The brand message is what connects the target market to your business. Brand positioning is the process of defining your brand messaging and ensuring that it is understood by your customers. Its goal is to set your business apart from the competition.
But Just Why Is Messaging And Brand Positioning Important?
The core of a business’ compelling marketing campaign is a powerful and consistent brand messaging. Developing an effective brand message takes time and a lot of brainstorming. When done correctly, it pays off over and over in the form of seeing your campaign’s desired effect on your target market across many channels.
Therefore, the brand’s message whether in the form of a tagline, slogan, or logo should be something that is relatable or readily recognisable to the target market.
On the other hand, a brand’s unique positioning can be looked at in 2 ways:
- How your present and prospective customers perceive your brand compared to your competitors’ products and/or services.
- The steps the business is doing to shape or influence their present and prospective customer’s perception of the brand.
Unique positioning, unlike taglines, slogans and logos, entails the use of specific tools and tactics to help your brand flourish in the minds of potential buyers. The brand’s unique position is the result of brand messaging and marketing campaigns plus the experience your customers have with your brand.
Whether the business is actively developing a unique position or not, the positioning will still happen. However, when the brand is doing strategic decisions and taking the right steps in positioning itself, it will have a positive impact on the minds of the prospects.
The question is, how do you craft a unique and effective brand positioning statement?
Step 1 – Angles To Consider (Who, Why, What)
A. WHO is the target market (or specific target audience)?
Having a well-defined target market instead of trying to catch everyone’s attention will help your brand develop a focused and more effective marketing strategy. Further, the information will help when doing a personalised marketing approach so that the customers will feel the product was tailored for them. Lastly, it helps the company identify who will most likely convert to paying customers who are also most likely will give business referrals.
This involves two activities: Market Segmentation and developing the Ideal Customer Profile.
B. WHY is your brand better than your competitor/s?
Having a good understanding of the marketplace and your brand’s competition and positioning is equally important for new and already established businesses. This is because when the target customers cannot clearly see what sets your company apart from your competitors, the attention of the prospect will turn to: pricing, customer reviews, and integration.
A very helpful tool that helps the business analyse its competitors and how they operate is the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.
MindTools has a really great article that will run you through how to perform a S.W.O.T Analysis. You can check it out here and see you how can apply this to your own brand startup or growth.
C. WHAT unique value does your brand have?
After undertaking a SWOT analysis of the competitors, it is now time to use the same analysis tool on your own brand.
What is your brand’s unique selling point? What features does your product or service have that you want to focus on which sets you apart? Does your brand offer more convenience, low prices, best integration?
In our founder, Mark Hunter’s, personal opinion; competitng on price can lead to a race to the bottom. I certainly agree with him!
Step 2 – Crafting The Brand’s Unique Positioning Statement
After all the hard work poured into determining the WHO, WHY, and the WHAT in Step 1, you can then try to plug in your answers to this brand positioning statement from Hive Mind Studios:
[BRAND NAME] provides [WHO] that is [WHY] with [WHAT].
This statement is just a simple formula but it’s something that your company can start with and build up on. It is by no means the only format and you can switch it up so that the statement will make sense. Lastly, it is better to create several statements and eliminate those that do not fit the criteria stated below.
The brand positioning statement should:
1. Be customer-centric and speaks their language so that they are able to understand immediately what your business does.
2. Speak to the needs, wants, and pain points of your prospective market. In other words, it should be relevant, engaging, and direct.
3. Be in a tone that your prospects can identify with. For example, serious or fun and playful.
Step 3 – Repositioning Your Position
After doing all that, the last step is where you’ll be placing your positioning statement so that your company and prospects can see them prominently.
As your company grows, so does your positioning statement. It is recommended to monitor and revisit your brand positioning to see if it is still working for your business.
You can do this by:
1. Doing customer surveys.
2. Monitoring your social media chatter about your brand.
3. Getting customer feedback in real-time.
Remember, brand building is always an ongoing process!
So What is Your Branding Strategy?
Having a strong brand is parmount if you want to stand out in today’s busy marketplace. Large Fortune 500 companies with Brand Awareness may be able to get a sale or client with little marketing effort, but if you really want to find your place in the world of digital clutter, I suggest you take some time to consider your message.
