The success of your marketing efforts depends on a variety of factors, but by far one of the most critical is your ability to effectively establish your industry market positioning. Your market positioning provides the foundation for your marketing strategy and guides every aspect of the process, from your brand messaging to the way you engage with prospects and customers. Without understanding your market positioning, your marketing efforts are much more likely to be rudderless, making it challenging to develop a cohesive strategy that will help you build your brand and generate the high-quality leads that will allow you to grow your business and achieve sustained success over time.
What Is Market Positioning?
Market positioning refers to the strategic process of differentiating your business and your offerings from the other competitors in your industry. It involves identifying the unique value you provide to your customers and understanding the ways in which this value provides benefits which aren’t delivered by the other businesses in your market.
Understanding your market positioning will help you create clear and compelling messaging that establishes your brand identity and resonates with your potential customers. By clearly differentiating your brand and your offerings from the other businesses in your industry, you can gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace and establish your business as an industry leader.
Why Is Establishing Your Market Positioning Important?
Understanding and communicating your market positioning is critical to your ability to achieve a successful outcome with your marketing efforts. Your business will experience a variety of important benefits when you take the time to establish your market positioning:
- Differentiation from Competitors – Effective market positioning will help your business stand out in a crowded marketplace by highlighting your unique strengths and the value you provide.
- Enhanced Brand Recognition – Establishing your market positioning creates a distinct brand image that resonates with consumers, making your business more memorable and recognizable.
- Improved Customer Targeting – Understanding your market positioning allows you to tailor your messaging and offerings to specific audience segments. This will result in more effective communication with potential customers and higher engagement rates with your marketing content.
- Increased Sales and Profitability – Effective market positioning can help you attract a larger audience, improving your ability to generate more sales. It can also potentially help you command premium pricing by establishing your brand as an industry leader, allowing you to improve your profit margins.
- Competitive Advantage in Your Industry – By using your marketing efforts to convey the unique selling propositions developed as part of your market positioning, you can carve out a niche that sets you apart from competitors.
- Improved Customer Loyalty – When customers identify with your brand’s values and market positioning, they’re more likely to remain loyal. Not only will you generate more repeat business, but these loyal customers can also serve as valuable brand advocates that will help you generate additional customers.
- Enhanced Strategic Decision-Making – Your market positioning informs every strategic decision made by your business, from product development to marketing. This improves consistency across all business activities.
- Better Adaptability to Market Changes – Effective market positioning makes it easier to respond to emerging trends within your industry, helping you maintain relevance as your market evolves.
- Improved Marketing Outcomes – Establishing your market positioning will help you craft more effective marketing messaging that will resonate with your audience and achieve a better ROI on your marketing efforts.
Critical Market Positioning Mistakes to Avoid
Establishing your market positioning is a complex process, and many businesses struggle to get this important aspect of their marketing efforts right. There are a variety of common mistakes many businesses make during this process which can weaken your brand presence, create a disconnect with your target audience and potentially derail your marketing strategy.
Failing to Research Your Competitors
Establishing your market positioning is a multi-step process that begins with a competitive analysis of other businesses in your industry. This is one of the most critical steps in the process, yet many businesses fail to take the time to perform this research. How can you understand your position within your market if you don’t understand what your competitors are doing and the messaging they’re using to reach many of the people you covet as potential customers?
It’s extremely difficult to differentiate your business from your competitors if you don’t understand what others in your market are saying and how their offerings differ from yours. This knowledge is critical to your ability to demonstrate the unique value your business provides and to make your offerings stand out from those of your competitors. It will also help you identify gaps in your market that present potential growth opportunities for your business to capitalize on.
In addition, this market research will help you understand the messaging your competitors are using to connect with your target audience. You’ll be able to see what the most successful brands are saying so that you can better understand what types of messaging resonate with your audience. You can leverage this information to refine your messaging in ways that incorporate the most impactful tactics of your competitors while modifying this messaging to focus on the unique value you provide.
Not Knowing Your Target Audience
In order to establish your market positioning, you must first know your target audience and understand the messaging that will resonate with them. One of the biggest mistakes many businesses make during this process is failing to take the time to define their target audience. As with conducting a competitor analysis, defining your target audience is a critical step that requires careful research and documentation.
Businesses that successfully nail their market positioning have a clear and detailed understanding of their target audience. This allows you to communicate effectively with each different audience segment in ways that are meaningful to them and help them understand what sets your business apart. Without this audience knowledge, you run the risk of creating generic messaging that isn’t relevant to any of your audience segments and fails to make the connection necessary to capture them as customers.
To ensure you have the proper knowledge of your target audience, it’s important to create comprehensive buyer personas for every segment of your audience. These personas should include information about your audience’s:
- Needs
- Preferences
- Pain points
- Concerns
- Behaviors
- Motivations
The more accurately these individuals can be identified, the more effectively you’ll be able to market to them. When you understand your target audience, you can craft customized messaging for each segment that is clear, compelling, consistent, and emphasizes the unique value you provide compared with the competitors in your market.
Ignoring Market Trends
We live in a fast-paced world. Technology is advancing at rapid rates, consumer tastes are constantly changing, and many of the products and services that were cutting edge even 5-10 years ago are becoming obsolete. If you fail to monitor the trends impacting your industry, you’re likely to be left behind. When you emphasize qualities and value propositions that have been eclipsed by recent changes to your market, you will struggle to remain relevant to your audience. Establishing and maintaining an industry-leading market positioning requires you to stay on top of the latest trends.
Failing to Address the Changing Needs of Your Audience
Just as it’s important to monitor market trends, you also need to stay current on the evolving needs of your audience. If you’re still operating off of buyer personas you created a decade ago, there’s a good chance your messaging is no longer resonating with certain segments of your audience. This can result in potential customers viewing your business as out of touch, antiquated or ill-equipped to meet their needs. When you fail to evolve with the needs of your target audience, it’s challenging to maintain an industry leading market positioning that conveys the value your business provides.
To avoid this issue, you should regularly seek out and monitor customer feedback. This feedback provides valuable insights into the current needs, concerns, pain points and motivations of your audience. You can use this information to continuously update your personas and refine your messaging to ensure it remains compelling as your audience evolves over time.
Inconsistent Messaging Throughout Your Marketing Channels
We live in a digital age where your audience interacts with you through a variety of different channels. The most effective digital marketing strategies maintain consistent messaging throughout every channel they use to engage with their audience. This ensures you have a cohesive and consistent brand experience regardless of where your audience interacts with your business.
It can be extremely challenging to establish your market positioning when the messaging about your brand and your offerings varies significantly from channel to channel. This creates several problems:
- Individuals who engage with your brand on multiple channels will struggle to gain a clear understanding of your brand and the unique value you provide compared with your competitors
- Individuals who only engage with you on one channel may not receive the proper messaging that will resonate with their needs and motivations, preventing them from recognizing the value you provide
Failing to Differentiate Your Business from Your Competitors
One of the primary purposes of establishing your market positioning is to make it easier to differentiate your business from your competitors. If your offering and messaging is very similar to other businesses in your industry, it will be much harder to convince your audience to choose you over your competitors. When you clearly convey what sets you apart, you’ll be able to create a compelling case for why your audience should give you a chance.
As part of establishing your market positioning, it’s important to identify your unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP defines the qualities that make your brand and your offering distinct from your competitors. It communicates the value you provide and the ways you’ll make the lives of your customers better. When you identify your USP and convey it effectively throughout your marketing messaging, you’ll be able to differentiate your business from your competitors and show your audience why they should choose you.
Webolutions Can Help You Develop Your Industry Leading Market Positioning
At Webolutions, we take a holistic approach to digital marketing that is based on three decades of experience. We’ve developed an exclusive Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach that helps you grow your business smarter, faster and easier. As part of this transformational approach to digital marketing, we’ll lead your team on a collaborative journey that uncovers the distinct qualities that make your business unique and set you apart from your competitors based on your core values, purpose, mission, specific set of strengths and unique culture.
When you first start working with our digital marketing specialists, we’ll engage your team in a series of in-depth discovery meetings to uncover your market positioning and create a Market Positioning Action Plan™ that shifts your focus away from the products and services you offer and instead highlights the real transformations you create for your customers. This is the true value of your business and establishes the market differentiation that is critical to achieve a successful outcome with your marketing efforts.
The development of your Market Positioning Action Plan™ is a multilayered process that involves:
- Clarifying your short- and long-term business goals
- Identifying your current market positioning and customer experience
- Developing detailed personas for every segment of your target audience
- Conducting competitive analysis to uncover the messaging used by other businesses in your market
- Performing keyword research to determine the terms and questions your audience uses to search for the products or services you provide
Our process challenges your leadership team to engage in deep introspection to determine what makes you truly unique. It also helps you to clarify the experience you deliver for your customers, since focusing your message on this experience is far more powerful and impactful than creating messaging associated with the features and benefits of your offering. This helps you position your business as more than a commodity that can be evaluated based on price. Instead, it entices your audience to value the overall experience they receive, which may be worth much more than the basic features and benefits associated with your offering.
At the end of this process, we’ll create a Brand Platform™ that outlines your overarching brand strategy and defines your offering, your culture and your experience. This comprehensive document will also define your company’s vocabulary, clarify your unique selling proposition (USP) and all associated components, and outline your brand story. As we develop and implement your digital marketing strategy, this Brand Platform™ will be used to ensure the messaging about your company’s brand identity and marketplace differentiation is consistent across all marketing channels. You’ll achieve more effective communications, more connected user journeys and superior marketing results.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
