Strategy & Positioning
Marketing must improve? Don't start at the outside.
Pick a moment that works for you.
"Our marketing must improve." It's the sentence that nearly every intro call with us starts with. Sometimes directly, sometimes packaged as "we're not doing enough on LinkedIn" or "our website doesn't deliver enough" or "we're getting too few leads in". Under each variant sits the same unease: the idea that somewhere in the marketing something is broken and that it should be better.
What often follows is what I call the reflex. The owner looks at what they see, compares it with what they see working elsewhere, and points to what should change on the outside. Different content, faster website, new funnel, more ads, better automation. All visible work. All seemingly logical interventions.
And in nine out of ten cases it's treating symptoms.
Imagine: an SMB owner in business services is getting too few leads through LinkedIn. He decides to post three times a week instead of once. Three months later: still too few leads. Conclusion: LinkedIn doesn't work for him.
What was really going on: his positioning was unclear. His ICP had never been sharpened. In his posts he was speaking to anyone who might one day need business advice. He wrote things nine other consultants wrote too. No matter how often he posted, the story didn't land, because there was no story. Three posts a week was not his problem. It was the expression, not the cause.
This pattern shows up more often than we like to admit. The website gets rebuilt while the proposition is weak. The ad campaign gets set up while no one can say who the client is. The content calendar gets filled with topics that hit no one specifically. Lots of motion, little direction.
The question is rarely "are we doing enough?" but almost always "are we doing the right thing?" and to answer that you have to look deeper than the outer layer.
A few years ago at Skillable, the agency of Bas van der Voort, I saw a simple diagram that exposed something I'd been trying to explain in vague terms. He showed marketing as a series of concentric circles: tactics on the outside, and in the core the positioning and the offer. With the observation that most companies work on the outer layer while the problem sits in the core.
For our approach we adopted that model, but translated it to our own version. We don't work with four layers, but with three. And we made the middle layer specific to what our three pillars do: Visibility, Authority and Market radar.
It looks like this:
Tactics on the outside. Three pillars in the middle ring. Positioning and ICP at the core.
Three circles. From outside in. What I'm going to explain below is what sits in each layer and why the order of thinking should be the reverse of what most agencies encourage.
On the outside sits everything you see when you look at a company. Their website. Their LinkedIn posts. Their ads. Their funnels. Their automations. Their CRM flows. Their newsletters. It's the visible layer, and that's also why it's the layer almost all attention goes to.
Two things make this layer treacherous. First: there's always something to do here. You can always post another piece, rewrite another page, build another automation. The to-do list never runs out, so it feels productive. Second: other companies see the same layer, so the temptation to copy each other's tactics is large. If competitor A is now posting carousels, I'll post carousels too.
What's missing here: the lever. A better LinkedIn post that comes from unclear positioning stays unclear. A faster website making the wrong promise keeps making the wrong promise, just faster. The outer layer amplifies what sits below. If what sits below is weak, you amplify weakness.
One layer deeper sits the work that delivers compounding results. These are our three pillars, and each operates on a different part of the buying journey.
Visibility is being found when someone searches. In Google. In ChatGPT. On LinkedIn. Visibility is the base assumption that you even exist in your audience's head when they wake up with a problem. Tactics without visibility is talking in an empty room.
Authority is the reason to pick you, not your competitor. It's your expertise on paper, your way of thinking made visible, your references that convince others you know what you're talking about. Authority makes the people who find you also choose you.
Market radar is seeing what moves before it shows up in your pipeline. Which companies are exploring, which shortlists are growing, how your position is shifting. It's your view of the part of the journey where your client sits before they know you.
The three pillars only work when they run together. Visibility without authority delivers clickers but no choosers. Authority without visibility stays a good story nobody hears. Market radar without the other two shows signals you can't use. That's why we talk about a system of three pillars, not about three separate services.
In the middle sits what makes everything above possible. The core. This isn't a layer where you do tactics, it's the layer that gives tactics direction. Two elements.
Positioning is the answer to the question: why should someone pick you and not the ten other parties who appear to do the same thing? That's not a marketing tagline. It's a strategic answer anchored in what you actually do differently, who you do it for, and what you don't focus on. Good positioning excludes clients. Weak positioning tries to reach everyone and reaches no one.
ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. Not your audience, because audience is a marketing word too broad to do anything with. ICP is concrete: which sector, which size, which decision-making power, which buying behaviour. The sharper your ICP, the more relevant your signals, the more specific your content, the more targeted your visibility. A vague ICP is the root cause of vague marketing.
With every new client this is the first thing we do before we touch tactics. ICP sharp on paper. Positioning that cuts edge. If those two aren't right, everything stacked on top is just cosmetics.
If you recognize your marketing stuck on layer 1, the solution isn't to work harder on layer 1. It's to look one layer deeper. Three steps that work for B2B SMBs with serious ambition.
First: put your ICP on paper. Not "B2B companies that want to grow". Instead "Dutch business services firms with 10 to 50 employees, at least one marketing coordinator, and revenue between €1M and €20M, working for business decision-makers in financial services, recruitment or consultancy". The sharper, the better. Test it against three scenarios: would I call this company to offer my service? Do they fit what we already serve well? Do they have the budget to hire us? Three yeses, or it's not an ICP company.
Then: retest your positioning. Two tests that work. First: can you say in one sentence what you do and for whom, in a way that only applies to you? If your sentence works for six other agencies in your sector, it's not sharp enough. Second: name three kinds of clients you don't work for and why. If you can't, you're not really positioned, you're open to whoever walks in.
Only then: step up to the pillars. With clear positioning and sharp ICP you now know which questions your market has, which terms you should be found on, which story you should tell to build authority, and which companies your market radar should follow. Suddenly layer 2 is no longer abstract but concrete. And layer 1 (tactics) follows on its own, because you know what to post and why.
This is not an academic exercise. It's what makes the difference between marketing that has to prove itself every month and marketing that compounds.
For clarity: this is not an argument to ignore tactics. Tactics are the expression of your strategy and without expression there is nothing. Posts must be written, websites must be built, ads can work for specific goals. It's an argument to respect the order. First the core, then the pillars, then the tactics. Not the reverse.
And it's also not an argument for months of strategic thinking before anything happens. Sharpening ICP can happen in a workday. Testing positioning can happen in a week. Both also deliver concrete output immediately: an ICP document you send to your whole team, a positioning statement that ends up in your hero. From that moment on all layer 1 and layer 2 actions amplify each other instead of running past each other.
Marketing must improve? Almost always. Just don't start at the outside.
An honest conversation about where your marketing stands today. ICP, positioning, and which layer deserves attention first. 30 minutes, no sales pitch, no commitment.