Is Focusing On a Specific Niche Really That Important? To specialize or not to specialize, that is the question. (The answer is yes.)
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
One of the most common mistakes I see businesses make is lacking specialization. For years, I personally fought this, with the mindset that specialization would limit the amount of potential clients I could work with, so I ran my marketing agency as a jack-of-all-trades offering services to any business that knocked on the door. Fast forward to today, qnd I have seen the power of specialization through both my own business and dozens of clients.
Why Do I Need to Be Niche-Specific?
Practice makes perfect, and that applies in the business world as much as anything else in life. By being niche-specific in whatever your business does, you are constantly getting in repetitions and practice at the same things over and over. It allows you as a business to become an expert at your craft in one particular vertical, often times making you the subject-matter expert for this particular niche.
Niche-Specific Doesn't Mean Turning Away Business
Well, yes and no. First and foremost, you can specialize in a specific niche, but still work with clients in other niches. Specialization doesn't mean you only work within that niche. You can also refer that business out to a partner who specializes in other niches. In the long run, however, as you begin to specialize, you will focus your marketing and sales efforts into your niche, which will lead to a decrease in leads outside your area of specialization and a dramatic increase in leads in your new vertical.
Related: 5 Steps to Carving Out a Niche Business
How Do I Find My Niche?
You can find your niche through research and marketing into a particular vertical. For example, if you're a marketing agency, pick a vertical that interests you and doesn't have a ton of competition. However, in my experience, more times than not your niche will find you.
For example, many of my family members are in the legal space. My dad is a lawyer, sister is a lawyer, mom is a court reporter, and many of my friends and their friends are also in the legal space. This naturally has led me to understand this vertical, and over time, I've continued to gain more and more clients in this space. This vertical fell into my lap, and once I started to actually focus on it as a target, our agency quickly grew to service dozens of legal clients.
How Will Being Niche-Specific Help My Bottom Line?
One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs is scaling their business. Being niche-specific and engaging in the same tasks and processes over and over is one of the easiest way to scale. Once you perfect these processes and procedures, it is much easier to train employees to do this at scale when compared to a business that does not vertically specialize.
A business can certainly succeed without niche specialization, but in my opinion, having a particular niche will increase your changes of success, make your business more scalable, make you a subject-matter expert in that industry and, perhaps most importantly, improve your bottom line.
