It’s January 2024, a new day for the agency.
We’ve finally taken our own medicine and gone all in for a rebrand – name, identity, messaging…the works. At least, that’s the headline (“goodbye ABA, hello said & done”).
But it isn’t the real story.
The truth? We’ve spent the best part of a decade circling the elephant, considering how we might start eating it (and whether we even have the appetite in the first place). All the while, we’ve been busy giving expert advice to clients on why they absolutely must eat their elephant, and how to go about it.
That elephant of course is niching – favourite buzzword of brand strategists across the land (few last more than 10 minutes on a sales call before uttering: “You really need to find your niche”.)
Here’s the lowdown on our decision to niche, our answers to some of the questions we've had…
‘What’s a niche, anyway?’
Put simply, a niche is a deliberate choice of where you will play and how you will win there. It’s the intentional, focused positioning of your brand in the market and mind of your audience.
For B2B brands, it means pinning down one or more areas of specialism:
- Audience specialism (i.e. expertise businesses)
- Service specialism (i.e. positioning & messaging)
- Problem specialism (i.e. over-reliance on word-of-mouth)
There are other focal points of positioning (like proprietary methodology, bespoke technology, or deeply-held values) - but these won't ultimately put you in the category of being a specialist in your field. To do that, you'll need to embrace one (or in many cases, a combination of) the above.
But get it right, and you’ll be in the sweet spot of what your ideal audience is looking for (“Star Wars-themed murder mystery parties for middle-aged men in Manchester? Now we're talking!”)
‘Why do agencies struggle to niche?’
Elephant-dodging antics are pretty common in our corner of the world. Here are the objections we often hear from agency/consultancy leaders (and which we told ourselves during our years of circling):
‘We’ll get bored’
As creatives ourselves, we get it. Variety is the spice of life – and surely niching will mean you end up working on the same sort of stuff over and over again, right?
‘We’ll miss out on potential work’
This is by far the biggest one – the nagging fear that by nailing your colours to one mast, you’ll miss out on all those potential clients standing around the other pole wondering where you’ve gone.
‘We’ll alienate existing clients’
Finally, there’s the worry of alienating – even potentially losing – existing clients who don’t quite fit the niche. Will they think we no longer care about them or understand their world?
‘What persuaded you to niche, regardless?’
Aside from wanting to throw off the cloak of hypocrisy we’d been wearing for all those years, we realised the benefits of niching really do outweigh the drawbacks.
Here are the big three switches we look forward to benefiting from (and which clients who’ve taken our advice already experience):
The switch from 'supplier' to 'specialist'
The harsh reality is that most creative/marketing agencies are seen as ‘suppliers’ in the minds of their prospective customers – and treated as such. They have to hustle hard (sales/biz dev), put in the hours on outreach (events, emails, social media) and join the beauty parade (creative pitches; competitive tenders) alongside all the other, similar agencies playing the same game.
A well-executed niche changes the game. Suddenly you aren’t seen as just another ‘supplier’, but as the ‘specialist’. You have the expertise – and by extension, the authority – that comes with doing a specific thing for a specific group of people. And it carries the assumption that you do it well!
As Liam Neeson would put it (whilst pulling on those black, leather gloves): “What I do have is a very particular set of skills…”
The switch from commoditized offering to premium pricing
As a rule of thumb, the more generalist the service the more likely you will been seen as a commoditized offering (which means competing primarily on price). Conversely, the more specialist you are the less likely you will be seen as interchangeable with other agencies (which opens the door to charging a premium for your services).
Imagine you are the marketing leader of an insurance broker looking to improve conversion on your website. You get two referrals from trusted contacts – one for a full-service digital agency (multiple sectors, broad digital expertise), the other for a conversion optimisation agency (specialising in financial services).
Which one do you think can command a higher price?
The switch from outbound to inbound
Finally, over time a good niche should ease the pressure on outbound activity. The outbound hustle of getting noticed and being remembered is hard work when you’re a generalist – like finding-a-needle-in-a-pile-of-very-similar-looking-needles hard!
A clearly articulated niche has the opposite effect. First of all, content marketing becomes much easier (as you finally have a rationale for what to write about). And, before long, those referrals and introductions start to snowball (as clients/contacts tell others: “These guys are exactly what you’re looking for”).
The up-hill battle of the generalist, or the gathering-speed of the specialist. Which would you prefer?
‘Can we get away without niching?’
And finally, the honest push-back question we sometimes hear (and definitely asked ourselves in the past). It usually goes something like this: “We know plenty of agencies who haven’t niched and are doing just fine. Do we really need to niche?”
And of course, it’s true. There are creative/marketing agencies across these fair isles (and beyond) whose websites would fail to pass even a basic niche sniff test. But, and it’s a pretty big but…most of those brands are big enough to get away with it.
If your name (and, by extension, your reputation) precedes you – by all means, stick with the generalist game. Chances are it’s already working, and you're seen as a trusted go-to-brand in the market. If, on the other hand, you are too small (and, by extension, too unknown) to seriously compete with the big name generalists in your field, it’s time you played a different game.
That was the choice we faced back in 2023. We chose to niche - figuring (a) we wouldn't get bored (expert organisations are a diverse and interesting bunch); (b) we wouldn't miss out on opportunities (we still get word-of-mouth referrals from what we used to be known for); and (c) our current clients who don't fit the niche would be forgiving (and some of them would even praise us for it!).
And that’s the real story behind why we became said & done.
We like to think Liam Neeson would be proud.
