at least an annual event, if not quarterly events and local events, it’s important to make sure that they’re organized in this way, so that you have the opportunity to get in front of your top prospects at any given period of time. And it’s a great opportunity to exhibit their events. It’s a great opportunity to potentially speak at those types of events. And it’s strategically significant, that you choose a niche that has an association that gets together on on a pretty consistent basis.

So I really feel like if you’ve got those elements nice and tight and you can say, Okay, my niche fits all of these different variables, you’re probably in a good place to launch a service to a very specific niche market.

Well hope you found that video useful. I hope it gives you some ideas and strategies on how you can more effectively build your local internet marketing or marketing consulting agency. If you’d like more ideas, strategies and techniques on really how you can build a successful seven figure agency I’d encourage you to go to seven figure agency com slash free there, we’ve got a couple resources for you. We’ve got a complete training that outlines exactly how we were able to build our agency from a start up about four years ago to the point where we’re now building $170,000 per month in recurring monthly revenue about $2 million per year, all by focusing on a relatively narrowly defined niche. And so if you go there, you’re going to get that training video. We’re really explaining our entire process and our entire model, we also share a checklist with you of the top things you need to be doing in order to position your company to get that type of success and kind of follow that same model. So again, it’s just seven figure agency com slash free. You’ll get the training video and the checklist and I look forward to talking with you.

There’s no doubt about it — choosing a niche for your agency is highly advantageous for your agency’s growth, reputation, and long-term success. However, choosing the right niche is even more critical than simply focusing on a specific industry.

If your agency has worked with a wide range of clients in numerous industries, you may have trouble identifying a practical niche to narrow your efforts within. First, we recommend brainstorming a few types of businesses you’ve produced the best results for in the past.

Once you’ve identified a potential niche, follow these steps to determine if it could be successful for your agency:

Step 1: Consider if they clump together

You’ll want to choose a niche with which your potential clients could self-identify. All of your clients within this niche should be able to clump together, so to speak, and feel confident naming their companies under your niche category.  As a result, your niche will need to be relatively specific.

For example, if you make your niche “dentists,” every dental office will know that you provide the specific marketing services they need to grow their practice. Your dental clients can clump together into this overarching “dentist” niche without wondering whether you have the expertise and processes necessary for their specific industry.

However, if you made your niche a broader category, such as “healthcare,” your potential clients may be unsure whether they fit into your niche or not. Dentists may not describe their services as “healthcare.” The same goes for chiropractors, urgent care clinics, or other more specific health-related practices.

“Healthcare” is not a good niche. While you may be able to use similar strategies between healthcare industries, your clients will not feel as confident working with a broader-niched marketing agency as they would with an agency that targets their specific type of practice.

Instead, homing in your efforts on a smaller niche that your clients could self-identify with will allow you to attract more clients with confidence.

Step 2: Find out if they have the propensity to invest

You should also identify a type of business that has the tendency to invest in digital marketing. If the businesses in the industry typically spend between $1,000 and $5,000 on marketing services, you’ll know that they will be willing to spend money on your niche-focused marketing efforts as well.

Some businesses tend to invest in marketing more than others. For example, hair salons are typically more location-based and advertise through word of mouth rather than print ads or social media marketing. Trying to convince these industries that they need digital marketing, then persuading them to hire your agency, will ultimately waste your time in money.

Instead, we recommend choosing an industry where the marketing money is already flowing and showing businesses in that sector how to spend their marketing budget more wisely through your services.

Step 3: Find out if there are enough of them

You’ll also want to choose an industry with enough businesses to make your efforts worthwhile.

We recommend selecting a niche with at least a few thousand businesses that make over $1 million per year in revenue. You can use the InfoUSA website to discover how many businesses are in a particular niche, then sort your results by revenue.

You should avoid selling your services to businesses that are just starting out. These businesses may not have the budgets to invest in your services long-term or even to remain profitable for more than a few years.

Instead, we always recommend selling to businesses at the top end of the vertical. Searching for a niche with several thousand companies that are already hitting the $1 million mark can make it easier to find clients willing to purchase your services long-term.

Step 4: Consider whether there are industry associations within your particular niche

One of the quickest ways to break into a niche is to join its association or national organization.

For example, the dental industry has the National Dental Association. Plumbers can join the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association. Lawyers can be part of the Bar Association.

Once you join an industry’s association, you can participate in its events, speak at conferences, and get to know its members. Over time, your presence in the association can help you develop leads and gain new clients in your niche.

You’d probably be surprised to learn how many industries have their own associations. However, you’ll want to double-check that a niche you’re considering has one before proceeding. Just perform a quick Google search for “(industry) association” to discover this information.

Step 5: Find out if they have periodic events in which they come together

Along with identifying a niche’s associations, you should also learn about the industry’s recurring events and gatherings that you could attend to get to know potential clients. You can typically find these events by heading to the association’s website and looking for an advanced calendar.

Most associations have annual events, but many also have quarterly events and local chapter gatherings. Speaking at these events can give you an excellent opportunity to present to your top prospects and grow your client base.

You can also search for events outside your industry’s association. Any gathering that allows you to network with businesses in your industry can act as an effective lead generation tool.

If a specific niche does not tend to have periodic events, you may have trouble gaining leads. Consider these gatherings strategically as you develop your niche focus.

Step 6: Have a background and affinity in the niche

Finally, along with considering the logistics of choosing a practical niche, you should also select an industry in which you have a background and affinity.

If you have background experience in a specific industry, you’ll be able to use this knowledge to tailor your marketing strategies and grow your agency faster. You may also have a few contacts that you can use to break into the industry.

Along with considering your background experience, you should also think about whether you have an affinity for a specific industry. For example, maybe you enjoy working within the pool-building industry because pools remind you of summer, your favorite season. Or perhaps you find the cosmetic industry interesting and want to learn more about its processes.

Selecting a niche that you enjoy can make your job easier. You’ll become incredibly enmeshed in the industry over time as you join its associations and develop custom strategies to grow its businesses, so you may as well select one that interests you.

Top Digital Marketing Niches to Consider

We’ve found 5 niches that should be avoided at all cost! On this video we’ll go deep and help you brainstorm your niche options, give you some guidance on the ones to avoid and share some of the niches that we’ve seen other agencies have the most success with.

Josh Nelson

Awesome. So just some things to think about as you choose a niche. And and now we could talk a little bit about the five, you know, five niches that Jeff and I have identified that aren’t really ideal for local internet marketing. There’s exceptions to every rule. There are niches that Jeff and I have looked at and been like, probably not a great fit, and people have been able to make it work. So don’t feel like just because this list is here, you know, it’s 100% non starter. But for the most part, there’s so many great niches that you can tap into, that have a need for the services that can get a tangible return on investment that have the propensity to spend, it probably would be better to avoid these. And so since I know a lot of you comment that I need to know what the five are. And you were really eager to find out what these are.

The first I would say is government entities and municipalities. You know, you’d feel like these are government associations that have big budgets, they should be able to spend tons of money, I’m going to suggest you kind of avoid them. They don’t have a propensity to invest in advertising. They usually have to go through a procurement process. So I would really avoid that.

Real estate agents and insurance agents. You know, a lot of times I see you know, people just getting into the space they are like ah there’s tons of real estate agents that are tons of insurance agents, I can probably get them great results. And while you probably could maybe through Facebook advertising or through some other mechanism, trying to generate results for them from a local internet marketing perspective, setting up a website, getting it optimized for search, leveraging paid campaigns, tapping into, you know, Facebook advertising, real estate agents and insurance agents, there’s tons of competition. There are like national groups that kind of control the paid search side of the equation like sites like Zillow and things like that. I’ve just found these are not great niches and it seems to be ones that everybody kind of flocks to when they think, oh, there’s lots of them. I can get to them through BNI and I can really scale a business, but they don’t tend to have the propensity to advertise, right. They’re not willing to spend two to $5,000 a month to generate leads and sales for the most part. Anything you want to add on that, Jeff?

Jeff Fisher
Nope, not at this point. I want to know what the other five are you just

Josh Nelson
General practice doctors offices, you know, we look at medical and I’m a big fan of medical, there’s lots of great specialties within medical. But for the most part your general practice doctor like your local doctor’s office doesn’t have the propensity to advertise, you know, isn’t spending a lot of money on their website and pay per click advertising because most of their business comes from referral as well as the the local Insurance Group that they’re part of. So specialized medical, absolutely. Like eye doctors and you know, audiologists and dentists and things but just general practice dentistry. Not a great niche to try and focus and build your business around.

And the last is is retail stores, hair salons, things like that. Again, I see a lot of people kind of gravitate to these they think well, retail store, there’s all kinds of retail stores. I’ll go to the local, you know, clothing shop, or I’ll go to a local hair salon, and I’ll get them. The problem is their ticket is so low at the average transaction value, the way they advertise, you know, they don’t have the propensity to spend, it’s hard to really aggregate and market to them. And so I can probably make this list longer. But I think you’d be wise to kind of focus your attention on something outside of these five deadly niches in my personal opinion. Anything to add on this, Jeff?

Jeff Fisher
Yeah, so said just a little differently. First of all, you want to work with companies that get paid up front or at the time of service. So that’s why a realtor is not necessarily a good choice, because remember, he’s going to get paid after the house sells after the 30 day escrow after after after. So guess what, he’s going to be asking you to get paid way down the stream as well because that’s when he collects his money. So I would stay away from that.

I would stay away from extremely skilled gatekeepers. So there are some industries out there that spend a lot of money on training their gatekeepers or their receptionist and so if it’s near impossible to get through to the decision maker. There’s other easier niches. That’s all I’m saying is there’s these here niches. And then finally, you want to stay away from niches where their content is constantly changing, daily, weekly, whatever the case, right? Because, remember, your goal is to put up a great looking little website for them. And then market the heck out of your website. You’re not wanting to every couple of days, you’re getting an email from your new clients. And they’re saying, well change the homepage picture and have these three new products to take these three products now, because pretty soon you’re not in the marketing business anymore. You’re in the website maintenance buisness. So those would be three things that are not just niche specific, but if if you hit on one of those three, I would, I would definitely reconsider your niche. Not to say won’t work. As Josh said earlier, we’ve been proven wrong more than once.

But the last thing is, I always believe that you need to have some level of passion for your niche. You don’t have to be over the top, you know, but I like to say, you know, the guy that 40 years ago, sang a famous song on the stage, and he’s still singing that 40 years later. Sure hope he likes that song that he’s singing. Well its kind of the same thing when you’re up in front of the association 10 years from now. You better like talking about plumbers and plumbing and better like plumbers when you’re sitting out there with a cocktail, you know, with them at the end of their association meeting or whatever. And again, you don’t have to be madly in love with them. There’s gotta be some level of passion.

We’ve spent years helping digital marketing agencies like yours achieve seven-figure annual profits. Throughout our experience, we’ve identified several digital marketing niches that tend to be more profitable and successful than others.

Here is our list of the top industries to target for digital marketing:

Home services:

  • Kitchen remodeling
  • AC repair
  • Plumbing
  • Landscaping
  • Roofing
  • Electricians
  • Pest control
  • Locksmiths
  • Painting
  • Flooring installation
  • Damage restoration
  • Garage door installation & repair

Legal:

  • Bankruptcy
  • Personal injury
  • Divorce
  • Criminal
  • Traffic

Healthcare:

  • Dentists (orthodontist, dental implants, cosmetic dentistry)
  • Chiropractors
  • Cosmetic surgery
  • Weight loss centers
  • Eye doctors
  • Day spas
  • Veterinarians
  • Fitness centers / personal trainers

Automotive:

  • Auto repair shops
  • Auto body shops
  • Auto dealers

Business to business:

  • Sign companies
  • Printing companies
  • Document imaging companies
  • Document management

These niches have proven successful for other digital marketing agencies because they meet the criteria above. Each of these industries:

  • Is specific and narrow
  • Tends to invest in marketing
  • Has an extensive presence throughout the U.S.
  • Has its own associations and events

Reviewing this list of industries that benefit most from digital marketing can help you brainstorm niches that may make sense for your agency. However, you don’t have to choose a niche on this list — perhaps stepping outside these options could allow you to dive into an untapped niche that could be highly profitable.

No matter which niche you choose, it will probably feel oversaturated when you first begin targeting clients and developing strategies within it. You’ll need to establish a competitive advantage to set your agency apart from the dozens or hundreds of other marketing agencies in that niche.

However, choosing a niche that meets the above criteria can give you a leg-up as you break into that industry and begin growing and scaling your digital marketing agency.

Contact Seven Figure Agency Now!

Choosing a niche to shape your digital marketing services around can be highly beneficial as you enhance your agency. However, once you select your niche, you’ll need to put in the work to develop effective strategies that produce real results for your clients.

If you’re serious about turning your business into a seven-figure agency, we can help. Contact Seven Figure Agency now to join our community and learn the strategies you need to grow your agency to the seven-figure mark and beyond.

If you watch these videos & go through the exercises you should have no problem deciding on & committing to a niche that has the highest probability for success. Now go out there, start prospecting, positioning yourself as the expert in that niche & take your agency to the next level!

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