Positioning: Give Them a Reason to Buy

If your message isn’t getting through to your clients and prospects, and you don’t seem to be able to guide people towards working with you, it could be your positioning. Or maybe your lack of positioning.

Maybe you’re aware of that. But what does it really mean, anyway?

A positioning statement stands for one message that’s unique to you, tells your customers the value you bring, and will give you a competitive edge. It gives people a reason to buy from you. It tells them where you stand. Positioning yourself in the minds of your prospective clients is one of the most valuable things you can do.

If you don’t position your company, someone else, most likely your competitors, will do it for you — and it won’t be good. They’ll say you’re the cheap one, or the too-expensive one, or the one that only does “this,” when really what you do is “that.” It can be very frustrating.

Positioning involves drilling down to the one most important factor that makes you different, that will make you stand out from the pack. Positioning is difficult because it’s counterintuitive — most people instinctively do what others in their fields are doing to succeed. Like, you’re a web designer, so you look at what other web designers are doing and you do that. You figure you need to look like a web designer, right? Well. . . yes, to a point.

But that won’t position you to stand out. You get lost in the sea of web designers.

Your place among the competition

So that’s where we need to start. Defining your position in the market couldn’t be complete or realistic without looking at who you’re competing against. You need to both fit in — so your potential clients will recognize you — and stand out. If you do a few simple things to analyze your competition’s positioning, you’ll be way ahead of most of them.

First, make a list of your direct competitors — the ones your Ideal Customer (you know who your Ideal Customer is, right?) most considers to be your competition — and look for everything you can find out about them. Go to their websites and print out the major pages. Gather any print literature or products you can find from them. Do a Google search and see what you can find written about them.

How to easily analyze your competitors’ positioning

Now review the materials. Look for common themes within each competitor company. Make note of the commonalities for each competitor. What is their tagline? What main colors do they use? Graphics? Themes? What is their main claim or “reason to buy?”

After you’ve analyzed each competitor individually, analyze the entire group in the same way — what common themes run through them? What common graphics or visuals do many of your competitors use? While some companies may have no rhyme or reason to their communications, many will be surprisingly similar.

In most industries, the results to this exercise are amazingly predictable. Companies within the same industries tend to do things the same way, in many of the ways they communicate. They share the same types of visuals, graphics, wording, colors, themes, claims, and sometimes even have very similar logos. Write out all of their taglines for comparison. Lay all of their logos side by side. Look at their colors side by side. You’ll find it isn’t going to be difficult to be different!

Now, before you go off half-cocked, thinking that all you need to do to position yourself in your market is to be different than these folks, you need to know that you’ve only scratched the surface here. This is only background information that’s going to be useful as you move forward. You still need to find the positioning that fits your company. You still need to give clients a reason to buy from you. You don’t want to be different just to be different.

But it’s a great start, isn’t it?