Do you want your business to grow at a snail’s pace with referrals or do you want to be able to pump the gas at will to create new clients?
I’m definitely not saying you suck at sales. But consider that you may actually have no idea if you are any good. If you don’t close four out of five red hot referrals then you have a problem, but that 80% close rate should be standard for referrals. You won’t be closing at 80-90% with people you didn’t already know. Unless you are “taking orders” then it’s going to be close to impossible to achieve that kind of non-referral close rate.
What if I told you that you could kill two birds with one stone and drastically ease both your fulfillment problems and sales velocity problems with one fell swoop?
This is it: Niche down.
If you are afraid… I get it. It’s true that your business has only made it this far because you have been taking on all sorts of referral clients. However, that same approach that helped you start your agency will just not work to help you scale your agency.
Today’s digital marketing environment is ultra competitive. Everyone wants to work from home, help businesses kick ass and make a lot of money. You need to distinguish yourself from these other agency dreamers, many of whom are happy to undercut you in price.
It’s not enough that you have oodles of happy clients. Strangers hardly care about that. If you want to earn the trust, respect, and business of SMBs then you must give them a reason to believe in you. You must tell a compelling story about why your business can help them more than the next guy. After all, you and your competitors are both complete strangers as far as your prospect is concerned.
Businesses are going to buy digital marketing. It’s a basic necessity. So how do you compel them to buy it from you?
Let’s start with you creating an “in” with your prospects. You don’t have that mutual connection from a referral so you need an outlet to plug into your prospect to build the sales “circuit.”
You create that “in” by being someone who is an expert in their industry. If you become an expert at providing one service to one niche and building up case studies then you will become unstoppable and your value proposition will feel airtight. Here is an example to help you illustrate this. You tell me which proposition is more compelling:
“Hi Eric, I work exclusively with chiropractors to build Facebook funnels for generating more patients”
OR
“Hi Eric, I help small businesses with their digital marketing needs”
Now let’s move to the story:
“So Eric, I’m going to assume that if you are like my other chiro clients, that you get calls all the time from different marketers offering you their services. I recognize that it’s important for us to set us apart from the dozens of other digital agencies out there. The truth is that anybody can run FB ads. FB makes it super easy for you to do it yourself and it does sound enticing to go that route, but it’s almost guaranteed that you will fail if you try this route. The value that we can add to your business is threefold.
I will save you time and money by not needing to manage any of the ads or funnels yourself
I will get you an exponentially better ROI with amazing results because we are FB ad experts
I will provide you with the benefits that come with working with a company like us that specializes not only in FB ads, but FB ad funnels SPECIFICALLY for chiropractors.
When we start a campaign for you we are bringing in all the proven methods, experience, secrets that we learned through tons of trial and error.”
OR
“There are a lot of digital marketing agencies out there that have come and gone, but we have been around for over ten years. We have built websites, done SEO and PPC as well as just about everything under the sun for our clients. Our clients stick around with us forever and I can promise you we will bring you that same level of experience and expertise when it comes to running the type of campaign that will bring you the most success.”
Both pitches are good enough, but the niche pitch is way sharper. It intrigues and compels the prospect. It provides relief to the prospect. They won’t need to make all these choices because you have made this simple. It will be done for them by someone who has done this same stuff for someone like them and has proven results.
Would you rather go to the “best” general practitioner physician for your shoulder injury or a top orthopedic surgeon who specializes in shoulder injuries? Yeah, exactly.
Not only will specializing get you a better value proposition and make more deals, but it will simplify your fulfillment. Imagine if you had ten campaigns for the same service and niche. Wouldn’t you be able to hire one person, maybe even full time, to manage all those campaigns for a fraction of the price and time that it would take to provide three different services to eight different industries? You bet.
Listen – the same people who were providing you referrals are not going to stop sending you referrals because you have niched down. You will continue to get what you are already getting, but now you are in the driver’s seat. You can now grow your agency at will, create more targeted marketing campaigns, and simplify your outreach.
Most agencies think they would lose opportunity if they were to niche down. How many new “random” clients are you closing right now without niching? How effective is your non-targeted marketing right now?
What is your experience with niching down?
Have you ever said no to a client that doesn’t fit your ideal profile?
Do you wish you were niching down and only fulfilling on your ideal clients?