A niche will help you make more sales

For most companies, defining a niche and creating a brand narrative is at the bottom of the priority list. 

This is understandable because many companies are able to solve many different problems for many different people. There are precedents for this all across the business landscape - from Unilever owning everything from food brands to cleaning products, to professional services that work with both businesses and consumers. 

However, while this may look good on paper, in practice it dilutes the service offering of those businesses. You can see how Unilever, for example, avoids this by having unique brands for each product, with only a small logo on the back of the packaging to show it’s theirs.

This isn’t really possible for the majority of companies, though, and especially not service-based ones.  

Some companies find themselves in this position at some point or another. It’s the realisation that the tactics and strategies that have gotten them this far aren’t enough to get them any further. 

They get stuck asking themselves the question: what happens next?

They know that they need to start marketing and communicating more effectively and efficiently, but when they look at their previous clients, they’ve worked with every type of company of almost every size, and they can’t market to all of these different companies at once. 

The idea of defining a niche when you currently have a diverse client base is a scary one, with a common question being: what happens to my existing clients?

The answer is so painfully simple, it seems dismissive: nothing happens to your existing client base when you start to niche.

By defining a niche, you’ll be able to focus on getting inbound leads, building authority, gaining brand recognition, and more easily closing new deals when they come in.

This will target your new client acquisition efforts in your niche, and position you as the expert in your area - allowing you to attract the kinds of clients that have problems that you can solve.

Your current client retention efforts, assuming you have a great relationship with your client base, will stay the same. These clients will continue to work with you, because what they care about is that you do great work for them and have a great relationship with them. It doesn’t matter to them where your new clients come from, or how you get them.

With that fear, assuaged, it’s time to begin defining your niche. The good news is that your company isn’t too big to niche and, if you can own a niche, you’ll be able to offer all of the services you offer now to a more focused client base, which has problems you can solve and will be very lucrative for you.

Crucially, defining a niche isn’t something that happens overnight or in a matter of hours - especially if you’re starting from zero.

Defining a niche is a process that demands that you look firstly at your client base and the problems you can most effectively solve, then at the types of people you can solve those problems for, and at their customers and the problems your soon-to-be niche solves for their customers.

While it can feel counterintuitive, a strong niche will be very narrow in its focus. Moving from serving everyone to serving a single niche will feel challenging, but the narrower and deeper you can make your niche, the better and stronger your niche will be.

The reason for this is that when you have a narrow niche that you can own, you can more easily become an expert in the types of business that your prospective clients run. 

For example, if your niche is B2C marketing agencies of a certain size, you can become an expert in what makes those agencies tick, what their problems are, and how those problems are best solved.

Knowing everything there is to know about your niche’s challenges and opportunities allows you to better position yourself as the expert in your niche.

Businesses want to buy from people that can solve their problems and that they have confidence can solve their problems well.

Owning a niche and positioning yourself as the expert effectively removes the competition from the equation and - with great service and happy clients - encourages your company’s growth in terms of revenue and in the category you’ve defined.