How to Nail Your Brand Positioning Strategy
Does your business suffer from inflammatory featuritis? This rarely-discussed condition is actually widespread among businesses large and small. Symptoms include:
Listing out product features when you try to explain what your product does
Difficulty conveying why your product or service is so great
Trouble convincing people to learn more about your product
Luckily, inflammatory featuritis is highly curable, and the doctor is in. Our prescription: Strategic key messaging and positioning.
Positioning is an aspect of marketing that often gets overlooked, probably because it requires a lot of research many startups with small marketing departments think they simply do not have time for. But positioning is an important strategy that helps influence buyers.
What is positioning?
Positioning is about two things:
What makes you unique
Who you are in relation to the rest of the market
And positioning enables you to:
Build a comprehensive marketing strategy that tells a uniform story across all content
Tailor content precisely to fit your target audience and their buyer stage
Quickly give prospects a high-level understanding of your product
Naturally, to create an effective positioning strategy, you need a deep understanding of your target market, your customer base, and their pain points. This is where many brands get tripped up. Without a deep understanding of your target audience, no marketer, no matter how magical they sound on social media, can build you a successful positioning strategy.
Because you want to show where you’re positioned in the marketplace, it’s ideal to have an understanding of your brand and product’s strengths and weaknesses. A comprehensive SWOT analysis can help you understand which aspects you can play up and provide a roadmap for future goals.
Often, marketers suggest getting into brand identity and tone of voice with positioning. This can really deter founders and executives, especially those within technical startups. They often find these things “squishy” and not a valuable use of their time.
While I think these things are important things to discuss, I don’t think they’re crucial to an effective positioning strategy. It’s far more important to understand your brand and your competition and leave the brand tone/personality to its own discussion.
Let’s review what you need to start creating your positioning:
Understanding of your target audience/customer base and their pain points
Clarity on the value your product provides
Analysis of your product position in the market, aka where do you stand now?
Analysis of competitor positioning, aka where are your competitors and where do you fit in?
SWOT analysis
Once you have the necessary information, you can start crafting your positioning statement.
How to nail your brand positioning strategy
The first step to strategic messaging is positioning your brand and product intuitively and clearly with a positioning statement. Positioning is like shorthand for leads and investors to quickly understand what you do. It’s not about details or really even your product; it’s about connecting who you are with something a customer or lead already understands.
Which product explanation makes more sense to you:
Tinder for books
A proprietary algorithm that examines reader preferences and uses machine learning to intelligently suggest new books
“Tinder for books” is easier to grasp because it takes something a person already knows (the Tinder app) and contextualizes it for something new (books, not dating). There are many different subcategories of positioning, but they all serve one purpose: Connect your brand to something the customer understands so they grasp how your brand relates to other brands.
Our positioning statement template
Here’s a formula we use to craft a simple positioning statement:
For [Persona], [company] is the [category] that provides [unique benefit] because [reasons to believe].
Your unique benefit is like the Holy Grail of solving your target audience’s pain points. It also differentiates you from your competitors.
Reasons to believe (RTBs) are justifications or proof as to why your prospective customers should trust you to take their money and solve their problems.
Positioning statement examples
It’s easier to see a great example before you start writing a brand positioning statement. Here are some example positioning statements from other brands.
Coca-Cola:
For individuals looking for high-quality beverages, Coca-Cola offers a wide range of the most refreshing options — each creates a positive experience for customers when they enjoy a Coca-Cola brand drink. Unlike other beverage options, Coca-Cola products inspire happiness and make a positive difference in customers’ lives, and the brand is intensely focused on the needs of consumers and customers.
Here’s how that breaks down with our formula:
Persona: Individuals
Category: Beverages
Unique benefits: Wide range of refreshing options that create a positive experience for customers, inspire happiness and make a positive difference in customers’ lives
Reasons to believe: Coca-Cola is intensely focused on the needs of consumers and customers
Amazon
For consumers who want to purchase a wide range of products online with quick delivery, Amazon provides a one-stop online shopping site. Amazon sets itself apart from other online retailers with its customer obsession, passion for innovation, and commitment to operational excellence.
Let’s break it down:
Persona: Consumers who want to purchase a wide range of products online with quick delivery
Category: Online shopping site
Unique benefits: Wide range of products, quick delivery, one stop
Reasons to believe: Customer obsession, passion for innovation, commitment to operational excellence
How your positioning statement fits in to the rest of your marketing
Your positioning statement is e a close snuggle buddy of your value propositions and key messages. For solid key messages, you need a positioning statement. For a stellar positioning statement, you need understanding of your key messages. You’ll want to integrate these three aspects to develop an effective mission statement, elevator pitch, and company description.
Think about how often you use mission statements, elevator pitches, and company descriptions. Only when you’re talking to investors, speaking with visitors to your booth at tradeshows, talking with prospective buyers, using on marketing material, putting on your website, working into sales emails … you get the idea. You use these statements everywhere.
Hopefully, this will help you realize just how important effective positioning is in not just your content strategy, but your sales as well.
We regularly work with brands to help them develop and execute a key messaging and positioning strategy. Reach out to us with any positioning or marketing questions.
