In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, it’s not enough to be the best at what you do; you need to be known for it. Brand positioning is a key tool to achieve this and define who you are in the minds of your customers. It allows you to stand out from your competition and forge a unique identity that resonates with your target audience.
But understanding your brand is just the beginning. To truly grow and succeed, you need to know how to align your brand strategy with your business goals. The combination of positioning and strategy can ensure your message is not just heard but remembered.
The Basics of Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is a marketing strategy focused on identifying and establishing your unique value proposition. To be effective, you need to develop a distinctive, authentic identity that differentiates you from your competitors in the minds of your target audience.
People are inevitably going to form a perception of your brand. Being strategic in your brand positioning allows you to intentionally guide that narrative and thoughtfully impact the customer experience. It gives you the ability to influence what your customers and potential customers think, feel, remember, and believe about your organization.
There are several elements to consider for effective positioning, including:
- Differentiation — What sets you apart from competitors?
- Relevance — What does your target market want or need to know about your brand and products/services?
- Credibility/authenticity — Why should potential customers trust you?
- Brand attributes — How do you want the market to view your brand? What traits should they associate with you?
As you build your brand positioning strategy, keep in mind that none of these factors exist in isolation. Consider the questions above as they relate to your company, but also evaluate the competitor landscape, target audience personas, demographics, and overall market trends. This context is essential for ensuring your positioning will truly resonate.
What Does Effective Brand Positioning Look Like?
It is one thing to understand brand positioning in theory, but it is another to put it into practice. What does a strong brand strategy look like? Several of our case studies demonstrate the process of building a brand and the impact it can have on your business goals.
Leveraging Brand Positioning to Guide Your Customer’s Journey
At the end of the day, positioning is not about businesses selling to businesses. It’s about people selling to people, and you can only connect with people to the extent that you understand them. If you can create value and then cut through the clutter and articulate that in a memorable way, you will attract and retain more customers. This positive impact snowballs over time; building strong connections increases the likelihood that others will engage and builds trust.
The relationship between brand positioning and strategy starts from the foundation of your customer’s journey. One example of where your target audience’s perception of your organization’s value becomes apparent, and measurable, is when it comes to pricing. Understanding your perceived value and how it relates to your brand positioning can inform the right pricing strategy.
As your customer weighs their options, the strength of your brand can tip the scales in your favor. When it comes down to two companies that have a relatively undifferentiated offering, the one with the stronger brand will win out more often than not. This is one of the major reasons why it’s important to strategically build your brand and create value in the mind of your audience; it impacts your ability to take market share.
Another benefit of intentionally investing in your brand is that if you establish strong connections with the target audience and build familiarity and trust, it can lead to faster sales cycles. Creating a bias for your brand in the mind of the customer by fostering familiarity and credibility can lead to fewer questions during the buyer’s journey which, in turn, can make decision-making simpler and faster. This translates into a quicker positive impact on your bottom line.
It’s important for your brand positioning to be authentic and to ensure that your organization delivers on its brand promise consistently, across every interaction through the buyer’s journey. This consistency is the foundation of trust. Once you’ve established that trust with your customer, it’s imperative to protect it, reinforce it, and build upon it, transforming this initial connection into brand loyalty and creating brand advocates. This, in turn, creates a positive feedback loop that can shorten your sales cycle and garner repeat business and referrals, which all benefit your business in a real way.
From another angle, a strong brand also creates synergies when it comes to recruitment and retention. If people are familiar with your brand and believe it to have a stellar reputation and relationship with its customers, this creates a more desirable workplace. If you can recruit top talent, your business and its customers benefit, creating a flywheel effect: happy employees provide better service, creating happier clients, and so on.
Aligning Marketing Strategies With Business Objectives
Clear brand positioning provides clarity on the brand promise and purpose of the brand within the marketplace. It serves as a north star internally regarding what the team needs to uphold and deliver and externally it serves as a beacon to what the customer can expect.
This alignment between marketing and sales efforts is crucial. If you’re marketing and selling the wrong aspect of the company or to the wrong people, you’re not going to achieve success. You want to get the right message to the right audience at the right time. You can’t do that if your business goals and marketing/sales functions are not in sync. In fact, lack of alignment risks creating confusion in the marketplace.
Adapting Positioning Strategies for Growth
Companies exist to meet the needs of their audience. Those needs change over time, so companies must adapt and innovate as well to maintain relevance in the market. There are always new solutions, new companies, and new ideas being presented in the marketplace. If you don’t remain competitive, you will lose market share to those who are willing to address today’s challenges in new and innovative ways.
Your brand needs to be in tune with your customers’ dynamic needs and evolve with them. To do this, you need to keep a proactive pulse on your brand perception, the needs of your customers, market influences, etc. This allows you to respond and flex to continue to meet those needs as they change. Brand positioning cannot be a one-time activity, because a brand needs room to innovate and continue to differentiate from its competitors. Instead of viewing your brand as static, anticipate and plan for its growth and evolution.
Bring Your Brand to Life
It’s clear that your brand positioning has the power to drive your objectives and speak to the hearts of your audience; are you ready to put this into action? To enhance your positioning for sustainability growth, it’s essential to start with a thorough understanding of strategy. Evaluate and establish your organization’s key values and goals, identify where you are now and where you would like to be, and make a plan to bridge these gaps. When done well, this can transform your brand into the top choice for your audience.
For more insight on building your brand, explore the resources on our website, or reach out for personalized support.
About the Author
Kate Covalt