Why Work with a Niched Marketing Agency?

A lot of people ask me, if SEO can be applied to any business or industry, why do you guys limit yourself to just working with manufacturers? 

Well first of all we don’t strictly limit ourselves to manufacturers.

Historically we have provided digital marketing to any industry sector, but we’ve recently chosen to niche our business in manufacturing. Whilst we’re not going to stop working with our current wonderful clients, or any business we think is a good fit for that matter, we are now specifically targeting businesses in the manufacturing space. 

This is known as niching and becoming a niched digital marketing agency is something we’re very excited about. And it’s something I want to talk about today.

So why should I work with a niched agency?

The reason for this is perhaps best explained with this simple analogy…

Let’s say you broke your leg and you end up in A&E (bummer).

After an agonisingly long wait you’re wheeled into a ward, where a doctor comes to visit you. He tells you not to worry as he’s a GP and he’s fixed a lot of broken legs in his time.

Now there’s something not quite right with this picture. 

What’s a GP doing fixing broken legs…? 

Marketing agencies have the same issue when they generalise. Effectively you have a business growth problem (the broken leg), which is holding your company back (not being able to walk on your broken leg). You’d like them to solve your problem in order to unlock your company’s growth potential (healing your broken leg).

So why are you seeing a GP, when you should be seeing someone who specialises in broken bones?

Ok, let’s break (no pun intended) it down a bit further and take a deeper dive into why niched agencies are often the better choice when it comes to outsourcing your digital marketing…

1. Profitability always trumps cost

Let’s be upfront here – niched agencies cost more. And for many businesses this puts them off, when they’re comparing them alongside generalist agencies. But this is a false economy. 

Let me explain why.

Marketing costs are always contextual to how large an increase in revenue they can drive over time. This is because, unlike most other business costs, marketing is an investment and like all investments, the cost is only relevant when you know the scale of the return.

Niched marketing agencies may cost more but they have the ability to deliver you much higher returns because they’re focusing all their energies in one particular sector or market. If they’re worth their salt, this will make them much more efficient at delivering results off the back of your – albeit slightly higher – retainer. In other words, niched agencies can deliver you a higher ROI a lot quicker.

Below are some of the advantages a niched agency has over a generalist agency:

2. Expertise

First and foremost, niched agencies know your industry sector because they’ve worked with a lot of other businesses in it. These might not be your direct competition (although they could be) but they will be highly relevant to what you do. A niched agency will know your industry, the jargon, the target market and how to speak your language. And in marketing, this is everything. 

Take copywriting as an example. Many generalist agencies will have generalist copywriters, but niched agencies will have copywriters who write about the same thing day in day out. Over time, this makes them pretty knowledgeable of your field. Generalist agencies on the other hand, may have to source specialist copywriters, conduct lengthy interviews with you, or even pass this work onto one of your team. 

3. Economies of scale

All agencies are able to leverage economies of scale, which is what makes them attractive partners to any SMB looking to develop a marketing strategy. Niched agencies doubly so. The reason for this is because their economies of scale are more focused and streamlined on a given industry and its marketing needs. 

Let’s take an example. If you happen to run a CBD or vaping business, you’ll know that you can’t run Google Ads as Google disallows it (same goes for Facebook or most other paid ads). A generalist digital marketing agency is likely to have a paid marketing team or department. But if you work with an agency niched in this market, then it’s unlikely they’ll have wasted energy growing and developing this part of their business. Their economies of scale will be centred on the channels, the tactics and the people that are relevant to your business. 

4. Contacts and networks

Marketing is about communicating and that means finding third party platforms, publishers and influencers that have the audiences you want to get in front of. Generalist agencies may expend huge amounts of energy reaching out and building relationships with relevant third parties in a given industry, only to never work with a business in that industry again.

A niched agency will have a far smaller pool of relevant industry platforms and people to target. As a result they are able to build and nurture a network of close and reliable contacts that they can leverage over and over again. Having a strong reliable contact list they can trust, means they’re likely to be able to skip all that timely prospecting and pitching and get you and your business in front of relevant audiences quickly, with the kind of content they’ll love.

5. Tailored solutions

Whilst there’s no such a thing as a truly effective one size fits all approach, the reality is that all agencies deploy repeatable processes and tactics. By working with similar types of businesses, niched marketing agencies are able to take this repeatability to the next level, by creating solutions that are tailor made for your industry. More to the point, these solutions and strategies have been tried and tested many times. 

In that sense, niched agencies represent a far safer bet when it comes to coughing up a sizable chunk of your revenue to invest in promoting and growing your business, as they’ve done all this before. Many times. 

Conclusion

Niched agencies are specialists in a given industry because they’ve run successful campaigns for a lot of clients within that industry. And yes, that does tend to make them more expensive to work with. But, more importantly, it makes them very good at solving your business’s particular problems. 

Whether it’s through tailored processes and templates, economies of scale or having a ready made list of industry influencers and journalists to call on to promote your brand, niched agencies know how to get results in your industry faster and better, because they’ve done it before with companies not entirely unlike yours.

So if you’re thinking of hiring a new agency, or perhaps taking one on for the first time, ask yourself – would you rather visit your GP or would you rather call in on a specialist?

Partnering with Superb Digital

I mentioned that we have niched our business in manufacturing. But why manufacturers, you may ask?

Well, manufacturing is an area we’ve had particular success in and it’s a sector we immensely enjoy working in, especially given the inventiveness and ingenuity of some of the entrepreneurs and business owners working in the UK today. It’s a broad area that can cover any number of B2B and B2C businesses, but post pandemic, it’s one that is increasingly reliant on ecommerce and therefore SEO to drive growth.

With an impressive track record and proven results, we thought it a no-brainer to niche and develop our own target market in this area. 

So if you run a manufacturing business or, if you just have an ecommerce store, and you’d like to see some of the success stories we’ve had in your sector, drop us an email and one of our lovely team will send over some examples.

Or if you want to find out how we can bring our marketing expertise in manufacturing to bear on your business, book a strategy call today.