That feeling of mayhem or being stretched too thin in your business might mean it’s time to refocus your niche. Whether you’re selling monogrammed towels on Etsy or digital marketing services, there comes a time to examine the direction you’re headed so you can grow. This is our story of that moment.
In those fork-in-the-road moments, it’s important to pause. First, get really clear about what you want to be doing and what you’re really good at before you go full speed ahead.
Consult with your leadership team and your books to see which services bring your team the most joy and your books the most profit, keeping in mind those things may not be the same.
Then you can focus on making your company the place for that service or your shop the place to buy that thing. Here are some of the benefits of streamlining:
Focus your messaging and marketing efforts
Focus your efforts internally to be more effective and efficient
Save time and energy that would have been spent trying to sell a broader range of products
Get really good at providing (and selling) your core product/service.
The Fiddlehead Journey to Find Our Niches
When we started out as TimeshareCMO, as Fiddlehead was called in the early days, we were a much different digital marketing agency. Like many other agencies and contractors before us, we expanded our scope to whatever digital marketing services we could get paid for. For many businesses, this is how you survive the first years. Maybe you long to support a certain kind of software or client on a specific type of media—but when there’s money on the table, you broaden your reach to stay afloat.
That’s all okay!
Those learning experiences give you a chance to test your theories about what you want to work on and who you want to work with.
In our first days, we worked with a lot of startups. But after a few years, we’ve realized that we are better suited to work with more mature businesses. We weren’t wrong in working with start-ups, and we did great work with them, particularly around SEO, but the experiences helped us learn. We also took on some projects that we didn’t think would be a great fit for us, but turned out to open us up to tactics that we happened to excel at, and we loved doing them. Score!
TIME TO LEVEL UP
If you do things right (and get really lucky), you get to the point where you ask: Who do we hire next? How do we structure our team? How do we give our clients the best service?
To do that, we needed to clarify what kind of agency we wanted to be and what marketing services we wanted to focus on. And since we had taken the opportunities we were given (even if they didn’t match perfectly) we had the space and cash flow to start making those decisions.
We knew that focusing on data would be one of our core values. We threw our efforts and our focus into data analytics because that service will support and strengthen all the others—and reflect who we are as a company.
This focus is more than just words. We:
Hired another FTE who focuses solely on analytics.
Hired a program manager to support the analytics team.
Built an in-house analytics solution to visualize data for our clients and our team internally.
Continue to refine our GA, GTM, SEO, and other diagnostics to give our clients the best base for success.
FOLLOWING THROUGH ON CHANGE
As we’ve worked to shore up our marketing analytics offerings and retire others, there’s a natural rhythm. Some clients move on, and with them, some of the older services.
We’ve also struggled with that urge to say yes to everything.
It can be hard to break survival habits from the early days. We work together to ask tough questions about potential clients and projects that may not fit our core services. Sometimes that’s a hard no; other times we give ourselves time and space to consider the outcome of our options and from that comes more nuanced decisions about what we do and how we can best serve our clients.
For example, recently a potential client asked if we were interested in a type of analytics project we hadn’t done before. This led to us asking:
Is this in line with what we do and what we want to do?
What are the potential business impacts of taking this project?
Is this the best way forward for us as we grow?
Once we parsed it out, we decided that it was something we were interested in doing, it fit within our core offerings, and was something we could do without added overhead, so we moved forward.
RESULTS
The most important result is that we know we have confidence in our key areas: best-of-breed analytics, SEO, and content services. By focusing on the digital marketing services we feel passionately about and do best, we’re giving our clients the best outcomes.
We also have the benefit of depth in each area, allowing us to really home in on the services that have the most potential to lift our clients in the ways that help them reach their goals. By simplifying our offerings, we have in turn pared down the proposal and pitching process and streamlined getting deliverables out the door.
The moral? Don’t be afraid to get specific. It allows you more freedom than you think! It’s okay to cover a wide range of offerings or client types while you figure it out, but there will come a time where you can get picky, and we recommend you do.