So, you got the SEO firm up and running and every day you’re finding new companies and new industries you think will explode with some SEO help. One day you’re chasing chiropractors then the next week divorce attorneys. You dip your feet in, reaching out to your flavor of the month clients, either through cold calling if you have the nerve, online advertising, or direct email. You’re all over the place constantly attempting to master the nuances of a particular market. Unfortunately, in today’s SEO world; relationships and deep understanding about a particular market are mandatory. That deep understanding needs to include solid marketing experience within the field, a strong handle of its terminology, its sales cycle, and the customer demographic.
Specializing
In SEO and social media marketing, specializing serves several purposes. It keeps the cost to the client down, minimizes your overhead, generates leads for you, and lowers your firm’s own marketing budget. How does specializing do all this?
Keeps Client Costs Low
During the initial stages of link building and digital marketing for your client, your firm will need to network with hundreds of websites to get back links or referrals. This process takes endless hours of research and emails and somebody has to pay for it, either you or the client. Now, if you had specialized in a few particular niche markets from the start, you’re first few clients would as I say “prime the pump”.
With specializing, you will develop positive relationships with professionals and websites from all over the web with your first few clients. Now when you get additional clients within the same field or related fields, you already know where you can place pieces and you have a working relationship with hundreds of site owners. Now a hundred person hours has been reduced to a fraction of that.
Generating Leads
When you contact another business owner or website owner you open the door to new contacts within your target niche. If you maintain yourself as professional, knowledgeable and offer insightful advice at appropriate times, you can actually develop customers through link building for existing clients.
Minimizing Your Marketing Budget
When you develop leads through one of your business activities for current clients, you save on leads, marketing lists, time and energy researching prospects.
By positioning yourself as digital marketing expert in a particular field, you separate yourself from the competition who seeks to service anyone in any field as long as they have a checkbook and marketing expense account. When your company’s sales cycle shortens in regards to signing clients, your marketing expenditures are reduced.
Keeping an Eye on Quality
Hunting around for qualified writers and content developers is going to cut into your profits or cause you to have to charge your client more. This is the new web and baby pieces with some keywords sprinkled around isn’t going to cut it anymore. Pieces written by people outside of the industry don’t seem to carry enough weight with readers or website owners.
The writing needs to be of the highest quality and if you are constantly jumping around looking for content writers and developers who are experienced in a particular field your chances for big problems occurring increases. Content generated by those well versed in the particular field will always be better than someone doing it as a onetime occurrence. That applies to whether its articles, videos, infographics, or pictures and memes.
Good quality work has a better chance to provide excellent results and ROI. The last added bonus is that having a portfolio with clients who have excellent content on their sites will impress future prospects increasing your chances at closing more deals.
What is the right niche for you?
What are you passionate about or what great ideas do you have for a particular industry? Better yet, what fields do you have experience in? I worked my way through the bartending ranks in Long Island, so I have lots of experience in the food and beverage business. This means I understand the market and know how to engage the customers.
Find industries that you can cross-market. One example would be; daycare centers, pediatricians, tutors, karate. All these businesses cater to children and their families. Having contacts across multiple related businesses helps you help your clients by providing content and content sharing partners.
Keep close tabs on your contacts as you build links and develop contacts. Also keep track of potential link partners for future projects and prospecting.
Remember to tailor your sales approach to you particular niche. Remember that since you’re an expert in promoting business “A”, you can provide a value driven service due to your firm’s background and success in helping similar businesses.
Don’t turn away business just because it’s outside your specialty. This article isn’t about turning down business. You do have to be honest about your skills and your firm’s ability to deliver quality services. If you feel the job is out of your scope it is better to refer it out and keep the customer happy than take something completely foreign to you because you “Need” to keep the income tap flowing.
Keep it Professional
When you decide on a niche and acquire your first few clients in that niche make sure to keep it professional with everyone you come into contact. That includes not using any sort of spam email system. It seems crazy to even have to mention this but people and even big firms still use templated emails.
Do your homework: Research the field and niche you want to focus on. Decide what kind of SEO/Social mix would best suit the particular industry. Not every business is the same.
Start becoming part of the community: Once you gain some understanding in a field and land a few clients, join groups that cater and network with your target audience. LinkedIn, hands down, is the greatest tool for this. Each week I write a particular blog post that targets the group I am focused on in my niche. I post them, as well as interact with any members that may like or comment about the article.
It’s often easy and out of desperation that those in our industry take any job when first starting a business. The problem is there’s always a learning curve when you take on a different kind of project. However, if you specialize, each client will be from a targeted market and your experience will reduce any learning curves and help maintain quality of work across your customer base.
