You Don't Need a New Website to Reflect Your Niche Offer

By Nate Freedman

Nate Freedman

By Nate Freedman, owner of TechPro Marketing

I’ve written at length about how, if you really want to expand your business and generate more qualified leads than you know what to do with, you need to “niche down” your business and you need to do it now. Instead of going after the largest audience that you can (and becoming a “jack of all trades, master of none” as a result), go after a smaller and more specific segment of that audience that you can position yourself to serve in a better, more organic and more forward-thinking way.

For many people, this will require them to slightly rethink their approach to their core business. They’re not necessarily changing what they do, but are instead recalibrating whom they do it for.

Once you’ve chosen that niche, the next most obvious question becomes, “What other changes will this trigger? Do I need an entirely new website, for example?”

In my opinion, the answer to that one is clear: “Maybe, but definitely not yet.”

There are a number of more important things you need to do first.

Let Your Niche Dictate Your Marketing

I’ve spoken with clients in the past who tell me that they’ve recently decided to focus on a specific customer niche. That’s terrific — but when the next sentence out of their mouth is some variation of “. . . and then once I do X, Y and Z I’ll be ready to reach out to customers,” I stop them cold.

Repeat after me: just because you’ve picked your niche doesn’t mean you know your niche.

To get to that point, pull back on the website redesign and start reaching out to people now.

Find people in your niche and talk to them before you make a big, up-front investment in redesigning all of your collateral. Have real conversations with people about what they like and don’t like, what they care about and what scares them.

Never forget that your most valuable marketing collateral — your most effective marketing collateral — is you. To put that resource to good use, you need to get out there and start asking questions.

Ask people to describe to you what their top problems are. Take more notes than you know what to do with. Then, ask yourself “if I had skipped this step and just redesigned my website straight away, would I have created something that aligned with what these people are telling me?”

The answer is a resounding “probably not.”

The other major benefit of this is that even in a smaller group like a niche, not all prospects are created equally. People care about different things and they all have different ideas about what their futures should look like. If you plant your flag in the ground today by way of an instant website redesign, you’re potentially leaving a lot of unique and wonderful ideas on the table.

In other words, you need to go on a little bit of a recon mission. Collect as much detailed, actionable intelligence as possible and then really think about everything you’ve just learned. Figure out what …

… fits in with your own larger strategy and think about what you can do to genuinely help all the people you’ve just spent so much time with.

You want to dominate your niche market, right? Well, this is how you do it.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

All throughout this time, be sure to use good, old-fashioned “door-to-door” tactics to start ramping up your customer base. Think about the people you already know in your niche and get into contact with them. Ask some of your existing customers for introductions to new ones. Start attending market-specific trade shows and conferences and take full advantage of any networking or other opportunities as they arise.

Once you get those first few customers the old-fashioned way, THEN you can start thinking about redesigning your website to better match the new message that you’ve spent time crafting.

None of this is to say that your website isn’t important if you’re in the process of niching. Far from it — I’ll always believe that it’s one of the most effective marketing tools that you have. But if you don’t get out from behind your computer and in front of these customers, your website isn’t going to reflect this new path.

To fully take advantage of what choosing a niche really means, you need to get the best possible understanding of your target customer base that you can. You need to be willing to ask questions of people and, more essentially, listen to what they have to say.

You need to think about selling solutions to problems, not just technical specifications sheets for products and services. You need to resist the urge to think to yourself “if I can only get my website where it needs to be, the leads will start rolling in!”

Yes, that’s true — but it isn’t true just quite yet.

Once you take these steps, you’ll be able to hone your message. Once you do that, your website will fall into place. Once you do that, it will create a ripple effect that positively impacts your SEO, your PPC, your white papers and brochures and the lot of it. But it’s not the destination, it’s the journey — you can’t skip to the end and expect the results to be the same without everything that came before it.

There’s a lot of work that you still need to do to become the “overnight sensation” you dream of being. Provided you’re willing to do it, your marketing collateral, including your website, will get to the point where it more or less takes care of itself.

Nate Freedman is the owner of Tech Pro Marketing, where he helps MSPs and other IT-related businesses strategically find their niche market and dominate it to the point that they become the one market authority that everyone just knows to go to for solving IT-related issues. Follow him on LinkedIn.