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It’s a big question for lots of agencies: to niche, or not to niche?

Before niching, Kelly Molson’s agency Rubber Cheese was “anything and everything to everyone”. They were a full service agency, with clients from multiple sectors including finance, healthcare, and food and drink – until a chance project changed everything.

“One of our food and drink clients led us down into the visitor attraction space,” Kelly explains. “We built a ticket booking system for Plymouth Gin’s visitor centre. It worked really well, so they rolled it out to five of their other distilleries. Before we knew it, we’d built this platform that was running six visitor centres.”

In 2019, they went all in on the tourist attraction space, focusing all of their outbound and inbound marketing on it.

The result? “The absolute worst year of Rubber Cheese’s whole existence,” says Kelly.

Despite this, and despite the pandemic, the agency kept ploughing on, until a key move turned things around: “We realised you can’t really call yourself a specialist without fully understanding the sector you’re working in. We saw a gap in the market, and launched a podcast.”

“Within 6 months, it became the leading attractions sector podcast in the UK.”

This, along with a benchmarking report they developed in partnership with an agency within the sector, saw Kelly’s agency’s profile rise significantly, helped them build relationships, and position themselves as industry experts. It also meant that by 2022, they were in a position to sell.

“There’s absolutely no way we would have sold if we hadn’t niched in the first place,” says Kelly.

For Chris Unitt, founder of One Further, there was no pivoting necessary – he already had his feet firmly planted in the arts and culture sector.

“I was handed the reins of a prominent arts and culture blog in Birmingham back in 2008. That led to doing training for arts organisations. I then joined a web agency that worked in arts and culture and my profile in the sector kept growing.”

Once he set up his agency, it was all systems go.

“Finding clients was never scattershot. I didn’t have to do networking I hated. Referrals came easily. There were obvious places to meet people – conferences, membership organisations. It was so much more targeted.”

“It means we also don’t pitch much, as we’ve worked very hard to position ourselves as the go-to in the sector for the services we offer. Experience and reputation compounds over time and puts us ahead of what others can offer”.

For Chris, the challenge is actually resisting the temptation to broaden out.

“We’re in arts and culture, but actually around 90% of our work is there. The other 10% is charity and public sector work through referrals. There’s always that question of whether we should push those services more or just stay focused.”

In this session, Kelly and Chris will talk through their own journeys to finding their niche, how their agency has benefited as a result, and the advice they’d give to anyone else who is looking to explore the world of niching too. If this is something you’re thinking about, this is the session for you.