Having a hard time standing out in a noisy market? Does it feel like no matter how hard you try, you just can’t differentiate yourself from the crowd?
Let’s explore how to develop your positioning strategy—that sweet spot between your strengths and the needs of your market—so you can set yourself apart from the competition.
[Full Transcript]
Having a hard time standing out in a noisy market? Does it feel like no matter how hard you try, you just can’t differentiate yourself from the crowd?
Let’s explore how to develop your positioning strategy—that sweet spot between your strengths and the needs of your market—so you can set yourself apart from the competition.
Defining Positioning Strategy
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when talking about positioning and differentiation. At its core, positioning is:
- Your unique approach to creating value for customers in a way that they can’t easily find elsewhere.
- The answer to “what specific, unique solution can we provide better than anyone else?”
- The intersection between your strengths and your target market—how your solution aligns with the problems of a specific group of potential customers.
Why Positioning is Critical For Entrepreneurs
Without a solid answer to “what specific, unique solution can we provide better than anyone else?” we can end up building a generic business that blends in and gets lost in the noise.
It comes down to supply and demand. A customer looking for website design, financial advice, or a sales training course has hundreds (or thousands) of similar options to choose from. If all you’re selling is “website design” or “sales training,” then you’re going head-to-head against every one of those other undifferentiated options.
Who will win the customer? Who knows? The choice will likely come down to things like:
- Luck—whoever’s service or product happens to come up first in a search.
- Price—whoever’s service or product happens to be least expensive.
- Convenience—whoever’s service or product happens to be the easiest to buy.
While some degree of luck will always influence your success, relying on chance is not a great business strategy.
A better approach is to make intentional positioning decisions about the solutions you can provide better than anyone else. Designing your business around your specific mix of strengths in order to help a select group of customers solve a specific problem.
Instead of building a business that does “website design”…
You build a business that designs and maintains simple, flexible micro-websites for SaaS startups that are looking for ways to quickly test, validate, and iterate their offers.
Why this positioning approach?
- You love the tech startup scene.
- Your strengths include working in fast-paced environments and being able to quickly build clean, effective, simple websites.
- There are enough SaaS startups that find it challenging to market themselves in a flexible way, and really need this type of agile go-to-market resource.
Instead of building a business that does “financial advice”…
You build a business that helps people invest in companies that represent their values around sustainability and environmental responsibility.
Why this positioning approach?
- You’re a passionate advocate for environmental causes.
- Your strengths include doing deep research on companies to uncover the reality behind their public-facing cultures, missions, and business practices.
- There are enough like-minded investors that find it challenging to weed through all their investment options, and really need this type of focused guidance to help them make investment choices that align with their values.
Instead of building a business that does “sales training courses”…
You build a business that helps small sales teams troubleshoot their sales process, diagnose what’s working and not working, and quickly boost revenue by doubling down on their most effective tactics.
Why this positioning approach?
- You love discovering and sharing cutting-edge sales methodologies.
- Your strengths include digging into the granular details of a sales process, discovering bottlenecks, and figuring out ways to overcome them.
- There are enough sales teams that are struggling to make their numbers, but don’t necessarily want to learn a canned sales approach or start from scratch.
What Blocks Us From Developing a Strong Positioning Strategy
Trying to Be Everything to Everybody
We can’t do it all. We simply can’t.
- We can’t be the best fit for every type of customer.
- We can’t provide every service or product that people might want.
- We can’t be a great fit for every opportunity we come across.
And yet many of us still want to try to be everything to everybody. It’s hard to turn away paying customers that just aren’t a good fit. And it’s really hard to draw a line in the sand and say “this is what we’re going to do better than anyone else!”
But we have to pick our battles, because as easy and exciting it is to come up with a long list of services we could provide, or customers we could serve, executing on them effectively is another story.
We’re all limited by two factors that are simply beyond our control:
- The broader our offering and market, the harder it is to create targeted, effective marketing and sales messaging. We end up trying to sell a generic service with a generic offer to generic customers (who don’t exist).
- We have a limited amount of time, energy, and money. Even huge enterprise organizations have to pick their battles wisely. The more we try to accomplish at once, the harder it is to create something extraordinary.
Ignoring the Market
Sometimes we don’t want to narrow down our positioning because we’re too focused on ourselves, and not thinking much about how customers perceive us.
After all, we know that we’re an awesome coder, copywriter, or trainer. We’re so close to what we do, we take for granted that our awesomeness is just as obvious to everyone else. We make our entire sales and marketing approach about our own amazing product or service, rather than our potential customers’ needs and perspectives.
The truth is—nobody cares about your business. Not really. What customers do care about is their own problems, wants, and needs, and they’re only going to care about what you do when they see exactly how it relates to themselves.
In other words, they’ll care about your business once you’ve positioned your strengths in a way that’s aligned with what they really want and need.
Ignoring Ourself
Other times, we have the opposite problem—we don’t want to narrow down our positioning because we’re too focused on the market, and not thinking much about how customers’ needs align with our strengths.
So we chase every opportunity and trend, rather than focus where we can create the most value.
- A copywriter starts offering case studies because they seem to be in demand, even though writing case studies bores them to death.
- A leadership trainer pivots to group workshops because they’re easier to sell, even though that means they no longer get to immerse themselves in the types of deep one-on-one sessions that really inspire them.
- A coder jumps on the latest corporate productivity trend, creating a profitable (but intrusive) employee behavior tracking app that goes against everything they value and believe in.
How to Turn Things Around
We’ll get into more details about positioning in future posts. But for now, the following questions will help you start to home in on the right positioning fit for you.
- What’s the customer problem or pain point that you’re most interested in solving?
- Why is that specific problem so intriguing to you?
- How exactly does your product or service solve that problem?
- What types of customers are you most interested in serving?
- Why will those customers pick you over the competition?
- What types of customers aren’t a good fit for your business?
In the next post, we’ll explore how to craft a strategic narrative for your business. A brand story that focuses on your ideal customers’ problems and how you’ll solve them so that your marketing and sales messaging is always on target.
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