The Expert Positioning Strategy That Works (Virtually) Overnight
You know how they say you need your ‘10,000h’ before you can position yourself as an expert in something?
When it comes to honing your craft as a branding agency, graphic designer, web designer, I agree.
But where I call BS on that Expert Positioning Strategy is that when you’re launching or scaling up a branding agency, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you don’t ‘know enough’ or have a ‘name’ in the market yet to show up as an expert, command high fees for highly skilled work, and get yourself to $30k+ months.
Bullshit.
Instead, I’m going to walk you through EXACTLY what you need to do (and what you don’t need to do) so you can shortcut your way to standing out as a real deal brand expert, that shows your prospects that you are the only choice to hire.
Settle in - it’s a good one!
The truth about positioning
Spoiler alert: if you wanted an in-depth, academic discussion exploring the different types of positioning strategies of, several definitions of positioning from revered experts, you can stop reading now. 🙂
I’m gonna give you the bottom-line, No BS summary of positioning and why you need to know this as intimately as you know the rule of thirds.
As a branding agency owner, sad to say, you’re not 1 in a million.
Google it - I dare you.
That’s the reality, and it ain’t changing any time soon.
So anything you can do to make yourself stand out, even just a tiny bit, is going to reap huge rewards.
Purple Cow, anyone?
Positioning yourself as an expert is no more than standing up and declaring to your marketing ‘Hey! I know my shit, I’m really good at it, and here’s why.’
Kinda like being a kid and proudly belting out the lyrics in chorus over the voices of your peers because you were proud you knew all the words (and you wanted your parents to be proud too)..
No? Was that just me? OK.
It’s where you get to bang the drum of who you are, what your agency does, and why you’re great. It’s the braggiest of brags, without being an asshole.
Why?
Because, my friend, you ACTUALLY know your shit.
You spent years at design school, making logo after logo, website after website, going nearly cross-eyed poring hours over Adobe Illustrator, and turned out some AMAZING work.
Or you spent years teaching yourself the ins and outs of Creative Cloud, devouring theory & inspiration in books, magazines and real life, only to come find out that designing brands was a lot less about inspiration than it was about perspiration.
Either way, you’ve got the portfolio to prove it!
So now, you just show off that collateral in a way that your prospects get it - they sit up, take notice, and say ‘Yeah, I really need someone like that to overhaul my website - they really know their shit.’
In order to do that, you need to make sure that you have 2 key pieces in place and if you do them consistently, and you’ll never have to worry about clients again:
A bulletproof system a.k.a your Lead Product™️ Process - this what I’m going to focus in on here
A watertight Authority Machine™️ - it’s the long-game that I teach my No BS Agency Mastery students, and it’s something I’ll cover in another article
Now, I can already sense you’ve got some questions coming up about this, and maybe you’re wondering if this is really the best way to get better clients, or if it’s yet another ‘strategy’ peddled by yet another marketing ‘guru’ that will send you down an info-product rabbit hole.
No. It’s not.
Consider that all your concerns, misgivings, scepticism etc. is that nasty Impostor Syndrome hiding in the background, waiting to take you out of the game of having that super-profitable, life-changing agency that you’ve been working towards.
What I’m going to show you will not only get you to expert status and make a name for you quickly, it will transform how you do things in your agency, and get you on track to make profits fast.
But before we dive into the process I created and mastered, I want to take a small detour and explore how to figure out if you’re still a ‘freelancer’ and how to make that move to ‘expert’ status.
Freelancer or Expert - which one are you?
“If a client says ‘Can you just do me a logo for my new website’, you might just be a…
…freelancer!”
(That’s me working in a Jeff Foxworthy-style quote to make a point)
But seriously - that’s your first clue that you’re a freelancer, not an expert, and where things need to change.
Freelancers are hired for their skills (think Fiverr and Upwork, where ANYONE can do you a logo, a bunch of social media captions, a homepage etc. for the lowest bidder).
They’re great. They fill a need for a short time, and you can ‘pick them off a shelf’ or even replace them with one of the 50,000 new AI tools available everyday.
You’ll know if you’ve positioned yourself that way, because people in your networks say ‘Hey, could you just do me a website? How much do you charge? What’s your hourly rate?’
It’s an easy pitfall - I’ve done it too.
It’s the most logical way to start out in branding, or even keep a branding agency going - and is SOMETIMES the simplest way to say what you do at a dinner party.
But here’s the thing that people at that dinner party will get if they give you the time to talk a bit more about what you do.
It’ll very quickly become clear that you do WAY more than design a logo or a homepage.
You’re the ‘unicorn’ of the branding industry.
You don’t just have mad skills with Illustrator and Photoshop.
You create plans that clients didn't even know they needed (mind blown.)
You paint visions of where your client’s company will be in 10 years when they overhaul their branding and REALLY show up in their market.
And you’re not afraid to call BS and be straight about what will and won’t work
So, now you’ve figured out that you're an expert ‘hiding out’ as a freelancer, what’s next?
You probably need another 10,000h or some other complicated way of convincing people to actually get what you do for them, and pay you well for it, right?
Nope.
You just need to keep reading.
The Lead Product™️ Process - the most beautiful path to expert status
Way, way, way back when I was running my own agency with my husband and business partner, Steve, I was falling victim to what happens to most branding agencies (and it’s probably happening to you too).
I was endlessly pitching and sending proposal after proposal - and let me tell you, these were BEAUTIFUL pitch decks we spent days putting together.
I was hustling on the mean streets of New York - going on coffee date after coffee date, up early and finishing late, all to get us out of the ‘rat race’ we’d built for ourselves, chasing the dream of having financial freedom and getting quality time off with family.
(Any of this sound familiar yet?)
This is what it looks like when you’re stuck in ‘freelancer’ mode, when you really should be seen as an expert.
One day, Steve and I were talking about our predicament, and we had a brainwave.
Why don’t we take the stuff we do for free for our clients (the strategy, consulting, initial pre-work before we actually get down to the nitty-gritty of designing), turn it into a ‘off-the-shelf’ easy-to-buy, stand-alone service that we can sell, and then upsell into the implementation and design?
That’s how the Lead Product™️ was born.
We were basically getting paid to pitch!
All the stuff we needed to know in order to do a rebrand, new brand identity, brand overhaul etc. was turned into a stand-alone service.
We could close clients into that service from just one 15-min call, and charge upwards of $500 for about a couple of hours of work (and we quickly raised the price!)
Those clients would get a clear outcome and we would inevitably upsell most of them into our Intensive™️ design service, leaving them even happier, because we’d done the hard work of getting clear on what they wanted in the Lead Product™️.
And this was our secret weapon to building our expert status fast
It’s not rocket science.
When you show up and take the lead with a prospect, you instantly become an expert in their eyes.
If you’re merely an ‘order-taker’ who is there to make them a quick logo (which is often what happened to us) then you’ll stay that way. (Spoiler alert: it won’t be quick either.)
And if you’ve ever tried your own version of our Lead Product™️ Process, or been curious on how it would actually work for you, then here’s how you actually do it:
Break down EVERYTHING you do when you have to deliver a client project, from the initial prospect conversation, through the onboarding process, to the different stages you go through to complete and deliver the finished branding project.
Be rigorous and don’t leave anything out - take a few hours or even half a day if you need to - it’s worth it.
Go back to the beginning, and group together all the things you need to do before you actually start designing your client’s brand. It’s probably going to be some sort of interview, questionnaire and discussion, so everyone’s on the same page, and you limit the no. of revisions. In fact, if you find you get stuck with endless revisions, what would you need to know upfront to stop that?
Then take all those things that you need to get from the client at the start of the process, and call it something sexy! My students use things like ‘roadmap’, ‘blueprint’, ‘playbook’, etc. and my own is called the ‘Brandup’. I avoid using the word strategy (even though that’s what it is) because no one wants to pay for a strategy! It might sound sexy, but to prospects it rings as “optional” or even “unnecessary.”
Decide on a price point for your Lead Product™️ - something you know you can easily charge and get paid for. You can (and should) raise it every few times you sell it.
And that’s all she wrote!
You could literally take this, tell 50 people in your network that this is how to get started working with you, and they’ll not only start getting that you’re a real badass when it comes to branding, but you’ll get paid for all those years of honing your expertise!
Sweet!
How Lead Products™️ work in the real world
“Yeah, Pia, this is great - but I don’t see it happening for me.”
I get it.
It’s not how things are commonly done in branding agencies.
Freelancers DEFINITELY don’t do this, and even those who are supposed to be experts spend years trying to do all sorts of other things that take lots of time before you get a return (think blogging, social media, podcasting etc.)
Don’t get me wrong. Those ‘other things’ are critical in establishing you as an expert, and I dedicate entire modules in my No BS Agency Mastery Program to showing you how to build an Authority Machine™️ that will deliver right-fit clients to your door.
But for right now, being an expert ISN’T about playing the long game.
You’ve done that already. You just haven’t had a way to show people that actually makes financial sense.
After all, you didn’t set up your agency to be a starving artist, right?
That’s just a non-sugar-coated way of saying you’re an expert, but don’t make expert money.
And that’s the bullshit that other ‘gurus’ are probably telling you - you need to put in all the hours, do all the things and then eventually you’ll be able to call yourself an expert.
I’m not about that.
I’m about making bank now AND showing your expertise, and then you can get to work on the other pieces.
And if you’re still having trouble getting your head around this, I’ll show you a story from one of my students, Eleanor Hancock:
“We were at a point of complete burnout trying to run our small design agency. Within 6 weeks of following the Lead Product™️ Process, we’d booked in 7 Lead Products™️ with brand new clients, increasing the price each time.
Because of this process, we were able to charge 4 times what we used to charge for the full design project.
This process not only makes such a difference for us, but also for our clients.
I can honestly say that it’s been the best thing I’ve ever done for my business.”
Here’s what you need to get…
Most branding agencies stay stuck in freelancer mode - they never figure out how to effectively transition to being seen and paid as an expert.
You can follow the ‘conventional’ wisdom that says you need to do all the things and spend even more time and possibly money on ‘building credibility’.
The truth?
You ALREADY have that credibility. You just didn’t know how to show it.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to fast-track your way to using Lead Products™️ and all my other tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!