Choose Your Agency’s Expertise and Don’t Shut Up About It
Has your agency embraced a niche? Are there specific industries you excel at or services that you focus on?
The first step to demonstrating expertise to land new clients is identifying your agency’s niche and what makes you unique.
When agencies make it their mission to demonstrate their expertise with thought leadership actively, they land new clients.
If you want to grow your agency this year, it’s all about showcasing your expertise and in this post, I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it.
Why Your Agency Needs a Niche to Showcase Expertise
The biggest reason your agency needs a niche and needs to talk about it actively is because data shows that brands are willing to pay more for an agency with expertise in their industry or the type of service they're looking for. In fact, 79% of brands choose and pay more for agencies with expertise than a broad full-service agency.
I know it’s scary to cast a smaller net when trying to land clients, but once you identify and promote your niche, I will give you my word that you’ll land more clients.
A niche and the promotion of said niche also make your marketing efforts a little easier. Instead of spreading yourself thin writing and talking about PR and marketing in general, you should just embrace your niche and only write and speak about what you’re an expert in.
The agency world is very competitive, and you need to embrace your niche and not shut up about it so that your agency stands out.
How to Identify Your Niche
Are you starting to feel like your thought leadership efforts are a little too broad? Now that you know how important a niche is, it’s time to identify what exactly that is.
To get you started, ask yourself the following questions to determine the niche that will work best for your agency.
Which clients have I produced the best results for?
Which industries have I done the most work in?
Which services do I know enough about that I could teach a class on it?
Which types of clients have I worked with that had the best budgets
Which industries and services have I made the most money in?
Which niche can I embrace that doesn’t have a ton of competition?
How to Convey Your Expertise With Thought Leadership
So you have a niche and all that is left is to write and talk about your niche with thought leadership. Like a lot of thought leadership.
The more you get “out there” through your thought leadership efforts, the more credibility your agency will have. And that’s what lands new business.
Here are some really strong ways in which I personally demonstrate my expertise and that I leverage to enhance thought leadership for my clients.
Actively post on all social media channels. You should run channels for both your own and your agency’s image. Use strategic hashtags, follow other thought leaders, and post about things you create or advice you have.
Leverage thought leadership content in your email marketing to give your audience actionable advice rather than a sales pitch.
Guest post on publications that your target audience follows. Identify publications, reach out to them with examples of posts you’ve created in the past, and ask if you can contribute. Once approved, write your article and promote it. If you feel like you’re not a strong enough writer, one of the things that The Campfire Circle helps agencies with is content creation and ghostwriting. We have access to a ton of high-profile publications.
Host a webinar. You’ve embraced your niche and have a lot to say, so run a webinar or two to demonstrate thought leadership. You just need a basic idea of what topic will resonate with your audience, build a landing page, choose a webinar hosting platform, promote your webinar, and knock it out of the park on the date it goes live.
Identify podcasts that your target brands listen to. Reach out to the host and ask if they need any upcoming guests or experts for an episode. It never hurts to ask, and you may be surprised at how many podcasts will want to interview you. The key is to emphasize you want to provide thought leadership rather than promote your agency.
Leverage social proof. Collect testimonials from happy clients and use them on your website, in paid social, in email marketing, etc. Your clients want to see that other brands in their shoes got value out of your agency, so put your testimonials front and center.
Publish your own data in the form of an industry report. This establishes a ton of credibility as people love new data, and it looks great when your agency is the source of that data.
Run a blog for your agency full of thought leadership content pertaining to your niche and address pain points that your agency solves. And, of course, actively promote all of your blog posts.
Final Thoughts: I Need Help Promoting My Expertise!
The hardest part is identifying your niche. It was for me, anyway. I knew I wanted to start a B2B agency and that it needed a clear niche, so I asked myself a lot of questions and went through my 13 years of freelance work, and it became clear that my niche was an agency to grow agencies.
Once you’ve identified your niche, you’ve done the hardest part. With the strategies I outlined, your agency can quickly gain momentum within your niche.
As you can imagine, thought leadership efforts to convey your expertise are time-consuming and require the right connections. That’s where The Campfire Circle comes in. You can get in touch with us here because putting thought leadership on steroids for agencies is one of our most popular services–we’ve got it down to a science.
What niche have you identified for your agency? I’d love to read all about it in the comments below!
