In their marketing, we see many companies spend their time reacting to change instead of anticipating and preparing for it. Only a few have taken the time to prioritize their overall needs and develop a plan to achieve them in a coordinated fashion.
You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.
Positioning your company
Every marketing strategy should start with how to position your business.
Positioning is simply concentrating or focusing on an idea, or even a single word, that defines your product or service and sets you apart from the competition in the minds of customers.
So are you positioning your brand as worth paying more for, or are you just another generic box of salt, shouting a low monthly fee, and hoping your competitor doesn’t beat your price?
All marketing is relative to your unique point of difference. The more important the difference in the prospect’s mind, the higher the marketing value. Positioning will affect all of your marketing decisions: price, promotion, place, products (the 4 Ps).
Think of your brand as the sizzle and the position itself as the steak!
Remember, the specialist always wins
Leading management authority Peter Drucker wrote, “The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through an organization’s difference, defining it and establishing it, clearly and visibly.”
Ask yourself the following questions to narrow down your point of difference.
- FOCUS: What business are we in? How will we define our sandbox?
- POSITIONING: What idea can we own that will differentiate/separate us from competitors? What can we stand for, apart from others who share our sandbox?
- BENEFITS: What obvious benefits does the positioning idea promise? (Consider both tangible and psychological benefits)
- AUDIENCE: Who does the idea appeal to? (Consider both demographic and psychographic characteristics of the target audience)
- COMPETITION: How does this idea reposition the competition? That is, make people think, believe, or know what they didn’t think, believe, or know before. Can you exploit your competitor’s weakness?
Build a marketing strategy
Positioning is the single most powerful concept in marketing. It is based on the principle that a company, product, service, even an individual, can only stand for one thing in the mind of the prospect.
Advertising is not communications; Advertising is positioning. Anything can be positioned.
As business owners, it is easy to become distracted by the noise of marketing and your day-to-day operation.
You can forget to pause and ask critical questions; questions that could make or break your success. When was the last time you stepped back and thoughts strategically about your business?
When was the last time you looked at how effective your marketing was or where your customers were coming from?
This guide from Hub Spot offers recommendations for brand positioning.
The Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center has excellent tools and resources to help you, too. We can help you define what your business does better than anyone else. Then we can help you turn your unique point of difference into a marketing and sales strategy to attract customers.