How To Own A Niche That Lets Your Branding Agency Thrive
“I push myself on my business stuff like doing my marketing and spending time on my stuff and developing my authority which is different.
You know, it's different than working on customer stuff all the time.”
Emily Wilkins
I'm so excited to share a recent interview I did with one of my favorite students, Emily Wilkins. She's the founder and CEO of Marketing Metal.
What I love about her story and her evolution in the No BS Agency Mastery Program is that she didn't waste any time going all in on a niche.
Once she realized it was the niche for her, she had spent most of the first decade of her career in marketing and sales support at job shops.
When she came into No BS Agency Mastery, she was working with everybody. But when she went through our process of finding her niche, it became immediately obvious that job shops were the niche for her. By narrowing her audience so specifically, she thrived quickly and built herself up as an expert and authority in the space.
I can't wait to share it with you because it's a perfect example of what happens when you own the obvious niche.
Emily developed a radical new process that gets these vital small businesses exactly what they need and empowers them with the knowledge, tools, and resources to build a successful business that will thrive long into the future.
Emily is another one of my go-getter action-takers. Without further ado, here's Emily Wilkins.
The journey to niching, and the challenges
PS: Emily, I am so excited to have you here. It has been just an absolute joy to watch you transform over the last year and a half. I thought it would be fun to bring you on here so that you could kind of share what all has taken place and also some of the strategies that I know have worked incredibly well for you growing your small branding agency.
Let's start at the beginning. Take me back. I think it was September last year, as I recall, it was actually a pretty emotional conversation that we had. What was going on at the time? I think your dog had just passed.
EW: Yes, the love of my life, George, my giant floofball. It was really hard.
And I had won a big website project, and I had the client planning on doing retainer work with me. So I had hired a couple of people because I was building up my retainer clients.
They pulled the plug without any warning and were late on payments and just were a nightmare.
This was the week before Memorial Day of 2021. So I had to fire the two people that I had just hired and gotten up to speed. I felt like my whole world and everything that I had been building was crumbling. I was actually doom scrolling in the parking lot waiting to find out about George at the emergency vet on Memorial Day when I came across your ad and went down your rabbit hole.
The first download I found was the blueprint to a No BS Agency. Everything you were saying made so much sense to me. I had been working my ass off all summer long. I was overwhelmed, tired, and hadn't had a break. And we live in ‘vacation town’ USA, so it's even harder when everybody's out playing in the sun and you're grinding in your house. So yeah, it was a little bit of an emotional time.
PS: Yeah, yeah. I really distinctly remember our conversation. That's a lot of things happening at once.
And just as a side note, people love the retainer clients, right? You feel there's security, but then where's the security? They can just back out. You think they're gonna stick around, but they can totally screw you if they don't.
So yes, retainer clients are great until they're not. You had to let people go. You've been working your ass off. You didn't get to play all summer. What made you join us? A lot of people in that state of mind will kind of just be like, fuck it.
EW: There was a lot. Everything you were saying made so much sense to me.
I was two and a half years into my business, still only getting paid probably less than when I was in corporate America, trying to build something that would give me more free time, not less.
I was just working all the time.
The other thing that really attracted me to your system and program was the authority piece of it. It was super scary to me. I wasn't sure if I really wanted to spend time on the internet positioning myself as an expert and all of this. But at the same time, I knew there were a lot of benefits to that. In future earning potential and having an audience that likes me and appreciates my brilliance.
I liked the community aspect, too, because being an agency owner working from home gets lonely. Being able to talk to other owners in the same position as me and doing the same program was really cool.
PS: That makes total sense. It's really hard to be in your own world in your house, even though you're on Zoom all day with clients. It's still lonely. Let's go back to last year. What changes did you make early on, and what was your experience?
Niching down and building authority
EW: The first thing was niching down. You were trying to get me to do more outreach first, but I let go of those two people and gave myself more space to take a breather.
I was really inspired by everything you were doing. I got a lot of inspiration from the people in the group. So I really went all in on the niching strategy, doing your worksheet of who were my favorite customers in the past, who paid the most, and which were on both lists.
It was super easy. Obviously, I have all these manufacturing clients that I've worked with. It's funny because before that, I didn't really think my career had any rhyme or reason to it. But then, doing those lists, I was like, yeah, obviously manufacturing. That's why I called my business Marketing Metal. It was kind of my idea behind it.
I had been a generalist, taking on whatever project fell on my lap, which presented its own challenges. Blurring the lines of friendship and business. It was liberating to have a very specific customer that I help.
PS: Yeah. That's very specific. These manufacturing small job shops, right? It's so niche. Just a side note for listeners, it was so perfectly aligned for you, Emily, and it made so much sense. I would never suggest someone pick something like job shops off a list if they haven't worked with them. But you had worked with so many of them. It made sense for you. So you picked your niche. Then what?
EW: I redid my website in two days. You had a couple of workshops that gave us time to work through some stuff. So I did that and then dove into the outreach.
At first, it was excruciating. My script was something like, “we've all been disconnected because of COVID, looking to reconnect.”
I had a decent LinkedIn network already. I started engaging more, interacting more, and telling people about my new niche and LP (Lead Product), which I call The Setup.
PS: You started selling LPs and stopped writing proposals?
EW: Yeah, I write the LP brief and get paid for it. It's been great.
Clients love it. It helps them get new ideas and understand their audience better. Most of them have upsold to my biggest package, like super high within the first year, over $30k projects.
PS: Over 30k projects sold from the LPs. And it was a seamless process?
EW: Yeah. Everything you teach us, establishing authority, sticking to the process. By communicating that to them, it closes the door for scope creep.
Results and reflections
PS: So now's your time to brag. You had a really good year last year. What did 2022 look like for you?
EW: 2022 was huge. Shortly after I rebranded, there was a trade show in my town.
I met a LinkedIn influencer in manufacturing who introduced me to Megan Ziemba of Mavens of Manufacturing. She invited me to go on her show.
That led to more podcast opportunities. I was on 12 podcasts last year. I applied for a big conference this year and got confirmed.
PS: Amazing. These are big spots to get, but they're in such a specific niche. Being in that niche, you stand out. You presented yourself as this expert in this specific space. It opened doors quickly.
EW: Yeah, I was on 12 podcasts last year, and five of them were a mini-series on manufacturingmasters.com. It brought a ton of opportunities.
PS: What was the result of that in terms of getting business?
EW: The biggest podcast was the Fabricator podcast. My episode has the most downloads on Spotify and 13,000 views on YouTube. I've gotten quite a few leads from that and people reaching out on LinkedIn.
PS: And how about the projects themselves? How are you doing with retainer clients and bigger projects?
EW: I still have a couple of retainer clients that were grandfathered in. I'm offering an upgrade for existing clients and a quarterly strategy session. We go on-site for a couple of days with cameras, interviewing staff and customers, and put together different videos for them. It's a long day but they love just getting it done.
PS: And what about your lifestyle now?
EW: I have a lot more freedom. I'm not working weekends. I got to play and enjoy the sunshine.
PS: That's amazing. What would you say to someone who's thinking about niching down but scared?
EW: I would say it's scary, but the benefits outweigh the risks. Being an expert in a specific niche brings so many opportunities. It has transformed my business and my life.
PS: That's so wonderful to hear, Emily. Thank you so much for sharing your story. It's inspiring to see what's possible when you go all in on a niche. Thank you for being here.
EW: Thank you, Pia. It's been a pleasure.
That was Emily Wilkins, founder and CEO of Marketing Metal. If you're interested in learning more about how to transform your small branding agency and find your niche, check out the No BS Agency Mastery program.
Here’s what you need to get…
Niching down can be scary. But Emily demonstrates that if you target your outreach, build authority, and shift away from retainer clients, you can significantly increase your revenue and work-life balance.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to learn all my other tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!