When we first begin working with clients, they rarely have a clearly defined market positioning platform which truly sets them apart from their marketplace competitors in a genuine, differentiating, and relevant way.
In today’s highly competitive business environment, positioning your organization effectively is critical to the success of your company. With attention spans dwindling, you may only have a matter of five seconds or so to create an impression on the new potential customer. If your messaging sounds exactly like that of your competitors, you cannot create interest, you cannot create differentiation, and you cannot create that defining moment of revelation which compels a prospect to continue to want to learn more about you and what you have to offer.
Often, when we ask new clients what sets them apart from their competitors, we get the same, old, tired answers:
- We provide great customer service
- We have a great product
- We have a great team who cares
Unfortunately, these are often the exact same messages that their competitors are stating on their websites.
In this post, we are going to walk you through the steps that we take to create a differentiating positioning platform for our clients. Once achieved, there are multiple benefits to reap, including:
- Differentiating your offering to potential new customers in a compelling and relevant way.
- Reducing or eliminating customer price sensitivity
- Improved understanding of your customers and your marketplace opportunities
- Clarity around who your company is and exactly what you stand for
- Easier attraction of new, talented employees
- Improved strategic and tactical decision making
What Is Market Positioning?
Market positioning encompasses many key areas, including:
- Identifying and understanding the specific product or service areas where you compete. In today’s world, this is a constantly evolving dynamic.
- Identifying and understanding your core competencies and strengths. You cannot create a competitive advantage without capitalizing on those things which you possess which differentiate you from other companies.
- Identifying and understanding your specific audience, their drivers, the questions they have, how they make decisions and why they should purchase from you vs. one of your competitors.
- Identifying and understating a concrete company vision. The key elements of this include:
- A set of clearly defined core values and their associated behaviors
- A well-structured and inspiring company purpose
- Well-constructed company goals and defined performance numbers that drive organization change, align your team and inspire them to reach forward together
- Identifying and understanding exactly how to position yourself in a way that is genuine, compelling and effective so that everyone quickly and easily knows what makes you stand out from everyone else.
Who Does Your Market Positioning Impact?
It is easy to understand how effective market positioning impacts your marketing results. But, there are additional benefits that your organization will enjoy.
You and your leadership team will experience greater clarity around making tactical and strategic decisions. What are the right moves and what are the distractions to which you should say no? These will become evident to the entire group, saving you time and driving greater success.
Your team members will enjoy multiple benefits as well. When hiring new team members, positioning clarity will allow you to share a compelling vision with candidates and invite them to become a part of something with meaning instead of simply offering them a job. Your existing team members will enjoy reaching towards defined goals together and doing this with people they like and respect who all share the same core values.
Our Approach to Effective Market Positioning
The highlights of our unique positioning process include the following steps:
- Working with your key organizational stakeholders and following a proven process, we lead your team through a fun and engaging self-discovery journey. Along the way, we apply a series of new lenses and conduct collaborative dialogue which shines light on many areas which are not possible to uncover by those who work within an organization. They are simply too ingrained in their existing ideas and preconceived limitations or too close to all the business details to effectively step outside of what they believe is possible. The group experiences a united transformation in the way that they see the company, who they are, and who they can be.
- We develop personas to better understand your customers, who they are, what they need and how we can address their specific needs.
- We fold in detailed market research to gain better clarity into the marketplace demand for your company’s products or services. We identify the top keywords used by your target audience and the number of searches being done each month for them. We also uncover insights into how your company’s competitors are marketing, the size and strength of their website, their messaging, their calls to action, their social strategies and more.
- This interactive and data-driven collaboration results in newfound energy, excitement and a go forward strategy that rejuvenates your passion and drive for the company to thrive.
It is important to note that our market positioning process is simply helping your company see and understand many of the great things that you already possess. This makes it easier to understand how to capitalize on these strengths in order to enjoy a competitive advantage. We call this process our Intrinsic Multiplier™ approach. We pull all the greatness and possibilities out of your company leaders and help you achieve a vision for all that you create. Then, we provide a concise implementation roadmap.
Implementing Your New Market Positioning
Once we have worked with you to establish your market positioning, the fun really gets started. Now it is time to implement. Some of the common implementation steps include:
- Establishing a clear set of critical KPIs (key performance indicators) which we will use to measure progress against your defined goals.
- Setting up real-time performance intelligence dashboards to ensure that we can quickly and easily see what areas are going well and what areas require attention to drive the results we need. We need to see what levers to pull.
- Engaging your company team members in the overall vision to drive engagement and create synergy between everyone’s specific role responsibilities and the shared success we are working towards together.
- Creating a success rhythm to align everyone, measure progress, celebrate results and continue to reach your defined goals together.
About Webolutions
Webolutions is a full-spectrum digital marketing and strategic growth implementation agency. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique stories to life, empowering them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.
Areas of expertise:
- Differentiating Brand Development
- Marketing & Communications Strategies
- Customer Journey Mapping & CRM Systems Execution
- Enterprise Website & Application Development
- Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
- Organizational Development Strategies
- Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
- Business Performance Intelligence Systems
A Special Offer
Our purpose at Webolutions is To Empower Passionate People to Thrive. If you are a business leader who wants to take your organization to the next level or if you believe that that you are not achieving all the success that you could, we’d love to show you more about how our market positioning process works and share the results that our clients have seen. If you are a company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request your Free Market Positioning Consultation. During this 30-minute introduction, we’ll help you start to see a clearer path to success. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.
