17/08/2023
Picking A Local Business Niche: How to Decide?
So I was having a conversation with a Keymaster yesterday who asked me while going through the Turnkey PPC System (my course on how to make money online with Google Ads) this question:
How do I pick a niche when I'm just getting started?
1.Work with people you like 🤩
I always recommend finding a niche that you have some type of positive feelings for. I personally ran a niche marketing agency before which started out as super exciting then became the most dreaded thing I could ever imagine. I launched it during COVID and worked on it the entire time we were locked inside here in Puerto Rico.
Needless to say, it went from something I loved to hated. So bad that after lockdown ended, I stopped working on it entirely and let my team run it for over a year without me until the clients eventually dropped off. Put food on the table, but I just didn't connect with the prospects or clients. I realized just how important it is to work with people you enjoy working with and really want to help.
In Yu-kai Chou's Octalysis Framework, this aligns with Core Drive 1. Epic Meaning & Calling. Pick your niche wisely and make sure you're aligned with your heart. It'll make all challenges along the way easy!
2.Have some damn standards 😜
Even if you're just getting started I highly recommend avoiding the "taking on any client you can" approach. While it can give you confidence early on just getting some traction, it can also make you jaded if they end up being bad fits or worse, they make you look bad. An example of this is doing marketing & advertising for a business that is just getting started.
Odds are the business owner still has a lot of problems they need to figure out in many areas of the business before they're really ready to grow. Areas like operations, service quality, hiring and human relations, website conversion rates, sales and followups with leads generated from marketing, and much more. The best way to avoid this is usually going to be avoid the one-man-bands or sole proprietors. You should also have baseline metrics like minimum annual revenue, number of employees, or other minimums to tell you how well the business is doing and if they're worthy of your time to help grow.
If they're struggling to keep the lights on, they're going to struggle to pay you and apply lots of pressure on you as a marketer. This all creates a toxic environment which having dealt with enough times myself, you never want to go through.
3.Choose a niche that is growing 📈
This may sound like a no-brainer, but it's surprisingly trickier than it looks.
Competition: How many other marketers are already trying to specifically serve this audience?
Local Competition: How many other local businesses offer the same service with no difference in their value proposition?
Market trends: Check https://www.google.com/trends and analyze search trends to see what's gaining steam and what's dying over the year.
Economic environment: In tough times like recessions or depressions, people spend less on some services and more on others. It usually goes away from things people don't need as bad as things they do. Think pressure washing versus plumbers. One makes your house look nicer and protects it from slow decay while the other is an immediate need that if not addressed in an emergency will cause 10s of thousands of dollars in damage!
Recurring customer revenue: Does the business service customers in a one-off fashion or very infrequently, or do they service them multiple times per month or year? The longer the client relationship is the higher the Lifetime Customer Value or LTV is for their business. This combined with effective marketing and advertising equals a powerful force to identify just how much the business can spend on every new customer which makes your job way easier.
Hopefully this helps paint a more complete picture on how to go about finding a great niche that you can help knock it out of the park for! Another way to get a feel is by Google Ads Keyword Research. The higher cost per click, the more valuable the lead is to the business in general. Now just find the inefficiencies in the competitive landscape. Let me know any questions in the comments 👇👇
