Choosing Your Digital Marketing Niches

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced the Subject Matter Expert (SME) Approach for selecting a client niche. The SME Approach tells you to go after clients in an industry that you are already an expert in, or at least are very familiar with.

For example, if you previously worked as a car mechanic, consider selling your services to auto body shops. You will have a leg up on your competition because you already know the industry and speak the same language as the business owners you will be talking to. Your prospects will quickly notice that you know what you’re talking about and trust you more than a random marketer that doesn’t understand the business.

The SME Approach is the easiest way to get your first few clients, but not everyone has a subject that they’re an expert in AND needs digital marketing. That’s okay! You don’t have to go with the SME Approach. But if you don’t, make sure to do plenty of research before diving into a niche or just calling every random business you can find.

Follow the rest of the tips in this article, whether you use the SME Approach or not, to further narrow your list of prospects.

Whether or not you decide to leverage your SME status, make sure the niche you choose has the potential to make a lot of money.

The first thing to look for is how often people search for the target services online. Use a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs to research keywords that relate to your prospects. These will tell you how many times per month people search for specific phrases that will drive traffic to your clients. The higher the search volume, the better.

However, some services that don’t get very much search volume have very high profits for each product or service job. These are considered high-ticket services, and you can live with lower keyword search volume for these because oftentimes, getting your client even one customer per month will cover the cost of digital marketing services.

Do some research on the niche you want to go into to figure out how much a business can expect to take home (pre-tax) from one job. Using the auto body shop example, Google something like “bumper replacement gross profit” to see how much a business owner might make off that job.

Once you do your research, try to decide if your niche is high-volume, high ticket, or both. Both is ideal, but one or the other means you may have found a strong niche. 

Most marketers start out targeting local businesses. This is because it is relatively easy to have a successful SEO campaign for a local business vs. a nationwide brand, and because it is much easier to get ahold of the key decision makers like the business owner. Once you gain some street cred, you might be able to start landing some regional or national clients (aka “whales”), but for now, let’s assume you’re starting out with local shops.

This means that you need to not only pick a good industry, but you also need to target a good geographic region. Sticking with our example, now you might want to narrow your niche to something like “auto body shops in Atlanta, GA.” Use SEMRush to research keywords like “bumper replacement atlanta.” If you chose strong SEO niches, you should be able to find a bunch of cities that have solid search volume for your clients’ services. Start contacting the businesses in each city, starting with the cities with the highest volume and lowest competition for service keywords.

Something else to consider when determining the best SEO niches is your competition. How many other digital marketing companies specialize in your niche? Who are the big players? How difficult is it going to be to rank your clients’ websites?

These questions take time and experience to answer, but there are a few metrics you can look to for a rough sense of the competition level when you do your initial research:

Keyword difficulty: SEMRush, Ahrefs, and basically any other SEO tool will give you some type of “difficulty” metric for any keywords you look up. Keyword difficulty tells you how hard it is to rank a website for that keyword. Ahrefs, for example, uses a 100 point scale for KD, where 0 is extremely easy and 100 is almost impossible to rank on the first page. Try to find a niche where the KD is 10 or lower.

Cost-per-click: CPC is the amount you have to pay to have a Google ad show up for a keyword. Google Keyword Planner is the best place to look for this information. The higher the average CPC, the more competitive the keyword.

City Population: Look up the population of the city you’re thinking of targeting. The more people that live there, the more competition you will face. Try to target places with a population between 50 thousand and 300 thousand. This is not a strict range, but it’s a good rule of thumb to shoot for.

Additionally, spend some time looking at the websites for the top businesses that show up for your niche. These will often credit the website designers and marketers. Scroll to the bottom of their home pages to see if you can find the credits, and check out your top competitors. Figure out if and how you can differentiate yourself enough to show your prospects that you can give them the best value.

After you’ve considered the above factors, you should have a pretty strong hunch as to whether you’ve found a good niche. At the end of the day though, you need to take action. Don’t over think it. Eventually, you just have to pick a niche and start reaching out to some businesses. This is the only way to truly determine the best digital marketing niches. You can always pivot if you aren’t landing clients. If you nailed it on the first try, then keep pounding the phones until you’ve dominated your niche for the entire country!

Thanks for reading Part 3 of Lead Hounds’ How to Start an Agency Series! If you still think you could use some help, ask us about our private coaching for digital marketers.

Check out the rest of the series:

Part 1

Part 2