Ad Agencies: 10 Tips That Separates the Best From the Rest

The agencies that win the most new business have a differentiating position from their competitors.

“Most managers invest their time and energy in trying to make their firms better, when in fact they should be also be working to make their firms different” – From Positioning for Professionals

I had the privilege to attend a Tim Williams seminar, “What Separates the Best from the Rest,” when I was the new business director for a regional advertising agency. Since that time I have read everything he has written.

Tim understands and can articulate agency positioning for new business better than anyone. He has a new book that was recently released that I personally recommend to you, Positioning for Professionals: How Professional Knowledge Firms Can Differentiate Their Way to Success.

10 quick tips from Positioning for Professionals:

  1. Bigness is no longer a competitive advantage
  2. Its better to be a profit leader than a market share leader
  3. There is no competitive advantage in doing what others do
  4. There is no such thing as full service
  5. Most professional service brands are not overpriced, they are just underexclusive
  6. Most firms are engaged in fighting turf wars, instead of finding new turf
  7. No customer is going to buy a vague brand
  8. For a brand to be in the middle of the road = death
  9. “Boxed in?”, no box means no strategy
  10. The main difference between mediocre firms and great ones is not just vision, but execution

I thought you might also enjoy a perusing through some of the book’s best parts, an expansion on these 10 tips:

Tim Williams leads Ignition (www.ignitiongroup.com), a consultancy devoted to helping marketing communications firms create and capture more value. He is author another book that I highly recommend, “Take a Stand for Your Brand: Building a Great Agency Brand from the Inside Out” ranked by Amazon as one of the top ten books on brand building.

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Filed Under: Agency Leadership, Agency Positioning, Best Practices, New Business Trends Tagged With: , , , , ,
About Michael Gass

Michael is an international new business consultant to advertising, digital, media and PR agencies. Since 2007, he has led in the use of social media and content marketing strategies to make agency new business EASIER.