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Key Takeaways
- A marketing problem means people understand who you are and what you offer but aren’t hearing it enough. A positioning problem means they hear you but can’t quickly grasp what you do or why you’re different.
- If you’re always explaining what you do instead of showing that you understand your clients’ problem, your sales process feels heavier than it should or your messaging hasn’t caught up with your growth, you likely have a positioning problem.
- Write down the one thing you want to be known for — something true, specific and hard for a competitor to claim. Then pull up your last 10 pieces of content, your homepage and your bio, and hold them up against that sentence.
When growth stalls, almost every business owner reaches for the same levers. You know the ones. More content, more ads, more discount codes. Maybe even more texts blasted to a list that stopped opening them months ago.
In my practice, these tactics are effective. But could they be more effective? Yes, they could. Not by spending more, but by clarifying what you already have.
Before you spend an additional dime on more marketing, examine your brand’s positioning first.
The root problem that looks like a marketing problem
A marketing problem and a positioning problem can look very similar. Growth plateaus, and your cost to acquire a new customer increases. But the fixes are completely different, and mixing them up wastes time and money.
A marketing problem means people understand who you are and what you offer. They just are not hearing about it enough, or in the right places. The message works, and it thrives on distribution, frequency and targeting.
A positioning problem is quieter and more stubborn. People are hearing about you, but it does not elicit an action, because they cannot answer two questions fast enough: What do you actually do, and why does that matter coming from you instead of the next person?
If a stranger cannot repeat your value back to you in one sentence after landing on your website from an ad, you do not have a visibility gap. You have a clarity gap. More content will not fix that problem.
Meet the surgeon who did not need a bigger budget
A few years ago, a cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Gina Maccarone of The Surgeonista, came to my agency wanting to grow her new practice more quickly. Her website was strong. Her content calendar was full. Her social presence looked, by every surface measure, like it was doing everything right. People were seeing her brand. Now what she needed were consultations.
We spent our first week together on one question: Why choose this surgeon over the 20 others within a 50-mile radius?
In a saturated market, differentiation is key to elevating your brand. More noise isn’t going to differentiate you. Better positioning will. We uncovered that her messaging described procedures instead of describing why she was uniquely positioned to solve her patients’ root problem: not feeling confident in their own skin.
A peer-reviewed study tested different positioning strategies using real brands. Researchers evaluated them based on brand favorability, differentiation and credibility. The findings showed that benefit-based positioning and user-based positioning generally performed better than feature-based positioning.
It took a few conversations to get there, but we uncovered her category of one. She was the only female surgeon in the region who was triple board certified in her specialty. Once we repositioned around that one fact, everything else got easier: the content, the press pitches, the partnerships — because for the first time there was something specific for people to remember her by.
The signals that mean it is time to reposition
I have started noticing the same handful of signals everywhere, not just in medicine. If you are constantly explaining what you do as a job instead of mirroring that you understand your clients’ problem and educating them on the best solution for that problem, positioning might be the issue — not your marketing.
If your sales process feels heavier than it should, that is another signal that positioning can be improved. If you keep attracting people who like you but are not quite right, pay attention to that too. And if your business has grown but your messaging has not caught up with it yet, that is usually the biggest tell of all.
None of that means you failed. Most of the time it means you grew faster than your positioning could keep up with. Repositioning is a growth strategy.
What happened when I applied this to my own business
My agency has been around for a decade. For years, our positioning stayed broad, because it could. We worked across beauty, home and wellness, and the work was good. But sales conversations could run long. Proposals got customized over and over. We were explaining ourselves constantly instead of being instantly understood — the exact signal I now tell clients to watch for. That is usually the first sign that something is not broken. It has just outgrown its container.
So last year we repositioned the whole company. Instead of trying to be a great agency for a lot of categories, we decided to become a category of one for a very specific audience. We stopped saying we offered public relations services and started owning a specific, named framework instead, called our Path to PRominence. We narrowed our focus from beauty, home and wellness down to women’s health, wellness and aesthetics, full stop.
What happened next? Qualified leads went up. Competition went down. Sales conversations got shorter, because people showed up already understanding what we did and why it mattered to them specifically. Inquiries through AI became warmer (if you can call anything from artificial intelligence “warm!”). That did not happen with vague positioning. It happens when your expertise is obvious enough for a machine to place you correctly, let alone a person. And best of all, our revenue doubled in one year.
How to find your category of one
If you think you have a positioning problem rather than a marketing problem, start smaller than feels comfortable. Write down the one thing you want to be known for. Something true, specific and hard for a competitor to claim. Not your mission statement. Not your list of services. The one line a client could repeat back to you, word for word, six months after working with you.
Then pull up your last 10 pieces of content, your homepage and your bio, and hold them up against that one sentence. If most of what you find is generic or interchangeable with a competitor’s, you have found your answer.
Our client did not need a bigger ad budget. She needed sharper positioning — one that attracted her ideal patients, enhancing her efforts when pursuing them. My own agency did not need a new marketing plan. It needed a narrower, truer answer to the question every buyer is asking: Why you, and why now?
Before you spend another dollar on visibility, ask whether what you already have is clear enough to be worth seeing.
Key Takeaways
- A marketing problem means people understand who you are and what you offer but aren’t hearing it enough. A positioning problem means they hear you but can’t quickly grasp what you do or why you’re different.
- If you’re always explaining what you do instead of showing that you understand your clients’ problem, your sales process feels heavier than it should or your messaging hasn’t caught up with your growth, you likely have a positioning problem.
- Write down the one thing you want to be known for — something true, specific and hard for a competitor to claim. Then pull up your last 10 pieces of content, your homepage and your bio, and hold them up against that sentence.
When growth stalls, almost every business owner reaches for the same levers. You know the ones. More content, more ads, more discount codes. Maybe even more texts blasted to a list that stopped opening them months ago.
In my practice, these tactics are effective. But could they be more effective? Yes, they could. Not by spending more, but by clarifying what you already have.
Before you spend an additional dime on more marketing, examine your brand’s positioning first.
