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The question I hear most from agency owners between $200k and $2M in revenue is this: "How do I position my agency so I stop competing on price and start attracting better clients?" The answer isn't another LinkedIn profile rewrite or a new tagline with industry buzzwords. The answer is building positioning so specific that it excludes 95% of the market and makes the remaining 5% feel like you're reading their internal Slack messages. Most positioning advice pushes you toward broader appeal. That's the opposite of what works.
The difference between positioning that attracts and positioning that repels bad fits comes down to precision in three areas: the exact client you serve, the specific mechanism that's broken in their business, and the contrarian insight that makes your approach different. Not different in a manufactured way. Different because you've seen something in the work that others haven't named yet.
The Problem With Market Category Positioning
Most agency positioning starts with market category. "We help SaaS companies" or "We work with e-commerce brands" or "We serve B2B service providers." This feels safe because the market is large and the opportunities are obvious. It's also why your pipeline looks like everyone else's pipeline and why prospects ask you to compete against two other agencies that sound identical to you.
Market category positioning works when you're building a generalist agency designed for volume. It stops working the moment you want premium retainers, longer client relationships, and inbound referrals from people who specifically want your approach. At that point, category becomes a ceiling. You're competing with every other agency in that category, and the only differentiation available is case studies, team size, or price. None of those create the magnetic positioning that makes clients choose you before the sales call even starts.
The agency owners I work with who've broken through that ceiling didn't get there by niching down to an industry. They got there by niching down to a specific breakdown inside that industry. Not "e-commerce brands doing $2M annually" but "e-commerce brands doing $2M annually where ad spend is returning 30% less than last year and the founder doesn't know if it's creative, targeting, or market saturation." That level of specificity sounds limiting until you realize how many founders are dealing with that exact breakdown and can't find anyone talking about it directly.
Who This Approach Is For and Who It Isn't
This works for agency owners who already have proof of concept. You're past the stage of taking any client who'll pay you. You're generating between $200k and $2M annually, you have a small team or you're running solo with contractor support, and your bottleneck isn't lead volume—it's lead quality. You're tired of competing in crowded RFP processes. You want clients who come to you already sold on your approach because they've read your content and recognized their situation in your words.
This doesn't work if you're still figuring out what you're good at or if you need volume to hit revenue goals. Early-stage agencies need broader positioning because they need more at-bats. You're still learning what types of clients you serve best and what problems you solve most effectively. Narrow positioning too early and you'll starve. But once you have pattern recognition—once you've seen the same breakdown in five or six clients and you know exactly how to fix it—that's when specific positioning becomes the fastest path to premium positioning.
This also doesn't work if you're uncomfortable with exclusion. Specific positioning means saying no to opportunities that don't fit. It means watching potential clients who could pay you choose someone else because your positioning told them clearly that you're not for them. If that makes you nervous, if you're still in the mindset that every lead is a good lead, you're not ready for this approach.
The Voice-First Positioning Framework
The methodology I use with agency clients is called Voice-First Positioning. It's built on the idea that your positioning should sound like your clients describing their problem to a peer, not like you describing your solution to a prospect. Most agencies position from their own perspective—what they do, how they do it, why their process is better. Voice-First Positioning flips that. You position from the client's internal experience of the problem.
Here's how it works. You take the last three to five clients where the engagement went exceptionally well. Not just results, but fit. The clients who understood your approach immediately, who didn't need convincing, who referred you to others without being asked. You extract the exact language they used when they first described their problem to you. Not the sanitized version they'd put in an RFP. The raw version they said on a call or typed in a DM when they were frustrated.
That language becomes your positioning foundation. You're not inventing a description of the problem. You're using the words your best clients already used. Then you layer in the specific parameters that made those clients a fit. Revenue range, team size, business model, the specific breakdown they were experiencing. Not "scaling challenges" but "hired two account managers in six months and clients are still leaving at the same rate." Not "content strategy" but "posting consistently for eight months with strong engagement and zero inbound leads."
The final layer is your contrarian insight. This is the thing you believe about solving this problem that most other agencies don't believe or won't say publicly. It's not manufactured controversy. It's the pattern you've seen in the work that contradicts common advice. For the agency owners I work with, it's often something like "your client retention problem isn't about content quality, it's about system design" or "the reason your LinkedIn presence isn't generating leads is because you're following best practices that work for influencers, not agency owners."
Why Specificity Compounds Over Time
Broad positioning feels safer in the short term because it keeps your options open. Specific positioning feels risky because it narrows your addressable market. But specific positioning compounds in ways that broad positioning never does. Every piece of content you create reinforces the same message to the same audience. Every client you work with deepens your expertise in that specific breakdown. Every referral comes from someone who knows exactly what you do and who you do it for.
Broad positioning requires constant reintroduction. Every prospect needs to be educated on whether you're a fit. Every piece of content needs to work for multiple audiences. Every referral is vague—"they do marketing" or "they help with LinkedIn"—which means the referred prospect still needs to be sold. Specific positioning does the qualification work before the conversation starts. The right prospects recognize themselves in your positioning and reach out already convinced. The wrong prospects self-select out.
The agency owners who resist this approach usually resist it for the same reason: they're afraid of leaving money on the table. They see opportunities outside their specific positioning and they don't want to say no. What they don't see is the opportunity cost of broad positioning. The premium clients who would've chosen them immediately if the positioning was tighter. The referrals that never happen because no one can articulate exactly what they do. The content that gets ignored because it's trying to speak to everyone and connects with no one.
What This Means for Your Agency's Trajectory
If you're running an agency between $200k and $2M and your positioning still sounds like it could describe a dozen other agencies, you're leaving leverage on the table. The path from where you are to premium positioning isn't more case studies or a better website. It's positioning so specific that the right clients feel like you're documenting their internal experience. That level of specificity doesn't come from market research or competitor analysis. It comes from extracting the real voice of the clients you've already served exceptionally well and using that language as your positioning foundation.
The implication for your business is straightforward. Tighter positioning means better inbound, shorter sales cycles, higher close rates, and clients who stay longer because they chose you for a specific reason instead of general capability. It also means fewer opportunities, at least in the short term, because you're explicitly excluding prospects who don't fit. The question isn't whether specific positioning works. The question is whether you're at the stage where you can afford to be selective, and whether you're willing to trade volume for fit. If you are, the next six months of your agency's growth will look different than the last six. If you're not, keep the positioning broad and keep competing on the same terms as everyone else.
