May 28, 2020
The more you read about SMMA, the more you’ll come across the importance of choosing your ‘niche’.
Choosing an SMMA Niche is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as an agency owner. Before we reveal how to choose your SMMA niche, let’s first understand what a ‘niche’ is and why it’s necessary.
In any business or service, a ‘niche’ or a ‘niche service’ is one which appeals to a very specific, small percentage of the population. For example, in the legal profession, some lawyers specialize in divorce law or intellectual property. This is their ‘niche’.
Some lawyers specialize further within that area of law: divorces that involve multiple jurisdictions or copyright disputes. This is one step further. Likewise, some social media marketing agency owners specialize in only one industry and offer one service.
For example, instead of offering SEO, PPC, content creation, and management, some agencies only offer paid traffic or email marketing; and only to companies within a certain industry such as dentists or eCommerce owners.
Let’s go back to the legal analogy.
Say you’ve been arrested for a crime you didn’t commit, would you rather be given a lawyer who specializes in the specific subset of a crime you have been charged with, has a fundamental understanding of the rules and procedures governing cases similar to yours and knows the judges who may preside over your case… or a lawyer who dabbles in shipping law and insider trading?
These are the three obvious benefits of only working within one SMMA niche:
You understand your market for niche:
The longer you work within a given industry, the more you’ll begin to understand the ins and outs of it. For example, in the restaurant niche, you’ll quickly learn the priorities and pain points of restaurant owners: they are constantly struggling to get new customers in and get existing customers to return. Or car dealerships: they make the highest profits on financing deals, not outright sales.
This in-depth knowledge will allow you to approach clients and speak confidently about their industry.
You get better results for clients:
No single marketing method works in every niche. And every niche has a swathe of nuances and idiosyncrasies such as how difficult it is to sell CBD products through Facebook, or the challenges that promoting music presents on YouTube. Understanding these difficulties will allow you to avoid potential pitfalls.
Likewise, with the service you offer, you’ll get better results if you offer and improve the same service over and over again rather than dabbling in email marketing and SEO.
You’ll streamline your processes
SMMAs are all about being lean and efficient and developing systems and processes to minimize your workload. This is easy to achieve when you deal with the same client, day-in, day-out. Take, for example, your onboarding process: this should be simplified to a simple funnel, requesting the same details over-and-over again.
If you offer multiple services, you have to tailor not just your onboarding, but your communication, output, and reporting to each and every client: this is a logistical nightmare.
Choosing the industry you will operate in comes down to three simple questions:
Can the niche afford your service?
Local cafés are a dream client to work with: you’ll probably know the owner, be able to get great results for them, and best of all, pop into them for your monthly report and a cake.
The big problem though: they won’t be able to afford your service. Even if you achieve incredible results, the service fee will cut into their profit margins too aggressively.
A general rule-of-thumb is to look for clients who have a monthly revenue in excess of $5,000.
What do you have a natural passion for?
One of the easiest ways to decide your SMMA niche is to answer the question: what’s your passion?
Being passionate about an interest or industry often means you will have expert knowledge in it, or at least understand it more than a layperson. For example, if your great passion is football, you might know a particular brand or training tool used that others wouldn’t.
What do you have previous experience in?
Many new agency owners often find success in the niche they previously worked in: for example, someone who previously worked with financial advisors would not just understand their business practices, but most probably retain contacts that they could leverage to get their first client.
It’s important to remember that whilst sticking to a niche is an easy way to guarantee the success of your agency, there’s no need to stick to a niche if it’s not working for you, and it’s important to try different niches when you first get started out.
Even the most devout music fan might hate working with music venues as their niche but only realize this a few months down the line.
Typical Best SMMA Niche includes:
Watch this video by Iman Gadzhi to learn the best SMMA niches.
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