Crafting your positioning

Now that we've done an overview of positioning and messaging, let's focus on what your company is building and how you want to position it in the market. 

Start With Why

You've likely seen this great TED talk from Simon Sinek on how inspirational leaders start by defining why they do what they do, and how they do it or what they do. We see a lot of founders fall into the trap of talking too much about what their product does or how it will help someone, without ever conveying why their company exists in the first place.

The why is the inspirational part. It's the reason you created your company in the first place and it's the reason your customers will want to use your service. This is such a great and easy framework to apply to your brand storytelling and brand positioning efforts, as it gives you the foundation in which to build the rest of your marketing.  

From there, you can start to define the other key parts of your brand story, from your mission to your vision to your brand pillars, which will round out how you talk about your company and give you the clarity you need to grow and scale. 

Your Users

Are you clear who your target user is? Does that person have buying power? Are you targeting both a user and buyer? Could you quickly describe what these users do on a daily basis, what their pain points are, and what motivates them to get up in their morning and go to work? This is crucial for developing clear positioning as well as defining your marketing strategy, and we recommend doing this work sooner rather than later. In the next sprint, we’ll go in-depth into personas, or creating profiles for your target users. This is an incredibly effective tool for gaining empathy and understanding of why these users will want to use your product and what you’re solving for.

Market Trends

It’s likely you came upon the idea for your product based on a gap in the market and a personal understanding and/or experience of the problem you’re trying to solve. While this certainly factors in to your positioning story, it’s equally important to tie the founding of your company to bigger trends happening in your space. Think back to what your target audience was doing 5 years ago. How did they handle the problem you’re solving for then? What tools were they using? What was missing? What were the pain points? Then think about what has changed since then that’s paved the way for your company to exist. Humans like to categorize information and providing a reference or anchor point to recent trends will provide even more clarity around how you market your product.

Competition

In later sprints, we’re going to help you flesh out your competitive battle cards, but for now, we just want to highlight the importance of regularly knowing and researching who your competitors are. By studying their product choices, along with their brand and product positioning and messaging, you’ll have a better handle on how you want to differentiate. You also want to have those talking points early on for when a potential customers ask, “Well, how are you difference than <insert competitor>?”