Niche Market – How to Define For Your Agency Business

---

By Catherine Howell | May 18, 2020 | Blog

Over the past three weeks, we’ve helped ten different marketing agency owners refine their positioning and their niche markets.

Also known as a “niching” or “niche market”.

The most common issue we come across is how undefined agency owners are when it comes to who they help:

“E-commerce store owners”

“Ecom stores doing $20k/mth in revenue”

“Coaches who can’t scale”

Whilst the above are great starting points, they are so broad and general that it ends up costing a lot of money to acquire these types of leads through a funnel (you can still make this work but expect to overpay $200 – $400 for a booked call if the niche markets are not clear).

A much better and profitable approach of narrow down the niche market is to carve out a space that is more defined and refined.

To begin with, ask yourself earnestly – is this a competitive space, are lots of other agencies positioning themselves around “ecom stores doing $20k/mth?” If the answer of yes you need to dig deeper.

Step #1 – Identify Your Competencies

A good starting point of defining the right agency niche market is to map out exactly where your clients were before working with you. Write a short story about it. Remember a story has a protagonist facing a seemingly insurmountable challenge, he/she is impacted negatively through this until they have some sort of breakthrough or epiphany that gets them to the other side. Your short story should be about three paragraphs long min and go into great detail about how their issues manifested themselves in their business and personal lives.

For example – if we take the coaches that can’t scale their ads. Outline how they previously tried to scale, why specifically they can’t scale, and how this problem is impacting them (eg: they can’t turn their side hustle into their main hustle and need to supplement their income with a full-time job).

Now abbreviate your story into one sentence. Your sentence should clearly answer the who, why, what, how.

Keep editing this sentence 6-10 times, run it past colleagues to see if they can guess who you’re speaking to, what problem they are facing, and how you are helping them to solve this.

Step #2 – Assess Competitiveness

Now, ask yourself once more “is this positioning competitive with lots of other agencies also in this niche market?” If the answer is yes you should layer your positioning with a specific solution you offer.

For example: “Online coaches who are unable to drive consistent webinar registrations at a decent price point and scale beyond the $5k/mth mark.”

This means your solution is to drive more webinar registrations.

For many agencies the objection here can be something along the lines of “but I do way more than that, I can do content and emails and blah blah blah”.

Remember, the point isn’t that you only offer one service ever again but that you have a refined funnel to cut through the noise and attract ideal leads. You can always build out more funnels for all your other services later on.

Sticking to one clearly defined solution in your business means you can work on improve and develop your processes of this step on finding your agency niche markets and eventually hand implementation to other people.

Step #3 – Run the Avatar through the litmus test

Before calling it a day, run your positioning through another litmus test:

Are lots of other agencies also positioning themselves around this messaging?

If so, refine it even more. A go-to here is to layer the specific type of industry or business.

Going back to the coach example this could be “relationship coaches who are unable to drive affordable and consistent webinar registrations and scale beyond $5k/mth mark.”

Now it’s very clear who you’re speaking to, what the problem is and what you are helping them with.

Before going live with your new avatar, make sure the market for your avatar is big enough for paid ads. Going to niche markets can sometimes make automated funnels difficult.

Final Thoughts of Niche Markets for Agencies

Refining your positioning and your agency niche market is the most important exercise you’ll do in your business and is the biggest reason agencies fail when trying to drive leads using funnels.

It’s not easy but it’s necessary if you’re wanting to leverage automated funnels.

If you need help to develop your positioning, your niche, and build your funnel and campaigns, we can help inside The Academy.

Hope this helps.