What can marketing agencies learn from tech?

When everyone sells the same thing

The way agencies sell themselves hasn’t changed in 20 years, even though almost everything else about how marketing gets delivered has.

Go to your closest competitor’s website. Read the services page. Then read another competitor’s. By the third one, you’ll realize you’ve been reading the same page with a different logo on it.

Strategy. Creative. Digital marketing. Content. Analytics. Maybe the order changes.

Agency culture rewards craft. The website is built as a showcase for the work, which makes sense for the creative director evaluating your reel but less sense for the VP Marketing who needs to justify the spend to the CFO.

When all three agencies on the bid list offer the same services, marketers either start comparing bells and whistles or default to the one that put up the best show. Either way, they’re not making a sound business decision.

Of everything a marketing leader buys, agency is the hardest category to evaluate before you sign. And agencies are not making it easier.

The holding companies are finally making scale mean something beyond a pitch deck. Publicis acquired LiveRamp, a platform that connects fragmented customer data across systems. WPP reorganized around an AI operating system. Omnicom merged with IPG for data reach. They’re rebuilding competitive advantages that eroded when the tools they once gatekept went self-serve. A marketing director with a credit card can launch a campaign on Meta in an afternoon.

Small and mid-sized agencies take a different approach. Many today are racing to automate execution with AI: faster workflows, assisted production, templatized deliverables. Others are packaging their expertise into scoped engagements and diagnostic products a buyer can evaluate before the first call. And then you have independent consultants running custom AI agents to deliver the same output at a fraction of the overhead.

All three responses borrow from the same place. Technology companies developed a packaging discipline years ago, and it transfers to services better than most agency owners expect.

Sell solutions over services

Salesforce sells one platform. For its key verticals it packages the components of that platform into named solutions like Healthcare Cloud or Financial Services Cloud. A buyer in one of those industries sees a version built for their reality, with the right mix of products and features already highlighted, instead of a menu they have to assemble themselves.

Behind each of those solutions sit dedicated sales teams and product specialists organized around that industry. The packaging on the site matches how the company is organized internally.

Agencies can make the same move. Instead of listing brand strategy, campaigns, content and digital, organize around situations the buyer recognizes. “We help B2B companies launch into new markets.” “We help DTC brands that have outgrown their founder’s aesthetic.” “We build employer brands for companies hiring at scale.” The buyer finds themselves on the page, and that starts a conversation. The wrong buyer moves on, which is also the point.

Some agencies try to differentiate with a point of view instead. “We believe in creativity.” “We’re driven by effectiveness.” These fall into a handful of archetypes every competitor shares. The conviction is genuine. It just doesn’t help the buyer choose between you and the next agency that believes the same thing.

More services make you less unique

In tech, one of the most important early decisions a product company makes is defining its ideal customer profile, or ICP. Not “anyone who’ll pay,” but a specific description of the company and situation where the product creates the most value.

HubSpot was precise about one of its early ICPs. It went after companies with 10 to 50 employees, that either had basic technical skills in-house or at least one on-staff or contract developer, and whose main goal was more leads but who lacked the capacity to chase them. Those are criteria you can check a company against. They shaped the product roadmap, the sales motion, the content strategy, and the pricing model.

An ICP is a deliberate choice about who you’re built for. Without one, product roadmap, sales pitch, case studies, and pricing all pull in different directions. The agency that tries to be relevant to everyone ends up memorable to nobody. The one that picks a lane compounds its reputation there.

Agencies spread thin by instinct. Some brand work, some performance, some content, some web builds. The team never goes deep in one area and the portfolio ends up looking like a sampler platter. Most never define an ICP at all. They let it emerge by accident, one client at a time, and end up with a portfolio that tells no coherent story.

The agency equivalent of an ICP isn’t always a type of client. It’s often a signature scenario: a recurring situation the agency is built to handle, with a point of view on how to handle it.

Arc’teryx is designed for alpine climbing. The R&D, the materials, the fit are all built for someone summiting in the Coast Mountains. Half the people wearing it are commuting in Toronto. They still buy, and they pay the premium, because the technical credibility is the brand. The climbers are the core that proved the product. Everyone else followed because the spike was real. A signature scenario works the same way for an agency: the specialty is the draw, not the fence.

David&Goliath. Category challengers. Best known for taking Kia from afterthought to Super Bowl advertiser (the Soul hamsters).

TBWA. Category reframing for ambitious challengers. Apple (“Think Different”), Adidas (“Impossible is Nothing”), Airbnb (“Never a Stranger”). A CMO hiring TBWA knows what kind of thinking they’re buying before the first meeting.

McCann. High-scrutiny global brands. Mastercard (“Priceless”), L’Oréal, Microsoft. “Truth Well Told” as a motto fits because the work has to survive compliance review and public pressure.

All of these agencies take work outside that lane. But the signature scenario is what makes them recognizable, and it’s what the right prospects self-select into. The differentiation is how they think about the work. None of this means turning away a brief that doesn’t fit. It means knowing where your reps are deepest and leading with that.

Your method is your margin

Digital products encode an opinion about how the work should happen. The product team studies how a specific job gets done, step by step, and builds the tool around that sequence. The software doesn’t ask what you want to do. It says “here is how this works” and walks you through it.

A signature methodology does the same thing for an agency. It tells the buyer you’ve done this enough times to have a formula, and a formula implies mastery.

It also changes the economics. A defined process means less reinvention per engagement and better margins. Quality becomes less dependent on which individual runs the project. And it’s where AI delivers the most for agencies right now. It handles the steps that follow the formula, so the team’s hours go to the parts that don’t.

A boutique digital marketing agency I’ve worked with sells a fixed-price diagnostic with a defined scope and a clear deliverable. It works as both a standalone product and a way into the relationship. A leading Canadian recruitment firm productized sourcing work into a sprint model with flat-rate pricing and built a client-facing dashboard showing progress in real time. That differentiator earned them market share and brand equity in a category where most competitors still sell the same opaque, full-cycle retainer.

Good strategy that never leaves marketing

Most agency deliverables are concrete: a media campaign run, a website launch, a content calendar with produced posts. Strategic framing work such as positioning can work fine when it’s scoped to a campaign: the team builds the messaging, the campaign carries it into market, and the work shows up in the touch points.

The problem is when positioning is meant to be more than a campaign input. Done well, it should change how the sales team pitches, how the founder describes the company to investors, how the company responds to an RFP. But it almost never travels that far.

Two reasons. First, most agencies aren’t set up to go there. Their scope ends at communications and campaigns. They deliver a brand book or a messaging framework and move on, because sales enablement, product marketing, and internal alignment aren’t services they sell or capabilities they staff for. Second, the engagement often starts at the wrong altitude. A VP of Marketing hires the agency. The output reflects marketing’s view of the company and stays inside marketing’s channels. If the CEO isn’t in the room when the positioning is built, it won’t reshape how the rest of the organization talks about what the company does.

I witnessed how expensive this gets at a healthtech company. An agency delivered a rebrand with polished visuals and a positioning concept built on grandiose words. It wasn’t grounded in market reality. It had virtually no impact on how the sales team pitched. The internal team barely adopted it, it didn’t resonate with external stakeholders, and I’d argue it added more confusion than clarity. The job was half done, and the most important part was skipped. Some time later, the positioning had to be completely redone.

Strategic work that stays inside marketing isn’t strategic. It’s a campaign input with a more expensive price tag.

Simple to market, simple to choose

Productizing a service means making what you sell evaluable and repeatable without reinventing it every time. It doesn’t mean turning your agency into a software company. It means applying the same packaging thinking to your expertise that product companies apply to their code.

Not everything should be productized. Custom, high-judgment work is often where agencies create the most value, and forcing a process onto it flattens the thinking. The question is which parts of what you do are both repeatable and valuable enough to package.

A useful way to sort it: how often you repeat the work, and how much the client values it.

Most agencies should start in the first quadrant. You probably already have the raw material: an engagement you keep running, a diagnostic at the start of every relationship, a deliverable your team has gotten efficient at producing. It has a shape and a rough price. What it doesn’t have is a name, a page on your website, and a description that helps a buyer say yes before the first call.

Start there.