I’m managing a small marketing agency and finding it tough to distinguish myself. So many agencies provide comparable services at alike rates. How do you set yourselves apart to attract clients away from the competition?
Had a retail client who kept losing pitches to cheaper agencies. I dug into their top competitor’s log files and found something interesting - they were bleeding crawl budget on infinite pagination. We’re talking thousands of wasted bot requests every day. So we fixed our client’s technical setup first, then used that 34% organic traffic boost in our case studies. Instead of competing on price, we started leading with technical audits that showed what other agencies missed.
Last year with a fintech startup, I noticed every agency was pushing the same top-of-funnel blog stuff. We dug into their support tickets and mapped out what buyers actually needed - turns out they wanted proof of compliance expertise way before caring about features. So we built content around regulatory deep-dives that competitors couldn’t touch without our client’s specialized knowledge. Game changer - we stopped competing on services and became the only team who could tell their story authentically.
Had this same situation three years back - eight agencies competing for a B2B client. Game changer? We ditched the whole ‘service provider’ pitch and became cultural translators instead. Rather than the usual ‘we’ll boost your engagement’ spiel, we showed them how we’d use social listening to figure out what actually frustrates their audience, then build lookalike audiences from those sentiment patterns. They picked us because we revealed stuff about their customers they’d never thought of - not because we were the cheapest option.
Had the same issue last year with a SaaS client. We didn’t compete on price - instead, I audited their automation workflows and found their welcome series was tanking after day three (12% drop in opens). Rebuilt it with behavioral triggers based on what users actually did, not just time delays. That one workflow bumped trial conversions by 40%. We went from being just another email vendor to the team that actually moved their revenue.