Expert tips for finding your niche and nailing your small business marketing

By Suze English April 7, 2022 10:04 pm

Tom Willis is an award-winning digital marketing expert and lecturer who co-founded Lawpath in 2014, a game-changing service aimed at helping Australians access affordable legal support online. He joined editors Adam Bub and Cec Busby on the First Act podcast to share his business journey and some excellent advice on finding your niche in business.

As a music tutor operating out of his parents’ granny flat, Tom’s first foray into business may seem a far cry from his current life as a marketing guru. Still, he says this early entrepreneurial experience taught him a lot about the power of finding his niche.

“I was quite an accomplished musician in high school,” says Tom. “I didn’t think it was something that I could do full-time, but I found that I was good at helping someone who had never picked up an instrument before to find interest in it. I became pretty good at it, not because I was the best musician, but because I found my own niche.

“At university, I got a job as a marketing analyst, reporting weekly on marketing spend, how many users that was generating, and the revenue generated from that. In many respects, that job changed my worldview on everything. It opened the door to digital marketing, which I didn’t have any real understanding of at all. It was very new at the time; it wasn’t taught in university in any actual capacity.

“I realised this is something that I really want to get into. I could combine the creative angle with leveraging data to talk about things with a little more objectivity.”

Tom Willis, co-founder and CMO at Lawpath

From music to marketing to … law?

When it comes to finding a niche, Tom says Lawpath is the perfect example in both his decision to get on board with his fellow co-founders and the marketing expertise he brings to his role as Chief Marketing Officer.

“I’d created a couple of different online businesses and built some blogs and a couple of online communities,” Tom explains. “I was learning so much about starting a business, but I always struggled with the boring compliance side of it – getting the proper registrations or making sure that I had the right type of contracts in order with clients. After a couple of chats with the other founders of Lawpath and hearing their idea of trying to make the law more transparent, accessible and affordable, I knew this was precisely the cross-section of what I’d been looking for.

“We wanted to make the law more accessible through technology, and we realised that there was so much that we could do in the starting, running and scaling of businesses, specifically for small businesses. Something like 87 per cent of small businesses do not get access to the legal solutions and support they need because of the time and prohibitive costs.

“I knew this myself as a business owner; unless you were at a certain level of maturity in your business, you had to fork out money that you just didn’t want to part with for the right legal advice. Without access to the law through technology, many simply wing it and wait for something to go wrong. It often means the downfall of the business.

“In many respects, Lawpath have created our own category. Everyone talks about big law, mid-tiers and small law. In effect, it’s tiny law that we’re going after; that’s always where we wanted to play. It’s our own category, and I think that’s always been our advantage.”

Listen to Tom Willis on the First Act podcast:

How can small businesses find their niche when marketing?

When finding your niche with small business marketing, Tom says that putting your customer at the heart of your branding is just as important as traditional advertising.

“We learned very quickly that the business owner was whom we were targeting,” Tom says. “It wasn’t the head of operations or the legal counsel; we were dealing specifically with the business owner. So we needed to talk about everything through their lens and put ourselves in their shoes.

“A lot of businesses invest every dollar into online advertising, but there needs to be an investment into your brand as well. You need to create demand that you can harvest based on the fact that people are looking for services like yours. And the only way to do that is to make people aware of what you do by communicating your value propositions and building demands yourself. It takes a two-pronged attack – both branding and advertising – to happen. Then things pick up, and the momentum builds.

“Most importantly, businesses need relatability,” urges Tom. “We try to learn who is using Lawpath, how they benefit from us, and how we can then tell their story. By doing that, we attract more of these styles of businesses. If you’re doing that in the early stage, you can learn so much. I would recommend this to any business owner when they’re starting.

“That can be through having a look at who’s signing up and adding them on LinkedIn, or sending them an email and chatting to them to learn about what they’re using you for and what they would like to see in the service you provide. You can then look to find more like them. You can even ask them to tell their stories themselves – through them being the champion of your business; it allows you to have cut-through because the relatability is so high, and you’re solving a problem they have had.”

Know your numbers

Marketing plays a significant role in the success of small businesses, and Tom says there’s one piece of marketing advice business owners cannot afford to ignore.

“Whatever you’re doing from a marketing angle, you need to be considering what that’s driving on the other side of things. For every dollar you’re putting in, you should be looking at what that’s leading to, how many customers you’re gaining, and then what those customers are worth.

“You need to set targets for what you’re looking to do in terms of acquiring customers, or bringing more leads or inquiries, so you can work out the longer-term value of everything you are doing. A lot of businesses say they tried radio or put up a few billboards, and it didn’t work for them. I ask, what were you measuring? What was your measurement of success? And they haven’t thought that through.

“Making sure you’ve got a straightforward way of measuring success means you can see what brings you more visitors, customers or leads.

“As the saying goes, ‘what gets measured gets done’. And I think that applies to all parts of life.”