Marketing 101: Positioning part one
By Brett E. Salisbury, Preferred Marketing Strategies
Positioning, put simply, is about what you are marketing and exactly to whom you are marketing. Positioning revolves around a “core marketing message” that clearly states who you work with, what problems you solve, what solutions you provide for those problems, what benefits your solutions offer, what results they produce, what guarantee you give and what’s unique or special about your particular product or service. Positioning is the foundation for your businesses entire identity.
What businesses don’t clearly articulate, nor most marketing agencies follow, is our little secret to success. Learn and live by the success secret and build your businesses marketing message around its principles.
“Your prospects or clients are profoundly uninterested in what you do or offer, but are profoundly interested when it’s about what they get!”
We are all selfish by nature, whether we want to admit it or not and capitalizing on this human nature is key. Once accepted the principle behind the statement becomes clear and easy to live by when marketing yourself, your business, or your service and product.
In the first part of this 3 part series you will be exposed to our secret and one of the 5 basic principles of positioning, target markets. This article is merely a guideline and designed to give you direction...execution does not necessarily mean you will succeed. Success comes from a diverse marketing mix that incorporates positioning, packaging, promotion, persuasion, performance and the unconventional method known as Guerrilla Marketing.
Our Marketing Secret
Realize that focusing primarily on solutions to prospects problems can be leveraged to attract new clients and entice your current ones to come back. The most common sales opportunity all of us experience comes from the simple question, “What do you do?” We don’t consciously answer with marketing commodities, features and processes, or purposely jump to solution and benefit statements. It is only natural to fall into this habit since it’s what we are bombarded with day in and day out from advertisers and what we are usually most comfortable discussing with others.
What the majority of messages don’t do is explain what clients get from working with or using your product and services. Instead, the airwaves, publications and World Wide Web are saturated with “what we do” messages. It is important to remember that a consumer allows you just 3 seconds or less to “touch” them in some way, or they move on to the next business. For example…what is more likely to “touch” you? “Brake inspection only $29.95” or “We get you on the road quickly and safely for just $29.95.”
Let’s use a hypothetical networking situation to explain. When someone asks you what you do it is important to stand out from the rest and certainly won’t by answering, “I sell insurance” or “I am the general manager of a lighting store.” However, you are far more likely to be invited to provide more information if your reply is ‘I provide security for families in case a crisis occurs” or “I brighten the lives of home owners while raising the value of their investment.” How you answer can set yourself apart from the competition or disappoint by giving them what they expected.
Don’t worry, it is against our nature to be anything but selfish and like anything worth doing this method takes constant work and practice. I teach this to my clients and live by it, and I too catch myself falling back into that old comfortable shoe we call features and benefits. The difference is I have had a lot of practice and when I catch myself; I adjust, without compromising the first impression. I discuss this in more detail in other articles and it’s something I like to cover every couple months for those whom may need a reminder.
Defining your Target Markets
The importance and attention target markets require can never be stressed enough. If you don’t know precisely every relevant detail of a prospective target market (your ideal clients) for your business then you are leaving dollars on the table.
Target Market Analysis
- Demographics: basic facts about age, gender, location, company size, industry, education, income etc.
- Psychographics: the adjectives that describe someone like creative, conservative, frugal, athletic etc.
- What are they buying: what keeps them up at night? What problems can you solve?
- When do they buy: are there seasonal factors or other influences on their when they buy?
- Why do they buy: what gets them off their behind to make that purchase?
- Where are they buying: are they buying at Bloomingdales or Wal-Mart?
Consumers are going to buy; the question is where and with whom. How you define your ideal client can dictate how your target market receives your message, if at all. This research involves the analysis of demographics, psychographics, what they’re buying, when they buy, why they buy and where they buy.
When determining an ideal client profile for a product or service that appeals to a number of markets you should narrow it down to the top three to focus your marketing objectives. Then break them down further into 5 segments. For example…your primary target market may be women and they can be focused further into segments such as age, location and so on.
Defining your ideal client is such an important component to defining your position that it requires more attention than given here; however, we will be adding more material on the subject to our web site’s toolkit over the next few months.