Most agencies aim to set themselves apart, expand their client base, and achieve sustainable growth. Niching down into a specific industry is one strategy that many agencies deploy to achieve these objectives.
In this Q&A article with Anna Anderson from Art Unlimited, David Thompson and Bobbie Smith from Redesign.co, and Ryan Amen from Nifty Marketing, we dive deeper into industry specialization. We explore the opportunities and challenges of niching down and what it takes to successfully grow an agency.
Q. How do you ensure your agency services are relevant and effective for your clients within your specified industries?
Anna: It's twofold: including the educational component and the relationship piece. We internally leverage our partnerships, such as CallRail, to bring specific partnership education to the table. Then we work to connect with our customers by understanding their pain at large by communicating solutions and opportunities. That's where we might join an association and be active members on their boards through the lens of, "we're not here to gain, we're here to serve." When you come to the industry to serve with humble authority you will always win. Industries are looking for experts who bring knowledge to the table from the agency perspective.
Ryan: Showing the ROI for our clients. It's really helped us to be able to show over the years to a lot of clients, "Hey, you are getting a lot more calls than you were before." Sometimes that gut feeling isn't all that accurate when asking clients where they came from. It's much more accurate if we can look at the touchpoints along the way.
Bobbie: Really listening to what the clients are asking for. The mentality of churn and burn is really hurting all agencies because it creates a bad taste in the potential client's mouth. Being able to use tools like CallRail where you can prove that your methods are working, we are really focused on being able to back up the data that we're presenting and making sure that we're explaining it in an understandable way so clients can have confidence understanding the variables in the market.
Q: What are some of the challenges with growing your agency when you're focused on a smaller pool of clients?
Ryan: It's hard to find people with experience working with attorneys. We also find that due to the nature of their work, they'll often question things a little harder and press our people harder than people from another industry might due to their line of work. When we're hiring, when people get into it, they might be excited about SEO or marketing, but they don't realize how important the way they communicate with attorneys is. So, there's definitely a learning curve with how we communicate with our clients. I would say more than a lot of industries.
Bobbie: When you niche down, I like to find a niche that you can make sure is a well-oiled machine and then look for another place to grow what you're already working in, such as having people that have experience in that specific industry to really understand the demographic of that industry, as well as the client needs. So, we have people that are solely focused on a specific niche. But I think if you are just focused on one thing, you are limiting your ability to grow and your ability to weather storms in the economy. So it's not like we're wanting to leave any one area, but I do think we've been really wise at growing each industry slowly and doing it right.
Anna: I remind my team that the relationships they hold are key. The small accounts are just as important as the big ones because we no longer have geographical barriers – it's a really small community. So, it's not, we lost one client, we gained one, but rather, how are we taking every interaction as not just a transaction but an opportunity to impart and to make sure that we are authentic? How can we make sure that we are providing not only exceptional service to those prospective customers and existing customers but also those past customers?
Q: How do you keep your agency team on top of industry trends and balance that with keeping up with the day-to-day stuff?
Anna: To me, that's saying, “Hey, have you let go of the vine?” Are you delegating and elevating? Do you trust the people around you? And if you're not – why not? Is it an education gap? Is it a tool gap? Is it just that you don't want to continue to excel, and maybe you just need to say, I need to be happy where I'm at. That's fine, right? I think balance ebbs and flows and the key is understanding when it's time to let go.
Ryan: We always have new employees take a little bit of time every day to study and learn the industry better and just keep up-to-date on things. We have weekly trainings as we've found it helps to stay up on trends. We also listen to other professionals in the industry on what they're seeing on their end so we can make adjustments and adapt as quickly as possible. So as the industry changes, we understand what algorithm updates are happening and their impact.
David: When new technology comes out, we try to make the most of it. We've been leveraging AI to help with our content and ad generation. We've been playing with it over the past six months. It's one of those things that we knew we could either find a way to embrace it in a proper way to help us grow or we could ignore it and most likely pay the consequences in a few years by being left in the dust.
Q: What's a final piece of advice you'd give to other agencies looking to grow?
David: Growing slow is not the worst thing in the world. Sometimes it's taking the time to slow down so you can speed up.
Anna: So commonly we say as an agency, where do we want to be in one year, three years, five years, but I challenge the agency owner to also say, where do they want to be in one year, three year, and five years. You should be running three to five years ahead of your company. You should be bringing that innovation to the company. If you don't plan out what your path looks like personally and professionally and you just live in the company, you are going to fail. So how you develop as a person will, in turn, feed how your agency will develop.
Ryan: Find the right people. It's really easy to find people that look like they have some experience, but it seems like it's getting harder and harder to find people with longevity. There's just a lot of turnover in the industry. We've done pretty good and had people stick around for quite a while. We started out hiring local and training people a little bit more, which worked. But we're to a point in growth now that we're looking for people that have a little bit more previous experience in the industry and hiring a lot more remote people. But we also find that there tends to be a little bit of a disconnect; you don't have that in-office interaction.
