How to Determine Your Niche

You have to have something that is different about your firm. One of the mantras that I say all the time, different is better than better. You're listening to Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. Each episode we have conversations with firm owners and marketing experts about how to attract your ideal clients, foster trust, and build a marketing engine that works for an accounting firm. I'm your host, Matt Banker. I'm. I'm the founder of Benchmark Growth Marketing. You can find more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now, here's the show. I'm here today with a solo episode for marketing for accounting firms. You all know me, my name's Matt Banker. I'm the founder of Benchmark Growth. And one of the things I've really been thinking a lot about, partially for myself, but really for my clients as well, is this idea of niching. And a couple episodes ago, we did a show with Todd Howard on niches for accounting firms. One of the reasons I did that show, and it's still a great show, you should go back and listen to it, is Todd and I are starting to work on some things for accounting firm owners to help them figure out niches. Basically, the problem out there is that a lot of people say, yeah, you should have a niche, but they don't tell you how to choose a niche. How do you know if you've chosen the right one? There's also this idea. Most people think of niches as being one specific industry or target market. Now, there can be real benefits to being known as, you know, the accounting firm for one particular industry. That's not the only definition of a niche. The main reason that you want to have a niche is that you want to create something that is sticky and defensible, something that is a perfect fit and very attractive to the types of clients you want to work with and that those clients can't get anywhere else. And so when you develop a really unique approach, you draw certain people right to you and they're not going to be able to get that service anywhere else. There's this idea. Nobody actually switches to a better accounting firm. They only switch to a different accounting firm. They switch to someone who is offering something different than what they're currently getting. Now, the only cases where this isn't true is when there's like a major break in trust or something. Or like, you know, if there's a huge tax surprise, maybe they'll switch to an equivalent firm, does the same stuff, but just is doing it better. Your cpa, you know, passes away. This is unfortunately becoming a thing that is more and more common, where people are left, you know, without a CPA because there was no succession plan or whatever. But in most cases, they switch because they're looking for something different that they're not getting from their current. From their current accountant. That being said, there's a lot of pushback when it comes to this idea of choosing a niche. There's a lot of fears that pop up. And so that's some of what I want to talk through today. So let me. Let me tell you a little bit of my story first, and then I want to talk a little bit about how this applies to accounting firms. So my name is Matt Banker. I started in 2017. I started a marketing agency called Banker Creative based on my last name. And for whatever reason, I happened to attract a fair number of accountants and financial advisors, wealth management, even some, like investment companies did a couple projects for actual banks. You know, Banker that would make sense. Along with, you know, all kinds of other businesses, nonprofits. We were a generalist marketing firm. I had gotten certified as a story brand guide. That gave us a little bit of a unique approach. Already storybrand at that time was new. The book, the Building a storybrand book by Donald Miller had just come out, and now it's not. It's a little more common. I think there's 400 something Storybrand guides, and a lot of people are familiar with the framework. But at the. At the time, it was really a unique approach. And so being a bit of a generalist, but having storybrand in my back pocket, it was a good. It was a good place to start as far as building a little bit of a niche. And in that community, in storybrand, it's very focused on words. And that's something that I've really taken to heart and is still a core part of our agency is this idea that words first, the messaging, the words on your website, really have the biggest impact on getting people to trust you and to eventually set up a sales call and hire you to do your services. That's true for me. It's true for my clients as well. So I love the words thing. We all. But I also, I have an art background. And so as I built my agency, it was kind of this combination of, you know, story brand plus good design, which made me stand out a little bit from a lot of the other story brand folks who were more copywriter focused and being able to design websites. That was sort of my core triangle of skills. And at first, it was really just me working for any business owner that would come through the doors. I was lucky enough to come across one of my first clients was an accounting firm. I built two websites for them. I built an accounting website and a payroll website for them and developed a good relationship with the owner. He introduced me to some of his peers. Pretty soon, you know, I had a handful of accounting firms that we'd done work for, and that's really what got us started. First, I tried to do a half niche. And here's the mistake that I made. I thought, who are the clients that I want to work with? Let. Let me build an agency that serves the clients I want to work with. And so what I did was I thought, well, accounting firms are great. You know, financial advisors are, are great. Hey, my last name is banker. How would I just work with anyone who works with money? And so we did kind of a half niche. But what I didn't do was really articulate or figure out what makes us a good agency for them. It was very much, you know, what would be good for my business, what kind of clients would I want more of? Let me serve them. But the difference between that, that's a favorite market. The difference between that and having a real niche is that a niche is a unique approach that works for your customers. It's a customer first approach. Right? And so developing the systems and the frameworks and the things that were specifically for your ideal client so that they would want you even more than you want them is a really important part of having a niche. Some businesses just need to uncover that. They need to figure out what it is that is unique about them. And then they're going to find out, oh, this is a perfect fit for a particular type of client. Others do have to do some of the work to figure out how do we serve this industry, this niche, this market better? How do we develop the things that really work for that industry and that and that market? But for me, it was just picking a favorite market and really three favorite markets, four favorite markets at the same time. And they weren't really related. That was the other mistake that I made. You can't go to a conference that has financial advisors and accountants and bankers. You might have them in the vendor booths, but they're not there at the same conference. There's no podcasts for people who work with money in that broad sense. There are no email lists. Now, I don't ever really recommend that you buy email lists, but if an email list exists for a market, it's A good indicator that it could be a good target market for you. But there aren't email lists that encompass all of those things. So there's no way for you to go out for or. There wasn't a way for me to go out and reach all of those markets at the same time. So instead I would have to invest time split between three different markets. I would have to learn about three different types of businesses. A financial advisor, most of their clients, it's B2C, right? Wealth management, it's B2. It's B2C. Business to consumer, you're working with, individuals you're selling to, which is great because it's a broad market. The accounting firms that I was working with, that's a B2B relationship they're looking for. Now, tax pros are B2C as well, but the most of the firms we work with are CAS firms. And so that's a B2B relationship. Business to business. And so reaching other business owners is a very different proposition from a marketing standpoint than reaching the general public and finding the right fits there. You can really go for a volume play if it's B2C. When it's B2B, you have to really know who your market is. It's a longer sales cycle. You have to build a lot of trust over time. And so the types of marketing that we would have to do for these different types of clients was so different. And so about three years ago, I decided I'm gonna. I'm just gonna go all in on marketing for accounting firms. I'm really gonna choose that as my niche. It's not that I don't wanna work with financial advisors anymore, but really like, marketing for accounting firms is my niche. And I would say even at that time, as I went that direction, there was a part of me that was thinking, well, this is, this is a. A good market for me to play in. It wasn't quite to the point where I was able to really think, what is it exactly that accounting firm owners need? It was more along the lines of, you know, who would be a great client for me? Now the good news, I think for my clients and the thing that has really impacted my business is as I started to pay attention to accounting firms, there's this nice idea. If you give a market attention, you will get attention back, even if you don't have a unique approach. And so as I started to give attention to the accounting space, I started to follow influencers. I started to connect with firm owners on LinkedIn. I started going to conferences. I just started having conversations. And I went into it very much with an attitude of curiosity. I wanted to know what is hard for firms like yours. What is working and what is not working? What are the bad experiences that you've had with marketing companies in the past? What are the challenging things for you? And so I started to just learn a lot about the industry. And that really led me then to develop products and services that were really specifically tailored for the problems that we were seeing. And that is really when it started to become a true niche. We launched this podcast. I started writing a lot more on LinkedIn. Like I said, I started connecting with these different, different people. I started following tax, Twitter. There's a lot of places where I was able to get insights. And getting insights into your niche is a key piece of the puzzle. You can't just choose insight, a niche, and then because it's your favorite market. And this is something that I really learned from Todd Howard, who I had on the show before, and I'm going to talk about some things at the end of the episode having to do with Todd. A. A niche is not a favorite market. Because if I said, I, I do marketing for accounting firms and I'm in a room full of accounting firm owners, that's great. I have a lot of attention from all these accounting firm owners. But then someone else could also show up and say, oh, I also do marketing for accounting firms. There's no reason that they would choose me over the competitor in that room. We might get half of the business, but then the tendency is like, well, the only differentiator we have really is price. And so you have this pressure to start driving your prices down because you don't have a unique approach that can command a premium price. Instead, you just have chosen a market that you like to work with, and it's indefensible. Anyone can come into that market. Market. This is a problem that a lot of accounting firms just in general are facing. They say, wouldn't it be better just to have a wide net? And essentially what they're saying is, we will work with any business out there. We want it. We want, you know, client accounting services, client advisory services, whatever your. Your cast practice. We want to work with business owners because we want that monthly subscription model. We want. We don't want to be paid just once a year at tax time. We want an ongoing relationship. We're going to provide value throughout the time. So we'll work with any business owner out there. And the problem is there are a bunch of Other firms that are also saying, we do business accounting. And so I recently went through, and I looked up, I think it was 20 different accounting firms for a city that I was. I was working with a client, and just about every single one of them said, we do some version of bookkeeping, taxes, payroll, and advisory for accounting firms. All of them led with, here are the services we offer, and we offer them for accounting firms. And this was website after website after website. And so if I had done a search in that city for a business accountant and I checked out these websites, I would have seen the same messaging on every single page. And so now, as someone who's trying to decide, who am I going to choose? I'm not going to. I don't know at this point. It's basically a question, well, who's. Who's the cheapest or who's closest to me? I didn't have any real information about why I would choose one over the other. In fact, I was a little bit desperate just for someone to say, we don't work with A, B, C, because at least that would help me understand if I was in or out as far as who they would work with. I see these sites all the time where people say, we specialize in. And then you look at their industry page, and there's like 30 different industries that they specialize in. Now, I know that's just a marketing ploy. It's an SEO tactic because you want to show up for more searches. That is not a niche, and that is not a specialization. And your clients, when they see that, they realize, oh, you're just after all of these markets. It's not that you serve all of these markets especially. I want to go back to this idea of market and niche for a second, because it's not. I want to reiterate that the idea of having a niche doesn't mean you have to choose one market. And this goes back to some of the fears. So a big fear is if you were an accounting firm and you specialized in hospitality in going into 2020, well, all of these hospitality businesses, or let's say tourism, they all shut down, right? And all of a sudden, you're in a really tough spot. Your clients, just a lot, a lot of them just close their doors now. Maybe they still need it unaccounted. Actually, a lot of them did for PPP and all of that. But the idea is that your, your business, because if you had chosen one specific niche, was really susceptible to, you know, market forces that, that you couldn't control something could happen, that could change. And if it's all in one industry, you've got a huge problem all of a sudden if something happens in that industry. And so, you know, we don't like risk, right? And so we have a tendency to say, well, let's, let's diversify. I don't want to just have all of my eggs in one basket. And this is one of the fears about choosing a niche. Well, if I choose one niche, what if something goes wrong with that particular market and this is where it comes back. If that is a fear of yours, if you don't have a super good reason for choosing one particular market, like, if you don't have a background in, you know, maybe if you grew up in an auto shop, your dad was a mechanic, right? Working with auto shop dealers could be a great niche for you. Or, you know, if your. Your parents were architects, you know, whatever that is. I. It doesn't have to be that, you know, maybe your first job out of high school happened to be working for a golf course or something. And so you decide, we do accounting for golf courses. It could be anything like that. You might have a specific skill set, knowledge base that applies. But a lot of times accountants are kind of sitting in this generalist space, and so they feel like I'm just going to arbitrarily choose a niche if I go that direction. That's where, like, fear comes in, though. Like, why would I choose something, put all my eggs in one basket and put it at risk of something going wrong? I just don't know what's going to happen over here. This is the big. The big worry. This is where it comes back to this idea that having a unique way of doing business, having a unique way of positioning yourself, doesn't mean you have to have a single market. I said it before. Having one market has some advantages. But if that's a fear of yours, there's other ways to differentiate. At the core of it, I say you should niche down. You should have a niche. What I mean by that is that if you really want to be successful as a firm, you need to differentiate from the rest of the market. You have to have something that is different about your firm. One of the mantras that I say all the time, different is better than better. I don't know where I picked this up. Someone. Someone said it on a. On a podcast. I don't know. I hope. I don't know if it's copyrighted or what it is. It's a great idea. Different is better than Better. No one switches to a firm that's 20% better than the one that they're currently at, but they might switch if they, they offer a totally different service. Here's an example that I, I, I love to use. As far as differentiation. There's another podcast that I like. It's called Creative Pep Talk. And there was an episode I, there was a guest on there. They were talking about how it's very difficult to be the best in any one category, right? You can't be the best golfer in the world. That would be very difficult. You can't be the best singer, you can't be the best accountant. I don't even know how you would judge that or determine who the best accountant is. So trying to be the best at something is really difficult. But he brought up this example of think of Lin Manuel Miranda, right? He is not Lin Manuel Miranda is not the best historian in the world. He is not the best theater performer in the world. And he is definitely not the best like rapper, singer, musician in the world. But Lin Manuel Miranda is the best historical theater performing musician, rapper in the world. He's taken three things, put them together in a Venn diagram, and it turns out that Lin Manuel Miranda, when you think of like a historical production that has music and performance in it, he's your guy, right? That is the one name that you think of for that spot and he's made a great career. When you're known for one thing or for a really unique approach, people will start coming up with reasons to work with you. They'll, they'll be creative and figure out why they want to work with you. Everybody has something that makes them different and unique and, and the goal for you in choosing a niche is figuring that out. Now, before I wrap up today, I want to, I want to address one last challenge when it comes to this idea of niching. So a big one is most niches like and be known for something. It is very difficult today for a firm to be known for something as a firm. It's much easier for a firm to be known for something through their owner or through a key partner who's kind of the out front, you know, face of the firm. It's hard to develop a niche in a lot of cases when all you're relying on is the reputation of the firm and you don't have a person involved as well. And this is hard. This is actually true for marketing in general for firms, the ones where an owner or a partner is willing to be involved in the content and to, to be part of helping to shape the point of view and to bring, you know, insights into any of the marketing work that we're doing. Insights for their clients. Man, it is so much easier for us to do that kind of work because people want to connect with people. Accounting is a trust based business. This idea that I'm just working with a corporation, you might be small, you won't think of yourself as a corporation, but just, you know, I'm working with a company instead of a person, that's, that can be hard for a lot of people, a lot of business owners to develop that trust. So they like to connect with that person. But accounting firm owners have a tendency to like to retreat. They don't want to be the face of the firm. They don't want to have to be out front. You know, there's exceptions to this. Obviously there are a few firm owners out there who are great on social media. They love being out, out front. What I will say is being an extrovert is one of the things that differentiates certain firms and certain firm owners. Being active on social media, always having an opinion, having good insights. Not everybody is wired that way. And the people who are wired that way, that is one of the ways that they are really building their firm. But that doesn't mean that you don't have something that is really unique and specific and interesting about yourself that will set you apart and it is going to attract people. And as your firm gets more successful, you want to move more and more into a one to many model. As the firm owner or as the principal, you want to be putting yourself in positions where the work that you do helps all of your clients or helps your clients and prospects at a larger audience. And so that's actually why I encourage firm owners. Get yourself out of production over time, but lean into more of the, the marketing efforts. You know, writing your newsletter, doing speaking, running group webinars and coaching for your current clients or for prospects. More of the stuff where if you're, you're doing the work but you're doing it for a lot of different people, that's a better direction to go. And as your, your own unique abilities, your own approach, the things that make you distinct start to become more apparent through that work. Doing the work, doing the writing, being like out in front is one of the ways you actually develop insights and learn how to articulate the wisdom and the insight, the knowledge that you have by doing the work that becomes such a huge value to your team, to your clients and to prospects as A way to grow the footprint, grow the impact of your firm in general. So get yourself out of those one to one relationships and work more on figuring out how do I get into these one to many situations. It doesn't have to be public speaking. It doesn't have to be posting on social media every day. There's a lot of different ways to do this. I don't know, maybe this is a stretch. I just, I feel like this is so tied to having a clear niche. You as the owner become known for something that is going to attract the ideal businesses that you want to work with to you. And the more time you can be spending putting yourself out there as a firm, but through your kind of personal brand, the stronger that attraction is going to be. The processes, the systems, all the things that you've developed, that's for your team to implement and to do for your clients. You are setting the tone, you are setting the leadership direction. All of those things still are you. But the idea is figure out what makes you different as a firm. This is where I want to end it with that idea. Figure out what makes you different as a firm. So the first step is you have to say, yes, I am interested in figuring out what makes me different as a firm. Bad news is I think after this, when this episode comes out, I think we will already have done. We did a webinar on niching and how to find your niche where Todd Howard, who I've mentioned a couple times, he and I walk through the framework that he uses to help companies find their niche. I am a huge fan of this framework that Todd has developed. I think it's so powerful. He and I are talking and you know, it's the sort of thing that I think all of my clients should do. Because even before you get to messaging, which is a lot of the work I do, you really need to know who you are and what makes you unique and who your customers are, all the things that are involved in niche. So he's developed a thing called the niche process. We just did a webinar last week. It's still available for free on the website. So if you go to marketingforaccountingfirms.com niche you'll find the video there and it's on a page where that is for a five week niche workshop that Todd and I are putting together. So we're going to work with a cohort of firm owners. It's going for five weeks to figure out what is their unique approach, who should their target market be, what sets Them, apart from the competition, what does their competition do that they, what do they do that their competition doesn't do? It's really this step by step process. Now, I know it's tax season and so it is a busy time of year for many of our, of our clients and folks that we tend to work with. But I also know there are a lot of firms out there where the firm owner is the only one who's not super busy at this time of year because the team is handling most of the production there. And so this might be a great time for you to spend a little time working on your business instead of in your business. Figure out what your niche is. The first step, if you want to do, if you want to try to figure out a niche, is you got to do the work right as a firm owner, you got to figure out, you know, could we move in a direction of having a niche? I really think that this niche framework is the way to go. I'm not saying you need to do it through this workshop that Todd and I are hosting, but I think it's a great tool. It's the sort of thing that if you do it, you're going to get it done. That's, that's the main thing. So I'll be a part of that group. I'll be helping firm owners along that path. And then Todd is going to be presenting his framework for this. This is a course we're going to run at least once a year is the plan. Maybe a couple times a year if there's a lot of interest. But right now, our next cohort for the workshop, it's, it's going to be five sessions over two weeks, is starting February 19th. I believe it's going to go Monday, Thursday, Monday, Thursday, Monday. So after those five sessions, you're going to have a good understanding of your niche. So go to the website again. Marketingforaccountingfirms.com niche. You'll find the free webinar video there and you'll find the spot to be able to sign up for this niche workshop that Todd and I are putting together. I would love to see some folks here. I hope that this episode has been interesting. I can't believe that I found, you know, 25 minutes that I could just talk about niches. It's a thing that I'm passionate about. It's a thing that I think so many firms could benefit from. It's not, I know there's bias here for me saying this. It's not just a thing we're trying to sell to to people. I think that this is such a key to being able to build a really successful firm. Part of this I know because I have built a niche firm. I am all in on niches. I'm working on launching some other companies right now that are very niche focused. And so I love it. I think it's so powerful. I want to share it. I want to bring people on board to learn about it. And so this is the way that we're doing it through this workshop. All right, I'm going to leave it there for today. Thank you again for listening in. We'll see you next week. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. If you like this conversation and found it valuable, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's really good for the algorithm and it helps other firm owners find this show. You can subscribe to our weekly Marketing for Accounting firms newsletter@marketingforaccountingfirms.com and you can connect with me, Matt Banker, on LinkedIn or Twitter. We hope you tune in next time for another episode of Marketing for Accounting Firms.