Establishing a solid and differentiated positioning is crucial for a startup’s success in today’s highly competitive business landscape and economic downturn.
Let’s look at the definition by Kotler in Marketing Management: “Positioning is the act of designing a company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the minds of the target market. The goal is to locate the brand in the minds of consumers to maximize the potential benefit to the firm.”
In fact, positioning helps you create a distinctive position for your brand or offering in your market, allowing buyers to identify, perceive, and eventually choose you in the buying decision process. It is a key differentiator for any startup in a competitive market.
However, building an effective positioning strategy requires careful consideration and avoidance of common errors that can hinder your efforts. Let’s look at six critical mistakes to avoid when shaping your positioning, ensuring that your brand, product, or service stands out from the competition and resonates with your target audience.
Not understanding your market
In today’s world, competition is hard. It is relatively infrequent that your market will have no direct or indirect competitors (if this is the case, this is usually not a good sign, but that’s another story).
Understanding your competitors, their brand messaging, Unique Selling Propositions (USPs), and pricing is crucial to understanding where you differ and what strengths and weaknesses you have compared to them. Because this is usually what a buyer will do: compare you with your competition before choosing which solution might fit him best. And if you haven’t identified why you’re better and different than your competition, how could a buyer do it?
Start by identifying your main competitors. Research online as your customer would do, look at analyst reports, website referrals, online communities, ask your customers whom they considered and your sales team, who usually competes with your solution within an account. Look everywhere you can to understand the customer decision process.
Don’t forget to look at the indirect competition, including options that prevent using your solution (ex. Excel vs. a prioritization tool). Sometimes they are stronger competitors than you think. Understanding why and how to counter them is crucial when establishing your positioning.
When identified, draft a table listing your main competitors and highlight their brand messaging, main features, verticals, and pricing. Add anything specifically relevant to your industry, like onboarding experience, etc.
Not being specific enough
Now that you have identified the market and competition, ask yourself:
- What is your value proposition?
- What is your vision?
- Why are you different?
Craft a positioning that differentiate your product from competitors, giving clarity and making it easy for prospects to understand why they should choose you over others.
Furthermore, understanding your strengths and weaknesses will help you shape the positioning that will drive the best leads to you. Being willing to be everything or claiming you are good at everything is counterproductive. You’ll make the message difficult to understand and attract leads that will not be right for your solution, wasting precious resources.
Positioning yourself in a specific segment will allow you to have a clear and consistent message avoiding diluting your positioning and creating mixed perceptions among your target audience. That way, you’ll be able to maintain a consistent brand voice and deliver a cohesive message across all channels and touchpoints.
Identify two essential market dimensions to you and position your competitors and yourself into an x and y axes to have a clearer view of your market per your vision. This will help clarify your positioning.
Not using your target audience's words
You’ve built a product to respond to a need. But do you really know your target audience? You need to understand and address your target audience’s needs, desires, and pain points to ensure an effective positioning.
Conduct thorough market research to identify your target audience. Read their comments, posts, and what they share on social media to understand how they speak and what matters to them. Read customer reviews, cases, LinkedIn profiles, etc., and understand them better.
Understanding your target audience well will help you understand their jargon, what they value, and what resonates with them. This is how you will shape a positioning that will resonate with them.
Not aligning with your Go-To-Market (GTM)
Remember what your GTM strategy looks like. As a Product-Led-Growth (PLG) company, you focus on users, not executives. If you’re targeting Enterprise accounts, your messaging will target multiple personas and require responding to different needs (security, productivity, etc.). If you’re combining Product-Led-Growth and Sales-Led-Growth (SLG), this adds to the complexity.
Ask yourself the market entry point and ensure that your messaging, target audience, and distribution channels align with how you plan to enter and capture the market. By integrating your positioning with your GTM plan, you can create a cohesive and consistent approach that maximizes your chances of success.
A well-designed GTM strategy considers scalability and future growth opportunities. As you shape your positioning, aligning it with your GTM plan’s scalability and growth objectives is essential. Your positioning should allow expansion into new markets, product lines, or customer segments without requiring significant repositioning efforts. By considering GTM from the outset, you can create a positioning strategy that supports your long-term growth goals.
Lacking perspective
You’ve built your product for a long time now. It is like your baby, and you see it through the eyes of love. But are you objective regarding what your product really is?
Take a breath, go on vacation, go to a museum, read others’ businesses, practice mindfulness, or whatever allows you to disconnect your mind (I practice running every day to disconnect). Then go back to your positioning and try seeing it through a fresh eye: is it clear? Understandable? Appealing to your target audience?
Ask your customers, community, analysts, and even friends or grandparents (grandparents are great as they need help understanding something that isn’t clear enough :)) and reshape until it’s clear enough. Simple is your best friend, don’t try to sound too complicated because you know the work you’ve put into your product.
Sometimes a fresh perspective is needed to help you clarify your vision. Positioning is hard work, don’t take it simply. Simplicity is much more complicated than complexity. As Steve Jobs said, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
A fractional Head of Marketing can help you in the process. Their neutrality and emotional disconnection can help you get the fresh perspective you need to achieve the right positioning that will resonate with your target audience.
To conclude: Building your positioning strategy is a long process
Avoid these errors and invest time into crafting a clear, differentiated, and customer-centric positioning strategy. But this is not a one-time process. Markets evolve over time, so continuously monitor the effectiveness of your positioning and be willing to adapt it as needed.
Shaping the right positioning appealing to your target audience can become a serious competitive advantage, waving your path to success. This shouldn’t be taken lightly during an economic downturn, as growth efficiency is more important than ever.
Upki can help you in your positioning process. To know more, click here.
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