Peter Vander WallFounder driving creative community growth

Targeting Local Businesses isn't a Real Strategy

Name: Targeting Local Businesses isn't a Real Strategy
Uploaded: 2025-10-02T17:02:13+00:00
Duration: 27 s
Channel: Peter Vander Wall
Description: Short spoken advice (YouTube) arguing that a useful niche must provide a competitive advantage. The speaker explains that geographic targeting (e.g…

2 Oct 2025 · 0 min

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0:27

Short spoken advice (YouTube) arguing that a useful niche must provide a competitive advantage. The speaker explains that geographic targeting (e.g., choosing a local accounting firm) is not inherently advantageous, and that specialization (an accounting firm that serves marketing agencies) is a stronger, differentiating reason a client would choose one firm over another.

When you niche down, you need to pick attributes that are going to give you a competitive advantage. Like if I'm going to target businesses in my local area, that doesn't give me a competitive advantage. I live in Indiana. I own a business in Indiana. There's no reason I need to work with an Indiana based accounting firm though. So if I'm considering a firm in New York versus a firm in Indiana, it doesn't matter. That doesn't change the playing field at all. But if one of those firms specializes in marketing agencies, I'm a marketing agency, and one of them works with anybody and everybody, then who am I going to pick? I'm going to pick the one that specializes in me.