By Neil Patel

You’ve heard of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and even Amazon. It doesn’t matter where you live in the world, the chances are you have heard of those companies.

But have you ever heard of Danaher, Fortive, AmerisourceBergen, Centene, or Archer Daniels Midland?

I bet you haven’t heard of any of those companies.

These companies aren’t small either. Here’s how much revenue each of them generates a year:

• Danaher – $29.45 billion
• Fortive – $5.25 billion
• AmerisourceBergen – $213 billion
• Centene – $118 billion
• Archer Daniels Midland – $85.25 billion

Now that’s a lot of revenue. These companies didn’t get to where they are by accident either. And although they might not be as “sexy” as Nike or Apple, they still generate a lot of cash.

We don’t work with all the brands that I mentioned above at my ad agency, but we do work with some of them as well as dozens of other billion-dollar companies you have never heard of.

And although our primary objective is to help our clients (which we do, hence we were awarded agency of the year and the 21st fastest growing company by Inc Magazine), we also learn a lot by consulting with over a hundred publicly traded companies.

Here are some of the marketing insights that you aren’t thinking about that billion-dollar companies leverage on a regular basis.

Lesson #1: The riches are not in the niches

Marketers always talk about finding a niche and how it is easier to market in a niche.

That is totally wrong. It’s not easier to market in a niche.

Think of it this way… what’s easier to do… rank number 1 for the term “credit cards” or “heatmap analytics tool”.

It of course is easier to rank for terms like “heatmap analytics tool”, which funny enough is what one of my former companies does.

But what happens if very few people ever search for terms like heatmap analytics? Sure you’ll get high rankings so you could claim it is easier to do marketing for that product, but if you barely get any traffic and sales from that term does it really matter?

See, rankings don’t mean much. All that really matters is are your marketing efforts paying off.

To keep it simple, are your marketing efforts driving you revenue profitably?

And although niche industries aren’t as competitive, it is harder to generate sales or even traffic. But if you go broad and you go after industries that are applicable to everyone, such as health insurance, it’s much easier to get traffic.

Sure you probably won’t get anywhere near the amount of traffic as the competition, but even if you get 1/100th of the traffic you can still build a big business.

That’s why I don’t go after niches. I go after massive TAMs (Total Addressable Market).

And yes health insurance isn’t sexy but United Health Care, a company most people don’t think about, generates $287 billion dollars a year in revenue.

The bigger the market, the more customers, and the easier it is to make some money. Now, it will be harder for you to …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog

Author: Aaron