Chapter One

DAY ONE:
Choose Your Niche Market

MANY BUSINESSES resist niche marketing. The most common reason is that they’re afraid that by focusing on a niche they’ll miss out on opportunities outside of that particular area. However, the reality is that by focusing your marketing on a niche you will stand out from your competition and eliminate many of the potential objections people have about doing business with you.

Here’s an example of a clever approach to niche marketing: In 2009, Matt Sonnhalter switched the focus of his Berea, Ohio, advertising and marketing agency from business-to-business (B2B) industrial manufacturing accounts to working only with companies that sell products to professional tradesmen. In other words, his clients sell to people who work with their hands, including electricians, machinists, and facility managers, among others.

He even created a new category for his business. Instead of defining Sonnhalter Advertising as a B2B company, of which they would be one among thousands, Sonnhalter now calls itself the first B2T, or “business-to-tradesmen,” agency in the world.

This niche focus has had a tremendous effect. Sonnhalter has been so successful that it’s been listed on BtoB magazine’s top agency list from 2009 to 2012. Then in 2012, the company ran an ad with the tagline “Is your agency dirty?” (This is a reference to the fact his clients sell to people who get their hands dirty.) Not only has this ad accounted for 20% of the agency’s new business leads, but it also won the prestigious Davey Award, a prize given for the best advertisements created by small agencies.

By focusing on this niche, Sonnhalter Advertising has attracted business from large global brands who are also targeting this niche audience. This is particularly impressive since his agency only has eight people. When they call, Matt Sonnhalter says the process of selling to them is much easier. “We don’t have to respond to requests for proposals or trudge through a long qualifying process,” he says. “They already know we understand this market better than anyone else.”

But niching doesn’t only work for services like advertising. It can be beneficial for physical products as well. Darlene Tenes’ company CasaQ designs Christmas ornaments with a focus on the Latin market. The fact that her products have a specific niche audience helped her land a contract with a major department store.

One day she went to a Latina Style Business Series luncheon. The keynote speaker was from Macy’s. As soon as the luncheon ended, Darlene rushed over to the speaker and gave a 30-second presentation on her products. She described them as similar to a successful competitor’s brand—but with a Latino flair.

The buyer was intrigued and gave Tenes her card.

“I immediately went back to the office and packed up a sample box of items with a handwritten note,” she says. “They were thrilled to discover my line of products.”

What was the result of her niche marketing approach? “Eight months later,” she says, “my products were on their shelves!”

Tenes’ Latino niche gave her a distinct edge when it came to selling Christmas ornaments. She wasn’t competing against all the other products on the market. Hers were the only ornaments with a unique aesthetic appeal to the 16% of the U.S. population that’s Latino.

How a Niche Can Improve All Areas of Your Business

Matt McCormick owns JDC Repair, a company with four retail shops in Washington state and Chicago. “We used to fix a ton of different cell phones, but about nine months ago, we decided to discontinue every repair except for the three basic Apple products.” They now only fix broken iPhones, iPods, and iPads.

Despite some initial concerns that he would lose business by having such a limited niche focus, McCormick’s switch more than doubled his sales, from $500,000 to $1.1 million in just over a year.

Since his employees only needed to learn about fixing one product line, they became better and faster at what they were working on. “The quality of service has gone up significantly,” he says. “This means happier customers and fewer problems.”

The smaller niche has also had a beneficial impact on training new employees. “We can now fully train new technicians in about two to three weeks—instead of seven to eight weeks—because they only need to learn about six major repairs instead of six major repairs and twenty minor repairs.”

Why You Need a Niche

Let me raise an important point about niche marketing. Focusing on a niche doesn’t mean you have to give up all your other business. However, when you implement the One Week Marketing Plan, you’ll find the results will be greater if you zero in on a particular group of people. You may become so successful with this one group that you find that they’re worth focusing your whole business on. Alternatively, over time, you may develop a series of niche marketing campaigns.

It’s up to you.

Whatever you eventually choose for your business, for the purpose of making the One Week Marketing Plan work for you, you’ll want to develop the campaign around a specific niche.

The primary reason I’m stressing selecting a niche has to do with the fact that there are two basic steps to acquiring a new client: attracting their initial attention and then motivating them to do business with you.

It may come as a bit of a surprise, but of these two, getting a prospect’s initial attention is often the most challenging part of the whole process. The world is so noisy, with so many marketing messages, it’s tough to break through the clutter.

The Easy Way to Create a Message That Matches Your Market

Marketing to a niche offers a simple way to overcome that problem. You are no longer addressing a general audience in the hopes that a small percentage of them are interested in your message. By focusing on a niche, you can communicate a very specific message concerning specific problems you can cure.

This instantly adds to your credibility. People assume that if you demonstrate that you understand their problems, then you also know the solution. When prospects see a reflection of themselves in your marketing materials, they’re willing to stop to see what it is you have to offer.

One of the biggest objections businesses face (particularly those offering services) is “but my business is different” syndrome. When you target your marketing to a very specific group of prospects, this objection quickly goes away.

For example, let’s pretend you’re a Silicon Valley engineer and you just made some money from stock options with the startup you work for. You’re very nervous about your taxes because this is the first time you’ve ever been lucky enough to deal with this issue. Until now, you’ve worked for start-ups that went bust before your sweat equity was worth anything.

You’re searching the Internet and you see listings for two free reports. One is called “7 Ways to Save Money on Your Taxes.” The other is “The 7 Biggest Tax Mistakes You Can Make with Your Stock Option Profits.”

Which of those two reports would you pay the most attention to?

Obviously, the answer is the second. It sounds like it was written just for you.

Any Business Can Find a Niche

For most businesses, finding a niche isn’t too difficult. In fact, the biggest challenge people often face is deciding which niche market to focus on first. It’s been my experience that anyone can find a great niche market that will be highly interested in what they do.

Even a comedian.

Dan Nainan is a professional stand-up who performs clean comedy around the world. “I quickly realized that comedy is a very low-paying profession for most of us,” he says. “Most mainstream comedians struggle mightily, earning perhaps $25 on weeknights and $75 on weekends working comedy clubs.”

But Nainan changed the economics of his profession by focusing on a niche.

“Early on, I concentrated on the Indian (South Asian) market, which has led to amazing results. I can earn literally two hundred times that in one show—up to $15,000.” If a comedian can niche his market, so can you.

Kinds of Niches

Let’s take a look at developing your niche market from a few different perspectives. To start, there are two large typical categories for niches:

   1.   Industry: This is pretty straightforward. You target companies in a specific type of industry. Industries are classified by either an SIC or an NAICS code. A helpful website to review industries you might want to focus on is at naics.com/search.htm. Remember that one of the first questions prospective clients typically ask is, “Who else in my field have you worked with?” Focusing on an industry niche is the most common way most people target their business. But it’s not the only one.

   2.   Function: Another approach is to pick as your niche a job title, regardless of what industry they’re in. For example, you could offer a training program on interviewing skills for human resources executives, whether they’re in telecom, retail, or software. With this type of program, it doesn’t make a difference what type of industry the HR manager works in.

Not surprisingly, niches can overlap between industry and function. If you offered an interviewing skills program, you could target HR managers in the retail industry. The trick to identifying the most hyper-responsive niche is to have it be as small as possible (so each person in the niche recognizes that you provided solutions to their problems), while large enough to be economically viable. This is where judgment ultimately plays a huge role. As you are working on developing your One Week Marketing Plan, especially if you have not developed one in the past, you’ll find it easier to focus on as narrowly defined a niche as you can.

Dana Humphrey of Whitegate PR, a boutique PR and marketing agency based in Astoria, Queens, found a unique industry to specialize in. When she started her company in 2007, she was a generalist, working with artists, musicians, and clients in consumer products, even olive oil products. After a period of self-reflection on the types of clients she most enjoyed working with, she’s developed a specialization in the pet industry. “Every year we attend the big pet trade shows—Global Pet Expo in Florida in February and SuperZoo in Las Vegas in the summer,” she says.

According to Humphrey, there are more than 11,000 pet product companies in the country and only six PR firms that specialize in this niche. She now has a business in which she is recognized as one of the leaders in her field and faces far less competition for new business.

Finding Your Niche

Let’s turn our attention to finding a niche for you to focus on for the marketing campaign we’re going to develop together. If you have an established business, the best place to start is with your current list of clients. Make a list of all your clients over the past couple of years and let’s do some analysis.

    •  Are there any common industries, functions, or problems that jump out as you look at the list?

    •  Is one group of clients spending more money with you than others?

    •  Is one group easier to sell to?

    •  Who were the clients that you most enjoyed working with?

The clients that you’ve worked with in the past can give you great clues about where to focus. Building on your current strengths is one of the easiest ways to become the predominant expert in a particular area.

This exercise is beneficial because it may help you discover some trends that weren’t apparent. I had a friend of mine who’s a chiropractor do this. She immediately noticed something interesting about her patient list. Four of her favorite clients were in the same women’s softball league. She didn’t know if this was simply a coincidence or if there might be more to it. Working mostly on a hunch, she decided to ask the team captain if she could bring her portable chiropractic chair and offer free treatments to the players after the game. They said it would be fine.

These free treatments attracted more new clients and led her to focus her practice on women engaged in sports. She found that as an avid tennis player in her forties, she had a natural affinity to this niche group of clients. As she commented later, “In hindsight, it seems so obvious that this is who I should be focusing on. However, until I took the time to really examine my client list, I wasn’t able to see that this group really stood out.”

There’s another set of questions that is worth thinking about as you’re starting to identify a niche. Steve Harrison owns a company called Bradley Communications, which helps authors of nonfiction books get national publicity. He suggests asking yourself these questions as you analyze your list of current clients:

    •  Who has the strongest desire for what you do or know?

    •  Who could spend the most money for what you do or know?

    •  Who would make the most money from what you do or know?

    •  Who are you most passionate about serving?

    •  Have they demonstrated a willingness to spend money for your types of products or services?

    •  Are they easy to reach?

Sometimes your niche market shifts over time. According to Internet marketing guru Tom Antion, author of The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing for Small Business, “I started out with the goal of being a great public speaker. Over time I achieved a level of success so that other speakers started asking me to help them.” This led him to the niche of creating products and services for those who wanted to improve their public-speaking skills.

As Tom’s business serving speakers grew, he started to focus on selling his information products on the Internet. Once again he was successful. “I got so good at it that people asked me to teach them how to sell their services on the Internet. That led to my current career of helping small businesses sell information products more effectively on the Web.”

The Reason for Being in Your Niche

You’ll have more success in marketing to a niche if you develop a story that explains why you’re focusing on a particular group. For example, Tom Antion has a great story: He got so good at what he did that other people wanted to learn from him.

One of the most compelling stories you can tell is your track record of success in a particular niche: “I’ve helped others just like you achieve a goal/solve a problem because of my in-depth understanding of the unique dynamics of the industry or function.” This is a very compelling marketing flag to wave, and it tends to get a lot of attention.

Another valid reason for focusing on a particular niche is that you previously worked in the field. For example, Joe Polish, who has developed a highly successful niche of teaching carpet cleaners how to get more new customers, was himself a carpet cleaner earlier in his career. Financial advisor Setu Mazumdar, who specializes in working with physicians, is himself an MD. This gives him a level of credibility that most others in his niche do not have.

In other cases, a family member or a friend in a particular niche needed help with an issue. They told you that you were such a big help that you decided to assist other people with the same issues.

An alternative story is that you are the person who takes lessons learned elsewhere and applies them to a particular niche. This approach can be pitched as: “The problem with the XYZ industry is that everyone is doing the exact same thing. I’ve worked in 17 different niche businesses and can apply the best practices outside your industry to make you successful.” Business consultant Jay Abraham has built a highly successful practice this way. By positioning himself as having worked in dozens of different niches, Jay does a masterful job of communicating that his broad perspective is a compelling reason to engage with him.

The important point is that you need some reason for why you are focusing on this group. However, why you’re in a niche is not as important as a thorough understanding about the current problems the niche faces. Hopefully, you already have a sense of this. If not, one day of studying the industry on the Internet will give you enough information to develop a list of the top five key problems.

A List of Factors to Consider

At this point you may have a clear sense of what niche market you want to focus on. Alternatively, especially if you’re just starting your business, you may be struggling to decide between multiple options. As I mentioned previously, many people worry that by focusing on a niche, they’ll miss out on potential business.

So let’s be clear about what niche marketing is.

I’m not suggesting that your entire business needs to be focused on only this one niche. Rather, this is about a specific marketing campaign. Over time, your business may have multiple marketing campaigns, each directed at a particular niche audience. When you look at your business in its entirety, you may notice that customers and clients come from a variety of different niches. That’s fine. All we are talking about here is the most effective way to attract clients to you. In order to accomplish that goal, a highly targeted niche-marketing message will beat a general message to a broad market every time.

As I’ve been sharing, there are a number of factors to consider when selecting a niche market. In this next section, I’ve compiled 14 additional items to consider. Some may be more important to you than others, but they’re all worth thinking about.

   1.  The Size of the Market: There are trade-offs that are worth considering. My former boss at Kraft Foods used to refer to this as the “fisherman’s dilemma.” You can choose a pond in which there are a lot of fish, but the banks will be filled with fishermen, or you can choose a pond in which there are few fish, but fewer anglers crowding the bank.

             The key point is to make sure you know the size of the market before you jump in. You don’t want to look back a year down the road and realize that the market isn’t as big as you assumed. Market size should factor into your decision, but it shouldn’t be the only point you consider. The truth is that you can still make a lot of money by focusing on a very small niche. Conversely, you can have great difficulty gaining entry into a large niche, especially if there are a number of large established players.

   2.  Growth: Is the marketplace you’re thinking about growing or shrinking? How many new people are entering the niche who may need your products or services? For example, one of the reasons sales training is such an attractive business is that there is a continual stream of new people entering the field who need training on the fundamentals of selling.

             Alternatively, I had a client who was in the CD manufacturing business. With digital downloads, that’s a business that is shrinking fast. Will there be a market for CDs in the future? Sure—but it won’t be huge, and it won’t support a lot of players. As common sense would dictate, you want to focus on a business that’s growing.

   3.  Reachability: This is a huge factor. You want to focus on niches where you can easily reach the key decision makers. Are there magazines just for the market you are targeting? Associations? Are there other people selling products or services to this group that you can joint-venture with or rent a mailing list from?

             This can trip up people who define their niche through attitudes or behaviors such as “I market to people who are seeking greater fulfillment in their lives.” It’s tough to find those people.

   4.  Geography: Sometimes this is important; sometimes it’s not. One question you need to answer is if meeting people face-to-face is crucial for your business. Would you be happier doing business with people you could sit across from? Or would you be just as comfortable communicating with them by phone and email? Some businesses (such as Realtors, dry cleaners, dentists) have a natural geographic focus. Other times the geography issue is more a matter of preference. However, it’s important that you check your assumptions. You may think you need to interface with clients face-to-face when in fact you don’t.

             When I began my career as a marketing consultant, I assumed that I would need to physically see my clients. The reality turned out to be that phone, email, and eventually Skype sufficed just fine. In fact, of the 30+ clients I’m working with currently, I’ve only actually met one of them face-to-face. This is not to say you shouldn’t focus your marketing on a particular geography, just make sure you’re making that decision for the right reasons.

   5.  Men vs. Women: One way of super-focusing your niche is to target a single gender. I work with a female financial advisor who originally focused on retirees. That’s a tough market with lots of competition. She changed her niche to widows, because as a widow herself, she has a natural empathy for this audience, as well as a story to tell that lets them know that she understands them better than any of her competition.

   6.  How Passionate Are They? There are certain markets where people will buy practically anything you offer. Golf and fishing are two great examples. Why else would I have a dozen drivers in my garage? My cousin Stan has boxes of fishing lures stacked up in a shed. He can’t seem to resist the latest infomercial that promises that this next lure will enable him to catch a fish the size of Jaws. Personally, I don’t get it. Then again, he doesn’t understand my ever-expanding collection of golf clubs.

             One of the things that makes passionate markets very attractive is that people are likely to simultaneously buy products or services from competing companies. When I hire an accountant, it’s unlikely I’ll hire another one. That’s not the case in passionate markets. It’s likely I’ll buy from you and your competitors. The downside to passionate markets are that they tend to be very crowded and the competition is usually first rate. The reality is that we all can’t market to a highly passionate niche, but if you can, you have an immediate advantage. That said, if we can make what we do the least bit “sexy,” we can tap into this passionate hook. This is where the automated messages we send out can play an important role.

   7.  How Passionate Are You? You can sell anything better if you care about what you’re selling. The woman who markets financial planning to widows really cares about what happens to them. This comes through in everything she communicates, and her prospects pick up on it. I’m a marketing geek and can spend hours talking passionately with similarly minded geeks. Even if my clients don’t have that much interest in the topic (aside from the end result of getting more or better clients), my passion for what I do increases their level of comfort in hiring me. My dentist goes on endlessly about the newest advances in fighting gum disease. Although it bores me to tears, her passion does make me more willing to follow the suggestions she makes. Prospective clients will pick up on your passion, so the more your work reflects what you’re a “geek” about, the better.

   8.  Is There a Need? Unfortunately, simply having a lot of passion isn’t enough. The people you market to have to understand they need what you have to offer. Missing this point has caused many computer and Internet start-ups to go bust. The founders thought they had a great idea for a product, but there wasn’t anybody else who cared about it. Just because you want to open a vegan raw food restaurant doesn’t mean there are enough people in your town who actually want to eat that way.

             On the other hand, if the commercial district in your town is only serviced by food trucks, your sit-down sandwich shop should be a sure winner. It’s important to remember that just because you think there’s a need, it doesn’t mean one actually exists. Why more people don’t talk with prospective clients about whether they’d be willing to invest in a service before jumping whole-hog into a business remains a mystery to me.

   9.  Price Sensitivity: How much money is your niche able or willing to spend? Are you selling to bigger corporations or smaller ones? To the affluent or the almost broke?

             You can accept as gospel that some of your prospects will think your prices are too high. In reality that has more to do with how well you communicate the benefits, but the market you choose to sell to will also influence how much you can charge. You can charge more money for a tailored product to a specific niche than you can for its generic version.

             For example, let’s suppose you offer a time-management training program. As a generic one-day program, you’ll hit the price ceiling at around $99 per head to attend. But suppose we offer time management for sales representatives? Now we’re in the $200 per person range. Time management for pharmaceutical reps? More money. Time management for pharmaceutical territory managers? Even more.

             You get the idea. The more that you can position your product or service as meeting the needs of a specific niche, the more that niche will be willing to pay for it. The reality is that there’s usually not a huge amount of difference between the generic Time Management for Everyone program and the others, but the perception is that “this is something that meets my unique needs.”

             It would seem self-evident that you’re far better off selling to people who have money rather than those that don’t, but unfortunately many budding business owners don’t fully think this through when they’re selecting a niche. For example, many entrepreneurs target the very small business community as their niche. The reality is that micro-small-businesses usually have very little money. They may have a need for what you sell, but their ability to pay for it is likely to be another thing entirely.

             Sometimes you need to be a bit creative with finding the right niche that can afford your services. This is certainly the case for those who offer job search services to the laid-off or unemployed. Not surprisingly, this group has little money and is extremely frugal about spending what little they do have. However, the “outplacement” industry, which basically sells job-search assistance, owes its success to targeting a different niche than the out-of-work individual. With a bit of research, the industry discovered that they could sell outplacement services to the corporate human resources department. Thus a service that was a bust in one niche (unemployed workers) became a huge success when marketed to a different one (the corporations laying off employees).

             In a similar fashion, selling expensive products to students doesn’t make sense, but selling to their parents does. An example of this is a company called Creative Circus. Their niche market is creative types who haven’t settled on a career but don’t want a typical job.

             Creative Circus offers a $45,000, two-year training program for people who want to be copywriters and graphic artists, which is well beyond the reach of these young adults. However, their parents are often able and willing to foot the bill, so the marketing is directed at them.

             You also want to consider whether you want to sell to corporations or to individuals. Generally speaking, you can charge corporations more money; however, it usually takes longer to get paid. There’s also more bureaucracy to deal with, and the sales cycle is longer. However, once you secure a large corporation as a client, they may remain with you for many years.

   10. Is Seasonality a Factor? There are some businesses where seasons matter. If you’re selling to teachers or accountants, this can be extremely important. You can’t sell accountants anything during the first five months of the year.

             I have a client who sells custom software to accountants. He hangs out on a tropical island from January to May, then works really hard from June to December.

   11. Competition: How much competition is there in your niche? Ironically, having no competition is a big red flag about the viability of the niche. None of us are so smart that we’re the first ones to think about selling something to a particular group of people. It’s very rare that what you’re offering hasn’t been offered before. A lack of competition may mean that there’s not much hunger for it or that it’s available for free on the Internet.

             Instructional videos are an example of this. Ten years ago you could command significant money for all sorts of videos that would teach various things. YouTube significantly changed the economics of that business. If you’re thinking about producing “How To” information, it’s a wise move to find out how much of it is currently available on the Internet for free. However, just because the generic version of your topic is available for free, that doesn’t mean that you can’t earn good money with a niche product. There are lots of free videos about how to hit your driver longer. It’s doubtful that I would pay money for another generic video, unless it was done by a celebrated golf pro. However, I probably would invest money on a video that targeted the over-50 male golfer who suffers from lower-back issues.

             Ideally what you want is bad competition. There are enough competitors to make you feel good about the viability of the niche, but they’re doing a lousy job at marketing their products or services. By following the strategies I discuss in this book, you should be able to capture a nice share of the market. Very few people in any niche implement the type of marketing program I’m going to have you develop, so you’ll have a significant competitive advantage.

             If there’s intense competition in a niche and they seem to be doing a good job of marketing, you’ll need to ask, “What can I offer that others can’t?” “Is there some way I can position my products or services that is different from the competition?” If you can’t come up with a reasonable answer, you might want to think about a different niche.

             This was a challenge I faced when I decided to focus on developing a marketing consultancy with a niche market of consultants, advisors, and experts. It quickly became apparent that this niche was crowded with marketing consultants, many of whom were quite good.

             As I analyzed the competition what I noticed was that most of them focused on one or two aspects of marketing. There was an Internet expert. A social media advisor. A person who would teach you how to write a sales letter. Lots and lots of consultants who had expertise in a particular component of the overall marketing strategy.

             But there wasn’t anyone who was focusing on the marketing system as a whole. No one was working on the question of how do you attract the initial attention, build a relationship with the prospect, and eventually turn them into a paying client? I decided that there was an opportunity to position myself as the “marketing system” expert. It turned out that this was an untapped area within my niche, and my business blossomed as a result. Just because there is a lot of good competition in a niche doesn’t mean there isn’t room for you, if you can offer something that the others aren’t.

   12. Can You Use Pain & Gain? The classic twin levers in motivating people to buy something are “Pain & Gain.” Either people want to avoid pain (or get out of the pain they’re currently experiencing) or they want to achieve some sort of gain. Both of these levers are important, and you’ll notice as we dive into the implementation of the One Week Marketing Plan that we will use both of them. However, they each have their own unique benefits, and we will use them at different stages of the client-attraction process. Pain tends to be more effective for getting people’s initial attention. Of course, we will need to show our prospects that they can achieve the desired outcome (Gain) before they’ll give us money, but Pain is what will tend to hook them initially.

             Closely related to Pain is Fear. If we can communicate a message that focuses on the Fear of Some Pain That May Occur, it’s likely we’ll get a lot of people interested in what we have to offer. As one of my marketing professors said, “It’s easier to sell fear than it is prevention.”

             For example, if you’re selling water heaters, you’ll get more attention when you say, “You have an 85% chance that your water heater will explode all over your house if it’s more than five years old,” than you will if you say, “Buy my heater because it will save you money over the next five years.”

   13. Your Advantage: You’ve probably heard of the term “unique selling point,” or USP. The term was developed in the 1940s by advertising executive Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates Inc. Many business owners feel pressure to develop their USP, which usually becomes little more than an exercise in frustration. After all, for most of us, there isn’t anything truly unique about what we do.

             However, you may be able to combine elements of what you do and create a service that others in your niche are not offering. For example, I discovered that while the advice I was providing was helpful, the real need was in implementing a marketing program for my clients. As I analyzed this, it made perfect sense. My clients tend to spend most of their day delivering their services. They simply don’t have the additional time or energy that’s necessary to implement a marketing program. Eventually, the proverbial light bulb went on and led me to offer Done For You Marketing programs. Now I had two advantages: 1) focusing on a marketing system rather than just a single activity, and 2) offering a service in which we actually do the work.

             Now, is this truly unique? No, not really. Many other marketing consultants offer the same scope and services, but none of them were playing in my niche.

             This is one of the reasons why you want to subscribe to all of your competitors’ newsletters and mailing lists, even if they serve a different niche than you. There may be something they’re doing that you can transplant into your niche, which gives you a unique advantage.

   14. Is There Potential for Additional Business? Although by implementing the One Week Marketing Plan you’ll have consistent streams of brand-new prospects, the reality is that it’s easier to sell something additional to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer.

             Not surprisingly, a niche that will purchase goods or services from you repeatedly is far more attractive than one that only buys from you once. The type of business you’re in dictates some of this, but it can also be influenced by how you structure your services. Accounting services are rather straightforward. If the service is good and I don’t get audited, I’ll most likely return next year.

             A dry-cleaning business has a similar built-in advantage. As long as they don’t lose or destroy your clothes, you’ll keep returning. This is why dry cleaners offer lots and lots of coupons to first-time customers. Studies indicate that once you’ve made three visits to the same dry-cleaning establishment, it’s their business to lose. That’s what they’re betting on when they initially offer you a great deal to clean six shirts for the price of one. They know they’ll make a lot of profit off you if they can get you in the habit of using their services.

             For other types of businesses, you may have to be more creative. A web designer who also offers SEO, mobile apps, social media development, and even ghostwrites your blog will have an opportunity to sell multiple services to a single client. Thus, as you’re considering what niche to focus on, this is also a great time to think about what you offer clients and if there are additional services that could make you stand out from the competition. I’ll talk in more detail later about how to develop joint-venture relationships in which you partner with others who can deliver complementary services.

One Important Note: You need to be aware of any legal or regulatory issues that govern your services or niche market. For example, financial advisors have compliance issues that limit what they can communicate on websites and in their marketing materials. Lawyers have restrictions, as do physicians.

If you are working in a niche that has restrictions and you can figure out how to handle the regulatory hurdles, that gives you an advantage. You’ll have a barrier to entry that other people need to overcome if they want to enter that business. I do a lot of work with financial advisors and have a thorough understanding about what they can and cannot do to attract new clients. That gives my firm an advantage that many of my competitors don’t have. In some cases it may make sense for you to enter a highly regulated niche simply because once you master the learning curve, you’ll face a limited number of competitors.