Positioning a product is crucial to business success whether it’s for B2B or B2C. It’s the fastest way to connect with your audience, the key to stand above the noise and the reason for your brand to be memorable.
Here are some common positioning challenges growing companies face:
1. Not clear about the value your product brings to the audience
For any product that has a customer base, understanding its value to your audience is mighty important. Sometimes the value can be the combined reasons that people choose you over the others. Understanding all the reasons is the first step in figuring out your positioning in the market. There are many free tools out there that you can use. The Value Proposition Canvas, for example, is a fantastic tool that we use in our process.
2. Positioning from internal team’s perspective ONLY
Your customer’s point of view should be the angle for the positioning statement, not YOURS. When written from the internal perspective, we often see these words such as “the best”, “the first” and “the #1”. Almost every time I see these words, my immediate reaction is: “Is it true?” I would look for a proof. If there isn’t any or it’s not convincing enough, I move on to the next option. By saying these words, you set yourself up to an even bigger job in convincing your target audience to trust you, a situation everybody else is trying to avoid.
3. Targeting at everybody
“
When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one. – Meredith Hilltweet this
Positioning should hit a home run with your core customers. Segmenting your current customers helps identify the core people you want to target at this stage in your business.
“I don’t want to leave anyone out”, you say. Of course, you serve everyone who buys your product, but your positioning and messaging should focus on the core customers for now. Over time, your brand will eventually reach everyone. Using Facebook as an example, when they first started, they targeted the students at Harvard University only, then they expand to other Ivy League universities, then other universities, high schools, and eventually everyone in the world. This is especially valuable to know if you have limited resources and bandwidth.