Famous to a Few

Originally sent out: 31/10/24

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We’ve won more new business in 2024 than in any of the previous 11 years I’ve run my digital agency.

We’ve achieved this at a time when many agencies are struggling and despite the economic uncertainty, the change in government and the myriad of other external factors.

So, how have we done it?

I realised we only needed to be famous to a few.

Most businesses, including mine for the past decade, try to appeal to everyone.

It’s a fallacy, it’s impossible.

If you are talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.

This time last year, I was having a horrid time in business.

We had won just four new accounts across the entirety of 2023 and I had a team of more than a dozen people with not enough work to do.

The problem?

Evergreen looked and felt the same as every other digital agency.

I went on holiday over new year and had some time to think.

Things needed to change fundamentally if we were to remain in the game.

Cut to early 2024 and I made the biggest overhaul my business has ever seen.

It was the toughest thing I’d ever done.

I had to let half my team go.

I changed what we did and how we did it.

The stress of it all put me in hospital briefly.

I documented the lowest of the lows on my LinkedIn and through our content marketing, as I’ve always thought it’s important to be honest about the reality of running a small business.

Business is not the Instagram of life. It’s brutal at times. If you’re curious to see what I was going through, check out episode 1 of Evergreen Uncut.

The single biggest change I made was in deciding to be specific in who we wanted to work with.

We knew our best work, our greatest results were for home, garden and lifestyle brands.

We knew the clients we most enjoyed working on were home, garden and lifestyle brands.

We knew the products and services we’d consistently marketed over the past decade were very often from home, garden and lifestyle brands.

It was obvious to me that this was where we were meant to be. A truly niche agency!

I told myself:

• Stop worrying about appealing to everyone.
• Stop worrying about alienating those not in our target sector.
• Focus instead on being famous to a few.

That decision was 9 months ago and it’s been a complete game-changer for my business.

We now have a laser focus on who we’re talking to/marketing towards.

We know their pain points and how we can help them.

We create content that talks specifically to them.

We position ourselves as go to experts for ‘people like them’.

If more businesses committed themselves to a niche, a sector, a discipline, a target audience they’d see the kind of explosive growth we’ve seen in 2024.

As I write this, I’m in between conversations with brands who are keen to work with us where I’m having to say we can’t start for 3-4 months as we have a waiting list.

That’s the stuff of dreams for most business owners, it was for me until I realised I could build an incredible business by being famous to a few.

Hopefully this has given you some food for thought if you’re struggling to get the traction you want in your business, regardless of what you do or where you’re at in your journey.

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