Your agency needs a narrative, not a niche

Because you're too big to niche

Despite all the ‘guru’ advice out there, your agency’s too big to decide one day that you’ll only work with pharmaceutical brands, or only do Google Ads. You’d have a mutiny on your hands unless you had a convincing business case for it. It could mean laying off staff, turning away clients, and shrinking your market potential. Instead, agencies of your size need a more nuanced way to position themselves beyond the usual niching and narrowing strategies. 

Because back in the days when there were fewer agencies out there, niching, narrowing and specialising was the smartest play. An agency could outposition their generalist, 360 and full-service competitors by focusing on serving a specific client type or delivering a specific service. But the days of being the only alcoholic drinks marketing agency or the only Facebook ads agency are over. Even a combination of the two is rare, and for many agencies just too small a pond to fish in.

Look, that’s not to say niching isn’t a smart strategy. If you have a sweet spot where you do your best work, for clients you like, who pay you well, then niche. It makes a lot of sense and a lot of things easier, from your messaging to your marketing. We’re not anti-niching at all, it just isn’t right for every agency and often it’s too much of a swing for medium to large agencies to make without serious consideration and detailed research.

You see, as your agency’s grown, your offer has grown with it. Today, you deliver a range of services to a range of clients. And things are going well. But you’re aware that nothing stays the same in the beautifully chaotic world of agencies. Challengers are nipping at your heels with cool websites and relentless self-promotion. And the big stalwarts are still attracting big names with the gravitational pull of their reputations. Even in your immediate competitive set, it feels like others are one step ahead by sharpening their brand and proposition to react to the world around them.

The downside of widening your offer is that your positioning has become a bit messy and mediocre. With so many pitches, meetings and people in the mix, everyone’s developed their own version of who you are and what you do. And while it can make sense to adapt to each prospect, it normally means a muddled message and an unfocused positioning. So when people read your website, there’s very little that would resonate with them beyond some big claims and some pretty case studies. 

What the hell is Narrative Positioning?

So with a wider offer and no desire to niche, how do you define a positioning that’s distinctive, desirable and defensible? A positioning that stands out and attracts the right clients in?

Enter Narrative Positioning.

Yay, another business-buzzword-bullshit term to confuse you and everyone else. Look, let’s keep this as simple as possible; it’s when you position your agency around one core story. At its most basic, it’s about a before and after state, a problem and solution, a change and a consequence. Then it’s about the benefits this creates.

Just like any good narrative, there's a tension and resolution. This is what’s commonly called a story arc or loop. Once some interest or intrigue is opened up, people instinctively need to know how it ends. The more specific and real it feels, the stronger that desire to know what the outcome is. And the stronger this narrative is pushed and promoted, the more chance the reader buys into it.

Sure, this all sounds deceptively simple, and sometimes it is. But it takes a level of empathy and intuition beyond just analysing market segments, firmographics and demographics - and this can feel abstract and intangible. But a narrative positioning works for a number of reasons:

Firstly, it’s more ownable than a traditional market positioning (by sector or service). In crowded markets like Digital Marketing for example, it’s increasingly hard to find a unique space by niching or narrowing. Your narrative, when done well, is much harder to replicate without looking like a latecomer or copycat. Nobody wants to be pitching a narrative another agency already uses, it looks lazy at best, disingenuous at worst.

Secondly, your narrative positioning can evolve at the same pace as your agency, market and landscape. It’s easier to test, tweak and optimise while it’s live in play. While you don’t want to be repositioning constantly, it does allow you some fluidity. If you position yourself to only work with sports brands, this can be difficult to undo or change. The narrative you take to the market is much more reactive. Think of narrative positioning as an important brand decision, but not a commercial business decision. 

And lastly, your narrative positioning works on multiple levels. Whereas market positioning or niching relies on the idea that you must understand the prospect because you focus on them as a demographic, narrative positioning works on the prospect’s feeling of being seen and understood. A strategically-sound and intelligently-written narrative hits prospects on an emotional and rational level - which is how people make buying decisions in reality. Not as some obscure segment on a buyer persona, but as a human with a conscious brain and a subconscious bias. Think of narrative positioning as appealing to a prospect’s specific state of thinking or being, rather than as a specific demographic or vertical.

For this narrative positioning to work, it has to come from the top down. Of course, middle managers and team members should help shape your narrative. But if the person at the top doesn’t buy into it and treat it like gospel, it’ll die a slow and pointless death in a deck somewhere. This should be the big story they tell people in their network. It’ll be the elevator pitch, sales patter and website copy rolled into one. When prospects ask why they should choose you, this is what you grab before the case studies.

Framing the problem

A strong narrative starts with a specific problem, issue or shift. There has to be some trigger or action that makes prospects sit up, take notice, and nod along in agreement. And it has to be so specific and vivid they almost fall off their chair in disbelief that you’ve just outlined the exact conversation they’ve been having in their heads for months. Not some general statement about how the world needs to be better, or how marketing is complicated. Something so weirdly detailed and acute, it makes prospects spit their latte onto their laptop. Specific and vivid, a bit like the last sentence.

There are three lenses to explore these challenges and changes through, from micro to macro:

1. Clients

2. Industry

3. Society

Clients

The most obvious starting point is to explore the context affecting your prospects and clients. This takes an understanding of who they are, and more importantly, what they think, feel and believe. 

The first task is to write down all the specific problems they have, from the small things that piss them off to their major frustrations around their role, aims and life. While the temptation is to assume their problems fit what exactly you want them to, it’s worth going deeper and deeper as much of the real gold is hidden in the smaller and more specific issues. Then you’ll need to consider what changes they either have, or will, experience. This might be inside their current employer or in their market. Once you have these, write them down too.

Hopefully you have some intuition and experience already to draw on for this exercise. In rare cases where you don’t have that level of understanding or knowledge, you can try to conduct some prospect research. This might be canvassing opinion, surveys, pitch feedback etc. But be aware that this kind of research is inherently biassed as prospects make decisions based on subconscious thinking they can’t give you access to. Annoyingly for everyone, positioning is the process of making an educated leap of faith - rather than an infallible system. 

Industry

Here you’ll need to write down ideas based on your knowledge and experience of what’s impacting your industry. Look for problematic trends, patterns and shifts that your ideal prospects want to overcome or avoid. For example, maybe your prospects don’t want to go through a pushy sales process that’s common in your industry. Or maybe they don’t like that most SEO agencies tie clients into year-long retainer relationships. Or it could be that the branding industry is full of fancy words but little practical guidance on how the process actually works. Again, with each example you note down, make it as specific as possible. Remember, it has to hit prospective clients in both the head and heart. Your industry is much easier to research by Googling competitors, exploring relevant social channels and groups, as well as speaking to your peers and colleagues. 

Society

This is the macro lens, so you’ll need to write down challenges, issues and changes that impact specific groups of people, communities and even the planet. Don’t feel it’s compulsory to have anything at this level and certainly don't force it if it’s not authentic. Too many agencies believe their work is a world-changing force for good when really they design websites. The other temptation is to head straight for the sustainability or environmental level. Of course, if your agency does something to positively impact this, you should shout about it. But many have tenuous connections that they try to shoehorn into their positioning. 

Finding societal level challenges and changes will be mostly down to intuition and knowledge. If you have to go looking for them too hard, they probably aren’t the right play for your agency at this point. Often, these issues are well-known and run as currents and hot topics that people are made aware of through the media they consume.

Naming you unique solution

For your narrative positioning to work, there needs to be more than just negativity and doom-saying; you need a way to solve or overcome it. This step is about writing down specific ways that your agency has the answers to the issues you mapped out above. You’re looking to create pairs of challenges / changes with solutions here.

You'll immediately gravitate to the most obvious solutions you offer; normally the services you deliver. It makes the most sense that there’s a client challenge or change that your agency exists to address through what it does. The only problem is that this narrative may feel a bit universal and generic to really cut through the clutter. For example, small businesses may struggle getting enquiries through their website. And so, as an SEO agency, the most obvious solution is to invest in SEO. From a narrative perspective though, this isn’t a story that’s going to grab prospects and make them feel the need. 

So then this step in the process becomes about exploring more detailed ways you can solve challenges or navigate changes. These may feel too small and limiting at first, but the aim of narrative positioning is to attract prospects at a specific point in their journey. It’s about entering the conversation in their heads, and appealing to the things that frustrate, challenge or scare them. Although this isn’t a definitive list by any means, here’s a few jumping off points to get you thinking about specific ways you solve challenges or navigate changes:

• Unique delivery model

• Unique fee structure

• Unique process

• Unique software or technology

• Unique guiding principle

• Unique category perspective

• Unique cultural insight

In fact, anything at this stage that’s specific to your agency and that actually solves the problems you’ve mapped already. Hopefully you’ve seen a few pairings that feel like they have potential. Now it’s time to see if you’re right.

Scoring against the 3D Positioning® model

You're now ready to pair up problems and solutions to form a basic narrative. Don’t worry if this pairing doesn’t sound sexy yet, at this stage it’s about finding the most compelling ingredients - not the icing on the cake.

Firstly, go through each possibility and aim to pick one to three that you feel have the most potential. This might come from natural intuition or experience in your industry. Once you have a few frontrunners, it’s time to score them against the 3D Positioning® model to see if they’re strategically sound.

Look, all positioning is a calculated leap of faith. If there was a foolproof way to validate your positioning before launching it, we’d be billionaires. The 3D Positioning® model is a way to bring some quantifiable rigour to the process so you can make informed decisions rather than gut-feel calls. 3D Positioning® is a simple scoring system for your possible positioning ideas, where you rate each pairing from one to ten against these three D’s:

Distinctive

This is how unlike your closest competitors this positioning is. One means it’s exactly the same as everyone else, so has little benefit as a positioning. Ten means it’s totally unique and exists as a market of one. Of course, this needs detailed research to really know your competitors before scoring. And yes, the final score you choose isn’t based on an exact science, but rather an approximate way to compare potential positionings.

Desirable

This is how much it appeals to and attracts the right prospects. Again, this is hard to turn into an exact science as the only way to validate it is to take it to market. Sure, you can canvas current or potential clients, but they’re biassed and not real-world prospects. So you’ll have to choose this score based on your knowledge of your ideal client. Once your new positioning is live, you’ll get real time feedback about how desirable it is - so you can optimise from there. Tools like Wynter, the B2B messaging testing platform, could help guide you but there’s no substitute for real market feedback.

Defensible

This is how much you can prove credibility around your positioning. While your new positioning should push you to a new place, if it’s total BS then prospects will see through it in seconds. Here your score is based on the quality and quantity of evidence you can supply to show you can live your positioning through. Think case studies, testimonials, stats, research, documents, articles, white papers etc. If you have nothing, think whether this positioning is pushing a bit too far. 

The point of the 3D Positioning® model is to ultimately leave you with a problem and solution pairing that scores highest. This removes some subjectivity from the process, and stops the loudest or highest-paid person railroading through a weak positioning. So once you have a winner; a basic narrative pairing, the next step is to flesh it out and bring it to life.

Unpacking the benefits or outcomes

Once you’ve found the strongest narrative pairing, you’ll need to unpack how it positively impacts people, industry and/or society. No doubt you’ll have heard the old copywriting trope to sell the benefits, not just the features. This is a golden rule, and these benefits can be broadly broken down into two levels of buying behaviour; functional and emotional.

Functional

These are the practical and business-driven benefits people can expect as a result of you solving their challenge. Write down as many as possible then map them onto a rough matrix, with the most lofty at the top and the most specific at the bottom. You’ll most likely find that the lofty ones feel impressive but are also pretty universal and unbelievable. Similarly, the ones at the very bottom probably feel too small to resonate beyond being a minor annoyance rather than a burning issue. The magic is somewhere in the middle, finding a balance between the two.

Emotional

These benefits appeal to how someone will feel as a result of this narrative coming to fruition. It’s about painting a vivid picture with evocative and emotive language that plays into their subconscious desires, fears and dreams. Sure, this sounds a bit woo woo, but this is how us humans move through the world. We operate on an emotional level for most of the time. This is why branding exists at all, to tap into this. So when writing up your narrative, explore some ways to show how they’ll feel before, during and after. 

Writing up your Narrative Positioning

Right, you have the challenge or change mapped. And you have the specific way your agency helps solve or navigate this. But two bullet points or short sentences rarely make an exciting narrative you can position around.

So now you need to add the colour and character to bring this narrative to life. This process is where the worlds of strategy and copywriting collide, because thinking and writing are two sides of the same coin. Beware anyone who tells you they can exist effectively in silos.

Start with the challenge or change and think how you’d say this to someone you were in a pitch or meeting with. Don’t try to write it straight away, because it often ends up over-written and lacking that visceral, immediate energy that makes it resonate. Speak it out loud (yes, you’ll feel daft) and find the flow of words that are natural, not poetic. This is a great technique for all writing. If you wouldn’t say it like that, don’t write it like that. Speak it in a way that’s unique to you, that’s passionate and stirring, but not an amateur dramatics Shakespeare play. Once you have a rough outline, write that down.

Same with the solutions side. Speak it out loud to a colleague or computer and hear it back. If it sounds salesy, scrap it. If it sounds too slick, scrap it. It should sound like the real you talking to a real person. Not a polished sales script full of stuff no normal person would ever say. Again, write the best version down and don’t overthink it (yet).

What you’re left with will be a rough and ready narrative, bespoke to you, that’s strategically saying the right things, and in the most resonant way. This is a solid starting point for your new narrative positioning. 

The next step is to edit, hone and copywrite this narrative so it flows nicely while feeling like you. Now, because your narrative is (hopefully) a one-off, it’s impossible to offer specific advice around the writing but here are some general pointers to consider as you go.

Speak to the reader, not about them

Most agencies write copy where almost every sentence starts with We, Our or Agency X. This is a monologue that nobody really connects with because it’s one-way. Look, we all care about ourselves first and foremost. It’s human nature. So a simple flip from using We everywhere to using You to speak directly to the reader is a game changer. Try it and force yourself to write your new narrative only using You and Your.

Short, medium and long versions

See if you can condense your new narrative down to two sentences. If you can, then that’s a good sign you’ve landed on a positioning that’s strategically strong. But this short-form version probably lacks emotion and passion, so write a medium version that builds it out with more specifics, details and colour. Then finally, push to write a longer-form version that really goes deep. This exercise opens up new ways to express the narrative that you might not hit on otherwise.

Make them feel it, not just read it

Your narrative should paint a picture in people’s minds. They should nod along in agreement with you because you understand exactly what they’re going through. It’s about making them feel heard, understood and aligned. And this means tapping into how they feel now, and how they’ll feel if you solve their challenge or navigate their change. It’s easier to rely on rational copy that appeals to a (mythical) logical buyer, but humans feel more than they think. Make them feel it, not just read it.

Mirror their language

Hopefully you already know the language and vocabulary of your target audience. This normally comes from years of just being around these people, listening to how they speak and subconsciously soaking it up. But sometimes agencies switch to using ‘agency-speak’ that only exists in our weird little corner of the world. It’s worth running your new narrative by a couple of people in the right industry and getting them to sense-check the language - but don’t let them unpick your positioning.

Structuring your Narrative Positioning

By now, you should have a set of sentences or paragraphs that form your narrative. But you might find that they flow better in a different order. For example, the most common structure  is problem then solution, but some agencies feel uncomfortable leading with negativity. So in this case, you can experiment with reordering the narrative so that you open with the benefits or outcomes, then show how it’s achieved with the solution, and finally build empathy by highlighting the challenge or change.

There isn’t a best or right way here, it’s about what works best to make the narrative as compelling as possible. And remember, compelling really means most likely to persuade and sell - not just tell. Yes it needs to elicit emotion, and have rational appeal, but it also has to drive action. Without this, what you've written is content, not copy.

Think of your narrative as a set of blocks you can move and manipulate. Tools like Miro and Figma are great for wireframing your narrative and bringing in multiple stakeholders. Create a digital playground where people can rewrite, restructure and rethink the narrative in real time. But remember, they’re not there to undo the actual substance and strategy. It’s about presenting the best version of the narrative to position around.

But beware, there is a danger that people play endlessly, and never actually commit to a narrative. To combat this, set clear parameters and timeframes for this stage. Once everyone has contributed their ideas, find a way to make a decision. Remember, there is no robust way to validate this narrative positioning apart from taking it to market. With this in mind, be brave and take the leap with a view to optimising and updating quickly once you get a sense of what the market makes of it. That’s the beauty of narrative over niching.

Presenting your Narrative Positioning

So, you’ve done the hard yards and followed the process. And now, eventually, you’ve got a narrative positioning that everyone’s fully behind and you’re ready to take to market. So how do you tell the team internally, and then where does it actually go externally? 

Well, there shouldn’t really be two versions of your narrative. It should be the same story, inside and out. This way you limit the potential for people telling their own interpretation of it. Sure, you might want a few extra notes for the internal version to help sales people or account managers make sense of it in specific situations. But again, keep this sparse if needed at all. The aim here is to create a unified ‘party line’ that everyone knows and uses. As soon as one variation gets out, the whole thing can start to unravel.

With this in mind, you need one single source of truth for your positioning narrative. A nicely-designed PDF deck is normally the easiest way to keep everyone aligned. Make it beautiful and simple so people buy into it. A scrappy Google Slides deck with hasty formatting lacks confidence, and people will push back against it. Think of this as your agency’s magnus opus; it’s what you believe in, and what you’re all about (at least for now).

The more investment there is in it as a process and a document, the more galvanising it’ll be. And that’s the whole point here; one narrative positioning that’s unique to you, that separates you from the rest, that unites your team, and that appeals to the right kind of clients. Sure, it’s just a few words. But with a big impact.