How to craft your agency proposition

I’ve talked a lot this year about the importance of agency positioning. Or, more specifically, how agency land is plagued with inward looking, broad-brush and cliché-ridden positioning.

But rather than continue my assault on your ‘passionate, full-service and award-winning agency’, I thought it high time I provide some actual advice on how to fix the problem. It’s the least I could do, right?

I started by exploring the difference between positioning and your proposition. I argued that for your proposition to be relevant and enticing, you firstly need to define a narrower audience for your agency offering. I then explored some creative ways you can go about doing this.

So, with your target audience nailed, you’re ready to start work on your proposition.

But before you put pen to paper, you’ve got some more thinking to do.

Dialling down the ‘we’

Far too many agency websites come across as narcissistic and boastful. It’s all ‘we, ‘our’ and ‘us’.

A good proposition is the opposite. It dials down the ‘we’, whilst dialling up what really matters to your target audience. It demonstrates your understanding of the problems they face or the opportunities they are looking to exploit. It succinctly talks about your offering only in this context. And it is outcome orientated, highlighting the positive impact you have on the people, companies and markets you serve.

This means looking at things from the perspective of your target audience. To get you started, here are a few questions to ponder:

What is your target audience trying to do? What does success look like?

What is standing in their way? What problems are they facing?

What is happening in their market? Are there opportunities they are looking to exploit?

How would you describe the mindset or attitude of the people you work with?

What will the client have after working with you? What is the tangible impact of your work?

How do you want people to feel when they work with you?

Of course, there is no better way to understand the aspirations, needs and concerns of your target audience than actually talking to them. I’m going to assume you have some clients on the books that fit your newly defined audience, so ask them…

What made you decide to work with us? What was the specific problem you wanted to fix at the time?

How would you describe the experience of working with us?

How does this compare with other agencies you’ve worked with?

In your role, what are you trying to do? How have we helped you to meet those goals?

What problems have we been able to help you address?

What are the most important benefits you’ve experienced as a result of working with us?

Have you experienced any unexpected advantages as a result of our work together?

From experience, you will probably find this to be more fruitful when you use an independent third party to ask the questions. A client is likely to be more open and honest, especially if the responses are also anonymised.

Bringing it all together

As you combine your thinking with input from clients you should start to see some patterns — recurring themes, words and phrases.

And with that, you are (finally) ready to start writing your first draft proposition. It might be useful to use a template like the one below. At this stage, don’t worry about it being somewhat formulaic. This is simply a way of bringing together the component parts. It’s unlikely it will ever be used in such a robotic way.

Instead, as it evolves in style, tone and language, it will act as the basis for all manner of outward facing communication; from your website to proposals and everything in between.

AGENCY is…(type of agency)

Working with…(markets / audiences)

Helping them to…(problems / opportunities)

By delivering…(products / services)

…that…(benefits / outcomes)

….because…(purpose / belief / perspective)

Let’s take a slightly closer look at each of these:

Type of agency

Personally, I don’t think it matters too much whether you describe your agency as marketing, digital, creative, media or otherwise (as long as it’s not ‘full-service’). However, buyers tend to pigeon-hole agencies by discipline so it’s worth thinking about. But don’t obsess over it.

Markets / audiences

Fairly obvious but critically important. Be as specific as you can. ‘Brands’ is too broad. Use adjectives to narrow the type of brands you work with.

Problems / opportunities

This is ultimately what a client is buying from you; your ability to solve a problem or help them exploit an opportunity. Your services are just the vehicle to get them from where they are now to where they want to be. Hence, this part of the proposition takes precedence over any mention of your services.

Products / services

Now you can talk about what you actually do. This shouldn’t be a long list of services. For some, this would create a proposition of biblical proportions. Instead, it is a brief summary, ideally demonstrating how your thinking or approach to delivering those services is particularly relevant to your audience.

Benefits / outcomes

Again, the more specific the better. If your clients see average growth of 50% inside 12 months, include this. But also consider the individual here if you can — how do you make people feel?

It’s likely there is a multitude of benefits a client will experience by working with you. For the purposes of your proposition, I’d consolidate these to three or four; those that are going to appeal to a number of different stakeholders.

Purpose / belief / perspective

This is a big topic in its own right (keep an eye out on an upcoming article).

Whilst I believe every agency has a ‘why’ (a purpose or reason for existing), I’m not always convinced it will resonate with the buyer. For example, it is admirable that you started your agency having become disillusioned with a previous employer. But is this relevant to your target audience? How much will they really care?

An alternative to purpose is to state a belief or offer a perspective related to the target audience. For example, when it comes to how agencies and clients seek to worth together, I believe there are too many ingrained behaviours, processes and dated methods that ultimately benefit neither party. I therefore encourage agencies to challenge the conventional way of doing things. This is not necessarily my purpose or ‘why’. However, if an agency owner agrees with my thinking, they are more likely to want to find out how I can help them.

Just to complicate the issue

While your proposition sets the tone for how you communicate with your target audience, it doesn’t mean you should stick to it rigidly. In all likelihood you will need to engage and influence a number of different people in any one organisation. This means you will need to tweak your proposition accordingly. For example, the benefits or outcomes a Managing Director will care about will be different to those of an eCommerce Manager.

I therefore like to think of a proposition as having layers. Your overall proposition (what you say on your homepage, for example), needs to broadly appeal to all stakeholders. But as you reach out and converse with different stakeholders, elements of the proposition will need to be made more specific according to the goals, desires, problems, concerns and motivations of individual buyers. This is where creating personas can really help.