Agency Positioning: What It Is and How to Choose Yours

On first calls, agency owners often tell me they know they should specialize but haven't done it.

Agency positioning is picking which clients you serve, the specific problem you solve for them, and the reason they should choose you over the next agency on their list. Your tagline and website come after those choices and express them. Your positioning shapes who contacts you and what you can charge.

If your positioning is vague, here's the order I use with agency owners to fix it:

1. Find the pattern in the clients you've already done your best work for.
2. Ask those clients why they hired you.
3. Put the problem you solve into one sentence.
4. Decide who you're not for.
5. Check that the market can support you.
6. Test the sentence on sales calls.
7. Rebuild your website, proposals and content around the version buyers respond to.

What are the 4 key points of positioning?

Strong positioning answers four questions a buyer is already asking:

• Who do you serve? Be specific about the industry, the stage or the size.
• What problem do you solve that they'll pay you to fix?
• What visible result do you produce?
• Why you over the obvious alternatives, including hiring someone in-house or doing nothing?

If you can answer all four in one sentence, you have a position. If your answer to those four questions takes a paragraph, you haven't picked a position yet. I made one sentence the rule in my book, The Attraction Agency.

Why does positioning come before more leads?

Agency owners ask me for more leads more than anything else. In my work with owners, more leads help most once buyers can tell who the agency is for and what it does differently. I start with positioning, a rule I call Positioning Before Pipeline.

When the message is generic, more leads mean more conversations that go nowhere. You write RFP responses for prospects who were never going to pick you, while your team gets pulled off client work to build the pitches. And you keep lowering your price, because the prospect can't see a difference between you and the next agency on the shortlist.

Referrals get lost when buyers can't tell what you do, too. In a 2015 survey of 523 professional services firms, 51.9 percent of respondents said they had ruled out a firm someone referred to them before ever speaking with it. The most common reason, given by 43.6 percent, was "I couldn't understand how they could help me or my firm."

Clear positioning has given the agencies I work with better conversations with buyers who already know why they're calling, and the pipeline work gets easier from there.

Why does a narrow focus make your case studies more persuasive?

I saw what narrowing does to case studies at Foundry, the custom software agency in Minneapolis that I co-founded. Early on we worked with a lot of startups, because we were nimble and cheap and the work was easy to win. We said yes to almost anyone who called.

Saying yes to anyone stopped working as we grew toward 50 people. We needed bigger clients, and we couldn't rely on whatever came in the door. We narrowed to financial services and manufacturing.

Once we'd done good work for a national bank, that work became our best pitch to the next bank. Shown to a burrito chain, the same bank case study got a polite nod, because the work didn't translate to a restaurant.

Case studies sell inside their category. Each project in your chosen market becomes a case study the next buyer in that market can see themselves in.

Won't positioning cost us the other work?

Nearly every owner I take through positioning asks the same question: if you lead with one thing, will clients stop buying everything else?

I answer the fear of losing other work with Tires Plus. People drive to Tires Plus for tires. Brakes are the last thing on their minds, but once your car is up on the lift and the tires are off, the mechanic can see your brakes, and that's the moment they sell you a brake job. Tires Plus advertises tires because that's where it has put its expertise.

In my experience, an agency with a clear specialty gets asked for more work, the same way the tire shop sells brakes. Once a client trusts you to fix the outlet, they ask whether you can do the light switch too.

Your other services are also less visible than you think. Owners I work with are often surprised when a longtime client says, "I hired you for SEO. I didn't know you could do websites." Clients remember the one thing they bought from you.

Start narrow, then add offers once buyers know you for the first one. If you're worried about the revenue in between, here's how to narrow your agency's niche without a revenue drop.

What are the ways an agency can position itself?

An agency can position itself by industry, by service, by the kind of buyer and problem it serves, or by a combination of two.

By industry

Industry positioning makes you the agency that knows how credit unions, law firms or medical device makers buy. Case studies from one client sell the next client in the same industry, which is what happened at Foundry.

By service

Service positioning means owning one kind of work across many industries, like brand identity or conversion work for online stores. If you position by service, sell what the service achieves for the client.

By buyer or problem

Buyer or problem positioning means serving one kind of situation wherever it appears, like companies launching their first product or replacing a website that no longer fits what they sell.

Pick the route where your strongest work and your highest margins already overlap.

What does strong agency positioning look like?

Side by side, weak and strong positioning are easy to tell apart. The pairs below are made-up examples, except the first, which comes from my book.

• Weak: "We help businesses grow." Strong: "We help fintech startups reduce customer churn with better onboarding experiences."
• Weak: "We're a full-service digital agency offering everything from SEO to social." Strong: "We help family law firms turn search traffic into signed clients."
• Weak: "We work with mission-driven brands." Strong: "We help national nonprofits raise more from monthly donors."
• Weak: "We have bandwidth for your project." Strong: "We've built 14 B2B SaaS onboarding flows, and we know which patterns keep new customers from leaving."

You could paste any of the weak lines onto a competitor's homepage without anyone noticing. Strong lines tell the wrong buyer to keep scrolling. I see the mission-driven line constantly, and my reaction to it is unprintable.

Of the four pairs, the bandwidth line matters most. "We have bandwidth" appears on agency websites and in LinkedIn posts, and all it tells a buyer is that you have room on the roster. A buyer might reasonably wonder why you have so much room. When you sell capacity, you compete on price and availability, and anyone can match those. When you sell expertise, you compete on pattern recognition and outcomes, which are hard to copy and easy to charge a premium for.

Buyers hire the agency they believe understands their problem better than anyone else they've talked to. Specific language is how an agency earns a buyer's belief that it understands the problem.

How do you find your agency's positioning?

Choosing a position means saying no to some work. These are the steps I take owners through, in order.

1. Start with the clients who already chose you

When you look back at past clients, skip the biggest logos and the highest invoices. Think about three projects where your team did its best work, the relationship was good and the client paid what the work was worth. What industry were those clients in, how big were they, and what problem brought them to you?

You're finding a pattern that already exists and making it intentional. The projects to look for are the ones where you made money and made a difference for the client. Plenty of agencies already have a position sitting in their client list and have never put words to it.

2. Ask those clients instead of studying competitors

Positioning guides tell you to research your competitors. In a services business I think competitor research is mostly a waste of time, because so many agencies sound like everybody else anyway. Your clients will tell you what's good about you and what will work.

When an owner hires me, I start by recording their version of what the agency is good at, then ask for introductions to six to ten clients and interview them about the same things. The gaps between the owner's version and the clients' version are where the work is. When I report back with "here's what your clients are saying," owners lean in further than they ever do for my opinion.

3. Put the problem into one sentence

Clients wake up thinking about problems, like a brand that blends in or a launch date that won't move while the team is already buried. Buyers rarely want SEO for its own sake. Clients buy SEO to get an outcome, and the outcome is what they're paying for.

Your positioning sentence should say who you serve, the problem you solve and why you're the right fit. Read the sentence aloud and cut every word a buyer wouldn't use about their own situation. Keep named industries and named problems, and drop words like transformation, innovation and full-service. For help with the wording, see agency positioning statements that hold up on sales calls.

4. Decide who you're not for

Deciding who you're not for is the step I see agencies skip most often, and it's the one that makes the rest work. Turning down a project that doesn't fit feels wrong when payroll is next Friday. Every project outside your market still spreads your team across work it isn't best at and pulls you back toward the chasing that was hurting you in the first place.

You can keep taking some off-position work for now. What changes first is what you go looking for: the prospects you pursue and the work you pitch should belong to the market you chose.

5. Check that the market can support you

Before you commit, check that the niche can support the agency you want to run by asking:

• Can you find these buyers? Check for an association they belong to, an event they attend or a job title you can search.
• Are there enough of them? Winning a small share of the market should be enough to keep your team busy.
• Can they afford you? At Foundry we narrowed toward banks and manufacturers partly because we needed clients big enough to pay for the size of work we did.
• Does the need keep returning? A problem that comes up again and again supports an agency, and a one-time event leaves you hunting for a new client every time.

Treat the four market questions as a filter for which niche to test on the sales calls in step 6. They won't tell you how big the market is or how much buyers spend, so they narrow the choice without settling it.

6. Test the sentence on sales calls

Take your best version into discovery calls before you touch the website. When you describe who you serve and the problem you solve, watch the prospect. A follow-up question, or a story about their own version of the problem, is a good sign. A polite nod followed by a change of subject is a bad sign.

Past clients make a good test audience too: ask a few people who hired you before whether they'd pick you again if this sentence were all they read. I've watched agencies debate positioning internally long after a handful of discovery calls could have settled it.

7. Put it everywhere a buyer looks

Once the sentence holds up on sales calls, rebuild the homepage around it and point your content at the buyers you've chosen. Then carry it into proposals, case studies and the answer your team gives when someone asks what the agency does. Off-position projects tend to fade as the inbound changes.

Your content should cover your buyers' problems specifically, because broad marketing tips any agency could publish won't help. Content is the evidence that your expertise exists, and it builds trust with people who haven't met you yet. I've written more about differentiation that holds up against competitors who look alike from the outside.

What does narrowing look like for a full-service agency?

In The Attraction Agency I tell the story of an agency that called itself full-service. It promised everything from branding and video production to SEO and social media, and to prospects its message felt scattered.

Its owners narrowed the agency's specialty to B2B SaaS onboarding. Held up against the four key points, the position looks like this:

• Who: B2B SaaS startups.
• Problem: customers who leave because onboarding is weak.
• Visible result: lower churn.
• Why them: they put all of their effort into that one area.

An example sentence for that position, the one I use in the book, is "We help B2B SaaS startups reduce churn by improving onboarding." As I tell it in the book, prospects understood quickly what the agency stood for, referrals came more easily, and its average project size more than doubled. Doubling project size was one agency's result, and yours will depend on your market.

How do you position a creative agency?

Creative agencies follow the same method, with one extra trap: they tend to lead with the portfolio. A portfolio shows you're talented. Every other agency on the buyer's list has one too, so a portfolio alone rarely decides who gets picked. Lead with the buyer and the problem and use the portfolio as proof.

One New York creative agency I worked with, long established and with household-name brands on its roster, had been introducing itself like a generalist creative shop. After its positioning work, the inbound skews to projects the founder wants, and discovery calls move faster because both sides can tell early in the call whether it's a fit.

What gets in the way?

Almost every agency I work with runs into the same obstacles.

Founder identity comes first. Many owners built their reputation as the person who could handle anything a client threw at them, and letting go of that reputation is emotional work as much as strategic work. Start with how you introduce yourself. I lead with the kind of people I want to meet, and the rest of what I can do comes up later.

Cash pressure makes positioning feel like something for next quarter, and I won't pretend it's easy to pass on a project when your bank account says otherwise. You can keep taking some off-position work while you test the new sentence, as long as you stop going out looking for more of it.

Partnerships turn positioning into a negotiation. With several partners at the table, the language gets diluted until it could describe any agency. Agree before you start which partner makes the final call, and have every partner test the sentence on their own sales calls so the debate runs on what prospects said.

How do you know your positioning is working?

Prospects start describing your agency the way you'd describe it yourself, which happens when every place they met you said the same thing.

Referrals get more specific once the people recommending you know which buyer and problem you're for.

Prospects argue about price less, in my experience. When a prospect understands what you're built to do, the fee becomes part of the conversation instead of the whole conversation. Value-based pricing becomes possible once positioning is solid.

Your team starts agreeing on which clients to pursue and which to pass on, which I've seen happen in agencies I work with.

First calls move faster once positioning is clear, because a prospect who found you through content or a referral already understands what you do.

Most of my work now is helping agency owners pick their position and carry it into the website and the sales conversation. If you want help with yours, here's how I work with founder-led agencies on agency positioning.