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In This Episode

If you had to say what your business does, who it does it for and why people should choose you rather than your competitors could you do it?

Well, if not, you’re actually not alone.

All sorts of businesses from startups to well-established companies struggle with their positioning statement, namely saying what they do, who they do it for and why people should choose them rather than their competitors.

In today’s show, we’re going to help you define what your positioning statement is.

What is a Positioning Statement?

When we’re talking about positioning statements, we usually talk about three things:

• What does your business do?
• Who you do it for?
• Why people should choose you?

Your positioning statement should work as a simple filter that you can pass your marketing materials through, to work out whether they are appropriate to your business goals or not.

That means it needs to be quick and memorable.

For example, at Thinkplus, we help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) generate more leads and sales to their websites. People choose us because we’re plain English and we focus on return on investment.

So when we’re deciding whether to develop a new service, we can run it through that filter. Does it help SMEs generate more leads and sales to their website?

Why is Having a Positioning Statement Important?

Think about it.

What do you write in your adverts in order to attract your perfect customer? Well, you write the differentiation points from your positioning statement.

What about your website? What sort of tone do you need to take on your website? Well, You need to take the tone that your positioning statement guides you on.

As a result, a positioning statement is a really useful filter that you can push all of your marketing material through to make sure it’s useful for your business and targets the right customer.

How to Create Your Positioning Statement

In order to create your positioning statement there are three sections we need to work through:

1. The Listening Phase

To craft your positioning statement, the first step is to listen. This is really important because for established businesses, creating a positioning statement is not about inventing something from scratch. It is about identifying what your company’s natural strengths are against competitors.

To do this, you’ll need to have a look at where your competitors are positioned in the market. In your competitor research you should consider the following:

• What sort of topics are they talking about?
• What angles are they pursuing?
• What do they talk about in their ads?
• What do they focus on in their landing pages?

In this phase, you also need to listen to your customers.

This is because if you’re selling your products and/or services to people already, then they’ve chosen to buy from you and they might be able to tell you the reasons why they choose to buy from you rather than your competitors.

So even if you’re not clear on your positioning, actually sometimes your customers are.

Often your sales team will know this information. If you don’t have a sales team then you can just go directly to your customers. Don’t be scared of just picking up the phone and talking to a few of your best customers and asking: Why did you choose us? If you had to describe us to a friend or a colleague, what would you say?

2. The Thinking Phase

In this phase, it’s time to put a basic positioning statement together.

There really is no secret formula to getting your positioning statement right. This is going to be something that you’re going to have to figure out for yourself.

You’re not looking for something that’s super wordy and uses clever puns and talks about pain points. You’re just looking for something plain English and common sense.

3. The Testing Phase

Now you’ve come up with a few different positioning statements, you need to identify which one fits best.

The first and most simple way to test your positioning statement is to bounce it against your sales team.

The next best place to test your positioning statement is with your customers. You could send them a survey and get them to choose the positioning statement which they feel most accurately represents your business.

It’s important that you get a wide range of perspectives here, because actually what one customer chooses you for might be different to what another one chooses you for it. You want to have a positioning statement, which is going to appeal to the broadest section possible of your perfect customers.

Once you’ve tested your positioning statement and are confident it is the right one for your business, please tell your marketing agency what it is. It makes our life so much easier if you have a clear position in the market, you know what you’re selling, who you’re selling to and why people should choose you.

Find Out More

Watch or listen to the video or podcast to gain further insight into how to create the perfect positioning statement for your business. If you want more digital marketing suggestions and advice, then request a free review of your website via this link: https://exposureninja.com/review/

Timestamps

00:00 — Introduction
00:50 — What is a Positioning Statement?
02:31 — Why is Having a Positioning Statement Important?
04:55 — The Supermarket Example
08:04 — How to Create Your Positioning Statement
09:25 — The Listening Phase
16:06 — The Thinking Phase
19:27 — The Testing Phase

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