5 Tips to Developing a Successful Brand Positioning Strategy

Blog-Different

An effective brand positioning strategy is an absolute must for scaling brands to succeed. It’s a strategy that seeks to influence how the market perceives your brand and the value you provide. It’s specific, clear, and distinctive from your competitors. It’s the process of strategically placing your organization, a product, or service that you offer in the market so that your target audience can easily notice and take action.

A successful brand strategy yields benefits such as increased client loyalty, an improved image in the market, generates more leads and shorter sales cycles, it increases client retention, gives you pricing power, and increased profits over time.

Depending on your industry and the nature of your offerings, your positioning and messaging will vary. A few types of strategies include customer service, convenience-based, price-based, quality-based, differentiation, the leader, the first, or even a comparison. Depending on whether your target audience prefers to save, spend money on quality, or have the latest and newest gadget will determine how you position your brand.

At the core, an effective brand positioning strategy cultivates a desired perception in your target audience. That perception should also be in alignment with the journey they will experience when they choose to do business with you.

Here are five considerations to help you develop a successful positioning strategy for your brand:

Identify Your Competitors and Their Approach

Who are your direct competitors? We don’t need to know every company that offers a similar service, we just need to know which of your competitors do you compete again or lose clients to? What do you do differently from the perspective of your clients? This is the core element of brand positioning since it covers the gaps left by competing brands.

Don’t Copy and Paste

A monumental mistake that many companies make is they seek to copy what a competitor is doing. This almost always fails because it creates confusion in the market. As the copycat brand, it means you’ll have to work harder for half or less of the results of the successfully established brand. It also means that any negative publicity that the brand you copied gets you will also have to deal with. Remember, the core element of a brand positioning strategy is to cover the gaps left by competitors, not create confusion. A confused mind doesn’t buy.

Be Timeless, Not Timely

Yes, you do need to consider what works for right now, but where do you want to go in the future? If you position yourself in a timely way, you’ll end up restricting your brand from growing, improving, and expanding. On the flip side, if you are too focused on the future, your brand could end up being too far removed from reality and unrelatable to your market. So by being timeless, you’ll position your brand in a way that is relevant today and future-proof your brand for what’s next.

Relevance and Difference to Your Audience

This has two parts: knowing who your actual audience is and then identifying how it’s relevant to them. Why should they believe in you? Your brand is not a good fit for everyone. The clearer you can be about who your target audience is, the easier it will be to connect with them, build a trusted relationship and build loyalty.

Promise, Values, and Personality

The all-important WOW and positioning statements as well as your brand personality. Some refer to these as a core brand promise or even a vision statement—it’s how you articulate your WHY. These should be direct and to the point, backed up by a brief description when relevant. They should make it clear what your brand IS and what it is NOT and influence every element of your marketing as well as brand and client experience. And, if you are truly living your brand, it will also influence your overarching business strategy and leadership mindset.

A useful way to check your positioning out is to apply a 'brand substitution test'. For instance, if your brand were replaced by a competitor in an ad campaign, would it still work as well and make sense to your target audience? If the answer is yes, then you're not being distinctive enough in your approach.

Claiming you’re "different" from the competition isn’t enough. Unless you are doing something remarkable by the market’s standards (not yours), your brand is simply a comparison to the competition.

Omicle delivers brand clarity, marketing strategy, and operational efficiency to prepare leaders to scale their business. If you are ready to scale your business, contact us today to get started.

Successful Scaling Brands Benefit More from a Positioning Strategy
Effectively Boost the Success of Your Go-To-Market Strategy with RevOps