A Complete Guide To Successful Brand Positioning
Many entrepreneurs misunderstand the concept of Brand positioning, thinking that it’s all about getting a nice logo. But it is far beyond that. Brand positioning is a distinctive space that a brand occupies in the market and the mind of its target audience. More than just a tagline or fancy logo, it is a marketing strategy that helps a business set itself apart from its competitors. It makes customers uniquely perceive a specific brand by associating emotions, traits, feelings, and sentiments with it.
Importance of Brand positioning:
1. Promotes market differentiation
Brand positioning creates clarity around who you serve. It also helps your target the audience understands why you are the best choice for them and what makes your products or services are different. When a business endeavour to deliver the desired experience to the target market or resolve an unmet need, brand positioning helps it set apart from the rest by articulating its uniqueness.
2. Value-based marketing
While competitive pricing is one of the positioning strategies you can apply, it might not always be the best option. Whether a firm sells a limited luxury item or products consumed by the mass market, brand positioning clarifies its specific value.
3. Justifies pricing strategies
Your prices may be low, medium, or high, an undefined position may confuse your audience why you have set a certain price. Once you define the position your brand wants to own in the mind of your target audience and as a by-product, how you help them, you can easily justify your pricing strategies.
6 Steps to Create a Successful Brand Positioning Strategy for Your Business:
- Determine your current brand position:
If you are thinking of repositioning your brand, you should first determine where you currently stand in the minds of your customers. You can’t know where to go next if you don’t know your current positioning.
For instance, you can:
- Carry out surveys and receive first-hand customer feedback on how they perceive your brand. Then, visualize your survey findings and share them with your team to help define your current brand positioning.
- Conduct internal research by analyzing your marketing and sales figures.
This can help your business identify the following:
- What are your best-selling products?
- What complaints do you get from customers the most?
- Which marketing campaigns do customers respond to the most?
- Which marketing campaigns failed to get results?
Tools such as Mention and Brand24 help you track conversations about your brand on social media, blogs, forums, and other places online and provide valuable insight into what customers think about your brand. This process will help you see where your brand shines and where it falls short.
If, according to your customers, your brand position is not where you want it to be, it’s time to review your brand voice, company goals, and mission statement as well as the products or services you are offering.
2. Study your competition
A necessary step in researching the market is studying the players in it. There are several methods to do so, such as by subscribing to their newsletters, analyzing their website and social media profiles, and assessing their content across various mediums. Brand Mentions to keep track of online conversations about your competitors.
3. Identify your Unique Value Proposition
It is essential to identify what sets you apart from your rivals and then build your brand image based on that. After having conducted your competitor research, it becomes easier to compare your strengths and weaknesses with theirs. In this process, you might find out that one of their weaknesses is your strength and thus, this can be a perfect starting point to build on your brand’s uniqueness.
4. Create a Brand Positioning Statement
After collection and analysis of all the necessary data, you need to craft a simple yet compelling brand positioning statement. A brand positioning statement is a one- or two-sentence statement that effectively sums up the followings:
- Who is your target audience?
- What is your product or service category?
- What benefit(s) does your brand offer?
- What is the proof of that benefit?
As a great example, we can consider Amazon’s positioning statement: “Our vision is to be the earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Although Amazon’s target audience is incredibly broad, they sell a variety of products for everyone, which is also their greatest benefit. And the proof of that benefit is that it is all online.
5. Implement Your New Brand Positioning
Just like any type of marketing plan, your brand positioning strategy needs to be implemented effectively to achieve the desired results. While branding might seem like a consumer-facing imperative, your employees have to live it first. A touchpoint refers to any encounter consumers have with your business, from information exchanges to services rendered, to monetary transactions.
6. Evaluate Your Statement and Measure Success
You need to keep track of online conversations surrounding your brand, carry out surveys, and collect real-time reviews from your customers, such as after a sale or during a support conversation to evaluate and measure the outcomes of your brand positioning strategy.
As a Mauritian-based Digital Marketing Agency , we would like to point out the following:
Clarity regarding your target audience is produced by brand positioning. It also explains to your target market why they should choose you as their firm and what makes your goods or services unique. You can use it to support your pricing strategy. A price plan may be supported by the brand’s positioning.
Read more: https://spheremedia.mu/brand-positioning/
