Does your agency have clear positioning?
To have clear positioning is important because it differentiates your agency from others in the mind of your potential customers.
Having clear positioning has two direct consequences, which are:
- It automatically disqualifies all those customers for whom your positioning is not relevant.
- It makes you much more valuable for those customers who value your positioning and puts you two steps in front of the rest of the agencies.
If you can align your positioning to what your ideal customers want, you have the perfect scenario, because it will disqualify customers who are not ideal and you will qualify better ideal customers.
Another possibility might be to define first your positioning and then choose those customers that best align with such positioning, but then you run the risk that your positioning may not interest anyone. It’s like building a luxury building in an area without taking into consideration the type of people who buy real estate in that area; the probability of success would be similar to a lottery. Make your customer and their needs your starting point, define your positioning related to those needs and you will have a much higher chance of fishing in a pond where there are fish.
Many agencies believe that having a very defined position limits them because they have to pass up on all those customers who do not value it. The reality is that the more you define your positioning, the more you limit the number of clients for whom you are somewhat relevant. Instead, you’ll be much, much more relevant for those who value your positioning. If from that moment onwards you focus your commercial efforts on finding those customers, you will have a much greater chance of getting them as customers, serve them better and retain them for longer.
Positioning the agency implies defining:
- The benefits that the agency is going to provide to their customers.
- The type of customers the agency is going to focus on.
- The services that will be offered to provide these benefits.
- Whether the agency will focus on customers from one or from many industries.
And then communicate this clearly in the website and in other marketing materials, so that the positioning can start to attract your ideal customers and push away those with whom you are not interested.
The other day I wrote the case study of a specialized agency focused on dentists who had achieved outstanding results. Having the right positioning was one of the main reasons why they had achieved these great results. The agency is positioned to helping dentists find new customers online. With this positioning, it is giving up on all companies that are not dentists, but it is far more relevant for dentists.
For example, the owner of a car dealership will never recruit this agency (at least, based on this positioning), but dentists will prefer to hire this agency much more, rather than another one which does not have such clear positioning. Also, all else being equal, they will be willing to pay more for this specialized agency than they would for a non-specialized one.
In the next few days, I will go into more detail to cover different types of positioning, such as vertical positioning (specialization by sector) and horizontal positioning (specialization by type of service offered). Both are aspects that will help you define the positioning that your agency should have.
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