Develop a focused and differentiating positioning strategy that attracts the clients and talent who want to work with you for what you do best.
Having a clear positioning strategy results in significant short-term and long-term benefits for your agency, including:
- A well-defined set of criteria for identifying ideal clients.
- A stronger win ratio when soliciting new business, because you are playing to your strengths.
- Clearer direction for how your agency should spend its time, money, and resources.
- A broader — not narrower — geographical market area.
- Fewer competitors, because there will be fewer agencies who do what you do.
- Better margins, because focused agencies command premium pricing.
Can You Answer These Four Key Strategic Questions?
To help you develop a focused positioning strategy, Lodestar will work with you to fine-tune the answers to four key strategic questions.
1. WHAT are your outstanding competencies?
In which areas could your agency be considered best-in-class?
When it comes to your agency’s abilities, the task is to identify not just capabilities but competencies. Competencies are capabilities of the organization that can be delivered in a dependable, differentiating way. Defining what’s core to the organization is often the result of disaggregating a short list of services and abilities, then breaking them down into component parts to find what’s truly distinctive.
2. WHO is your ideal customer?
What types of categories does your agency know best?
Defining an effective positioning strategy means having a clear definition and understanding of your ideal customer – the types of clients you’re best suited to serve. This is a process of deeply exploring your agency’s experience with business categories, market segments, audiences, and types of business models.
3. HOW can your agency be distinguished by the way it thinks?
What are your unique philosophies, methods or approaches?
The culture and intellectual capital of your agency is a critical cornerstone in business strategy. This is about identifying the standards, values, and beliefs by which your agency operates, serves clients, and makes daily decisions. It’s also about proprietary approaches you bring to solving client problems.
4. WHY is your agency in business in the first place?
Beyond making money, what is your purpose?
Without exception, the most notable agencies have an ambitious reason for being. Rather than being driven solely by the market, the competition, or the numbers, what is it that drives you from inside? Your purpose must be at the center of who you really are as an enterprise.
Align Your Strategy and Delivery Model
The intersection of these four brand boundaries — What, Who, How, and Why — defines your agency’s business strategy and points the way to a positioning strategy that makes the most of your agency’s strengths.
Lodestar then works with the executives of your organization to make sure your positioning strategy is reflected in five essential areas:
- Services & Structure – adapting your products, services, competencies, and organizational structure to reflect and support your strategy.
- Leadership & Talent Development – adapting your ways of selecting, training, developing and leading your people to support your agency’s positioning.
- Day-to-day Practices, Systems & Processes – adapting your internal processes and procedures in support of your strategy.
- Self-Promotion & Business Development – adapting the promotion of your brand to reflect your positioning strategy.
- Staging & Resources – adapting your agency’s physical and virtual place of business to reflect your strategy and brand.
By identifying and prioritizing key initiatives in each of these areas, we bring your business practices and delivery model fully into alignment with your business strategy.
Imagine What Your Agency Could Become
Agencies that have completed this program put their time and resources behind what they can do instead of what they can’t do, and direct their energies toward a long-term business strategy that increases the organization’s value and relevance to both current and prospective clients and talent.
To learn how your agency can benefit from a more focused business strategy, please contact us.
Lodestar is a licensed provider of the Positioning Strategy Program developed by Ignition Consulting Group, Inc.
