To niche or not to niche? Or is that neesh? Welcome to The Marketing Accelerator Podcast, featuring three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker. I had a client tell me that I have a talent for making the obscure obvious. If your marketing effort is a bit foggy, well, let's talk. Today, I'm speaking with Corey Morris. He's the CEO at Voltage. That's a premier digital agency focusing on digital marketing and websites. Corey, niching down your business has advantages, but also some fears. Let's start with how you define niching down, or is that neeshing down?
Corey Morris: Yeah, to me, that is niching down. It's a word I've used a lot over the past couple of years as we worked through a process of looking at it and applying it to my company, a digital marketing agency. We didn't start with an industry vertical or industry of focus. We instead turned around and looked internally at our services and the line of services that we do and where we were doing the best work for our clients and prospects and where we should be talking about the smart things that we're doing in our authority position in the industry.
Drew: Now, you've worked through that "niching down" process at Voltage. Tell me about that experience. How did that work?
Corey: Yeah, so we went through kind of an introspective, challenging exercise to look at where we were doing good, better, and best level of work in our services. And so, there were a couple of things that really stood out that we felt like we could go toe-to-toe in a pitch and prove it and validate it against any other marketing agency or group in North America. And for us, we identified those as search marketing and websites for the right formats and the way we do those. Other things, though, were just harder to maintain and more of a drain in terms of resourcing and staffing and being at that same level of experience and expertise. And so, we had to overcome some fears of what we might lose being full service and the range of things and understand how that was going to impact our relationship with our clients and the level of expertise we brought to them.
Drew: So, now that you've narrowed your offering down, it's turned you into a lean, mean machine. What have you learned from this experience?
Corey: Yeah, by not having to have the pressure of doing everything and knowing that some things are great, some things are okay, we had a chance to really lean into what we were good at. And when we started doing that, it got really easy to talk about what we do with a level of quality and passion. And so, our elevator pitch went from being a hundred-story building elevator pitch of having to go five levels deep before you really understood and picked out maybe some things that we did to say, we do these two things and we do them as well as anyone. We can back that up. And so, by doing that, it naturally unlocks some strategic partnerships and opportunities. We became less complicated to understand what we do and people could find other full-service agencies or other partners or coaches or people in our industry could say, hey, go to Voltage. They're the SEO people. They're the paid-search people. They're the web people. And in turn, by not holding on to all these things that we were trying to do in-house and protect work, we were able to turn around and pull in others or send great work their way as well and be a really good partner in our industry, as well as to our clients.
Drew: Simplicity is good for everything! The Marketing Accelerator Podcast is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.