How to Create your Strong, Unbeatable Brand Positioning & Stand Out In The Market
brand direction & styling by us for Boheme Fragrances | photo by Aimi Photo
Your brand is so much more than your logo, your brand colors, and your website. Your brand is what people think about you and what they associate you with. And how do you decide what ideas and thoughts you want people to have when they think of you and your business? Brand positioning is your answer.
What is Brand Positioning?
There’s no doubt that all of us have unique experiences and memories, and they contribute to how we perceive a business and brand and what we think of when we interact with them. But a huge factor also comes from how the business and brand have been marketing themselves based on how they want to be perceived.
As a business owner, how do you decide how you want your target audience and customers to think of you? Where do you want people to position you in your market? What sets you apart from your competition in their minds? Brand Positioning is the process to decide how you want to be positioned and associated.
Brand positioning is the process of positioning your brand in the mind of your customers. More than a tagline or a fancy logo, brand positioning is the strategy used to set your business apart from the rest. (Patel)
Once you figured out how you want people to think of you through brand positioning, you can then align everything you do in your business, how you run marketing, and your entire customer and brand experience with it to get the idea across and into their minds.
Let’s walk through the 3 important parts of brand positioning and the factors that you need to consider, analyze and research to figure out where you want to position your brand in the market so you can stand out to your target audience and customers.
3 Key Elements to Finding Your Powerful Brand Positioning
Positioning Element 1: Your Differentiation
Your differentiation is why a target customer would choose you over someone else. Instead of focusing on innovating your products or services or having to make what you sell unique in the entire market, you can also consider your “differentiation combo.” Think of this as your superpower, a combination of your hard skills, soft skills, strengths, resources, knowledge, and experiences.
When you aren’t aligning your business with your differentiation and get distracted by trying to compete in areas that aren’t your strongest, you’d end up investing in double or quadruple the time and resources to achieve what someone else can with less time. This puts you at risk of building a business that is not sustainable. Instead, find your differentiation so you can focus on what you are great at and where you have an advantage.
Need some more tips on finding your differentiation? Click here to first uncover the 3 biggest myths about finding your differentiation, and also learn how to identify it for your business.
To make your differentiation work for your business and marketing, it has to be something that your target audience or target customers desire.
Positioning Element 2: Your Target Audience
Find out who your target audience and customers are. If you are not clear on who you are marketing, selling, and speaking to, nothing you do or say would attract who you want to sell to. When you don’t know who your target audience is, everything you do becomes vague and confusing. And when your marketing isn’t clear, people lose interest and focus altogether. You’d end up with zero attention and no traction for what you sell.
To get started on finding your target audience and target customers, figure out who your best customers are, who you want to help most, or who can benefit most from your differentiation. Once you have a general sense of who your target audience is, find out what they care about most when they make purchases, their lifestyle, how they spend their time, what they value, what their biggest challenges are, and what they desire most.
Still not sure where to start? Click here to learn the 7 questions every modern business owner should ask to pinpoint their target audience.
After you’ve narrowed down your target audience, find out what they care about most when they shop for products or services similar to yours. Identify the attributes and factors that they value most and focus on meeting those specific needs through brand positioning. To stand out and become your target audience and customers’ go-to choice, stop trying to be the best at everything and meet everyone’s needs, and focus on being excellent or even the best at the things your target audience cares about most.
Positioning Element 3: Your Opportunity in the Market
Identify your top competitors in the market and spot any gaps that haven’t been filled. Those are your opportunities in the market. Given the top needs and desires of your target audience and target customers, are the current options that are available to them sufficient to them? Is there any opportunity that you can fulfill especially with your differentiation?
If there isn’t an opportunity in your market and your people’s needs are already met, your business and what you do can easily be replaced by other businesses that serve the same target audience as you. If there’s an opportunity in your market, there’s unmet demand that you can use to set yourself apart.
The intersection of the 3 brand positioning elements, your differentiation, your target audience, and your opportunity in the market is your sweet spot to stand out from your competition. This sweet spot is how you want people to position your brand and how you want your target audience to think of your business.
To give you and your team a concise message and direction to work toward and align with, put all three elements together to come up with your brand positioning statement. This statement is what will bring everything you do in your business together and what you focus on delivering and fulfilling through your business.
Your brand positioning statement should include the following:
your target audience
your audience's biggest problem/challenge
the key benefit of what you sell
your unique solution/differentiation
There are different brand positioning templates available, but this one is the one we use and it’s what we find the simplest and the most applicable for small businesses:
I help [target audience] with [biggest challenge] by [your unique solution and differentiation], so they can [target audience’s main desire and benefit].
brand direction & styling by us for Little Pin | photo by Nina Ruth Photography
Keep Up & Keep Refining Your Brand Position
Just like everything else in your business, it’s a long-term game. Use your brand positioning statement to guide and align the decisions you make, including how you run marketing and how you service customers. Ultimately, no business or marketer can dictate how people feel about a business or brand. But as a business owner and marketer, you can live up to your brand positioning statement and deliver your promise through action and people’s experience and interaction with you. (Check out the 3 unspoken myths of customer experience you should stop believing)
As your business grows, you will also learn more about your target audience and customers. Get in the habit of asking for their feedback and listening to them, and make changes to your brand positioning to evolve with the market and your customers’ needs.
If you’re working on your brand positioning to start your new business, check out the 6 crucial things you can’t miss to have a remarkable name that sticks.
Now, if you’ve been running your business for a while now, and want to upgrade your brand, here are 3 things you need to re-energize your brand to reach a new level in your business!
Did you know that as part of your brand positioning, your pricing strategy also dictates how people perceive you and how they position your business in the market relative to everyone else? Click here to learn more about how to use pricing to give your brand positioning a boost.
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Works Cited
Patel, Sujan. “The 2019 Guide to Successful Brand Positioning in Your Market.” Hubspot.com, 2019, blog.hubspot.com/sales/brand-positioning-strategy.