Hi Reader, the riches are in the niches. We’ve all heard this many times, me included, yet I’m still marketing my own business way too broadly and wonder why I don’t have a Ferrari* parked in my driveway (yet).

How I’ve picked “niches” before

I would take our client list, see which industry they were in, consider if I’d like a lot more of those businesses as clients, and then go off and create content and landing pages targeting that industry.

The big problem was this was WAY TOO BROAD.

Like hundreds of thousands of companies just in the US, broad.

Which meant the content I would write wouldn’t resonate other than the word “tech business” - and everyone is using “tech” to run their business!

So what changed?

Interesting clients…

The penny that dropped

I still want to have a semi-broad range of businesses we work with at Growth Experts. That’s who I am, and naturally I want to work with businesses doing all sorts of things. (I’d never be able to be a Google Ads business that only works with injury lawyers in the state of Pennsylvania. ☠️)

But the penny dropped when we started working with a handful of NPOs.

I think the most interesting part of this was my preconceived idea of what an NPO is. To me there was FIFA (Generate billions in revenue, taken mostly for themselves, pay off small countries to keep the president in power and oh, also play soccer) and NPOs that help the poor in war-torn countries. There was no middle ground.

And after looking around and seeing what our NPO clients do, I see there is a massive middle where NPOs are building and doing some really cool stuff!

Some help business owners sell their company to their staff. Others train people on how markets and food systems work. Some run platforms, collect data, or build tools that thousands of organisations actually use.

NPOs as a niche is still broad

Yes, this is true, but it's shown me where to look. The organisations we're working with aren't charities. They are established NPOs doing ambitious work in specific industries themselves, and that helped me go down a rabbit hole to determine the type of NPOs we know we can help, and are there more of them that we can find.

What can you take away from this?

The simple lesson is to go past the broad industry targeting.

The better lesson is to wait and see what clients come your way and if you’re finding that you’re excited about working with them and you’d genuinely like more of them not because of the revenue, but because of the work, then you’ve stumbled on a niche to double down on.

This has been my experience with NPOs, and one other niche we’ve stumbled across (more on this one in a later newsletter. Sorry, not sorry)

Lastly, I want to say that this has taken years to get right. Lots of mistakes, dead-ends, sometimes going too broad and sometimes going deep on niches we didn’t care about.

Take your time finding your niches. Because I know I’d be dreading coming to work every day if all I did each day was analysing injury lawyer keywords and their CAC budgets.

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See you next week!

Jason

*As much as I love Ferraris, I don’t actually want to own one. 😅