I used to run a small (10 person) design/development/marketing agency and one of my biggest regrets was not figuring out a way sooner to differentiate from the competition.

It's not enough to say you do better design, get results/ROI, or anything like that. Those things are now commodities that every agency has to say they do. It’s like an ice cream company saying they make cold ice cream.

Instead you need to pick a vertical. What industry outside of your own are you most fascinated by or knowledgable in? What does you and your team have the most experience in over-delivering? Health care? Software Startups? E-Commerce? Tourism?

Whatever it is, you need to find the ONE type of client you can best serve. Let's say you pick tourism for example. If you have several case studies of where you made a big impact for tourism clients, that can't just be buried in your portfolio, it needs to be on your home page and part of your entire brand messaging. It becomes who you are as a company - ‘We are the agency that helps tourism groups increase online bookings'.

Any tourism client looking for an agency to help them with marketing is automatically going to want to work with you vs the 'we make nice websites' company. It's like with photography, if you need to hire a photographer to shoot an ad for Mercedes, are you going to pick the photographer who does weddings, or the photographer who has amazing photos of cars? The answer is obvious.

Picking one industry to build all of your communications around take guts, because it means turning down or simply not going after all the other clients, but it will open up the world for your business as you won’t have to hunt as hard for clients (you’ll have one target market vs shot gunning to the world), you won’t have to compete based on price, and you can work with anyone in the world and won't be limited by location.

I’m free to chat more if you’d like to book a call.