Last week I flew to Colombia to run a marketing workshop for a group of agency leaders from around the world. Tiara covered KPIs and finance planning for 2026. I covered marketing strategy. Rachel Jacobs and Ecommerce Agency Growth hosted the whole thing in Cartagena, sponsored by Rivo and Klaviyo.
Three days. 30 Degrees C. Fifteen agency leaders from around the world. A lot of strong opinions about Shopify, AI, and what "good content" looks like.
Here's what I didn't expect: I could have predicted every agency's USP before they said it.
"We're a premium Shopify Plus agency."
"We focus on complex builds and migrations."
"We care about long-term relationships, not quick wins."
Sound familiar? That's because it's what everyone says.
The Interesting Part Came When We Dug In
When we actually worked through the exercises, defining content pillars, building interview frameworks, mapping positioning to real commercial problems, something shifted.
Every single agency had a genuine perspective. Not a manufactured differentiator. Not a tagline dreamed up in a strategy session. An actual point of view that came from how they work, who they hire, what they refuse to do, and what they've learned the hard way.
The problem wasn't that they didn't have something to say. It was that they'd never been forced to articulate it in a way that sounds different from every other agency's LinkedIn feed.
The Framework We Used
I walked them through waye's two-part content system: Hero pieces and BAU.
Hero pieces (quarterly): Original research, big campaigns, things that make your audience stop scrolling. These attract new people who've never heard of you.
BAU content (weekly): Consistent, useful, sounds like your agency actually sounds. This nurtures people who already know you exist but aren't ready to buy.
Simple enough. But here's the bit that landed:
In an AI-saturated world, everyone can produce content. So everyone does. Most of it sounds the same because most of it is the same, just reworded.
The old game was volume. Whoever publishes the most wins.
The new game is trust. Whoever earns it wins.
And you don't earn trust by sounding like "good agency content." You earn it by sounding like the content your ICP actually consumes outside of work.
What Actually Made the Difference
We spent time on:
Content pillars based on positioning, not based on "what should we post about"
Interview frameworks to extract genuine POV from team conversations (your best content is already in your colleagues' heads; you just haven't asked the right questions)
Mapping one piece of content to 10+ assets across formats, without it feeling like you're recycling the same thing
Designing hero pieces for each quarter, choosing between inspiration, research, human stories, or utility based on what actually fits
The insight that kept coming up: most agencies are trying to sound like what they think an agency should sound like. Polished. Professional. Safe.
But their actual opinions, the ones that come out after a few drinks, or when a prospect asks a dumb question, or when a project goes sideways, are far more interesting.
The Point
I've done enough of these workshops to know what agencies will say when you ask about their USP. I can usually guess before they finish the sentence.
But when you push past the surface, everyone has something real. Something that can't be copied. Something that, if they actually said it out loud, would attract exactly the right clients and repel exactly the wrong ones.
Most agencies never get there because they never do the work to find it.
This group did. And the content they're going to produce over the next year is going to be significantly better for it.
/