What makes your product stand out in the minds of your customers?

Product positioning is the framework for establishing where your product fits in the marketplace and helps your targeted audience(s) differentiate your product from your competitors by communicating the unique benefits your buyer receives (also known as the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP). As an essential piece to your marketing strategy, your positioning provides a clear buying choice for your customers. It’s an opportunity to identify yourself as the ideal brand to support by developing messaging that resonates with your target audience and encourages them to choose your products and services.

Demonstrating effective product positioning early in your businesses’ launch phase can sustain business growth by developing a memorable, go-to brand and increasing your visibility in key markets. When you use positioning to communicate your unique value, your audience has the information necessary to feel like they’re making an educated buying decision and understand why your product is the best option to meet their needs.

Developing your product positioning strategy

There are several routes companies take when creating their product positioning strategy. For example, some companies

• directly compare themselves to their competitors, or
• highlight their unique product offerings, or
• appeal to specific customer needs within separate target audiences.

Regardless of approach, your product positioning should include an understanding of customer needs, source industry and market research, explain what problems your product is solving, how it’s solving those problems, and more.

Step 1: Know your customer. Identify your targeted audiences and learn from them.

In what areas do your customers need more support? How can your products and services provide additional support?

• Gather customer insights from any available sources (social media, client support channels, feedback from sales efforts, customer surveys, online reviews, Reddit and Quora threads, YouTube comment threads, etc).

Is your brand messaging resonating with your audience? If not, why? Analyze available data to understand your existing customer’s experience or utilize a focus group to determine the effectiveness of your brand messaging.

• If you're in your pre-launch phase, you will not have an existing audience base to source data and that’s okay. As an alternative, this step can include the development of focus groups to test your brand messaging.
  -- How is your messaging resonating within the focus group? Gather feedback from participants to inform your next steps.

Step 2: Know your competitors. Conduct a competitor analysis and utilize a competitor matrix to visually identify your key marketing opportunities.

What are the similarities and differences between your products and services?

What positioning do they hold in the market? How is their positioning benefiting them?

Are you and your competitors targeting the same audience?

Step 3: Use the information you’ve learned about your audience, customers, and competitors to develop your product positioning statement.

Your statement should include the following components:

• Who is your target customer?
• What problem does your product solve for the said customer?
• What is your product? What market does your product fall within?
• How does your product meet the specific needs of your target audience? What benefits does your product provide?

If you’ve gotten to this point and are wondering where to start and how to move through this process, don’t worry. That’s one of the many benefits of having margo on your team. We’re here to help guide you through the processes of defining your product positioning and implementing your result-driven marketing strategy.

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