Positioning
The first step in creating the best messaging for your target audience is creating positioning. Positioning is the process of digging deep to identify the problems your audience faces and aligning those problems to the solutions you offer. Going through a list of features and benefits your product/solution offers is never the best way to get a customer’s attention. You need to show a prospect that you get it and you’re here to help. Remember to think about this from your customers perspective. Talk about them and what they are dealing with and don’t spend so much time tooting your own horn.
There are many different theories and ways to approach creating your positioning and after years of experiments we’ve been able to combine the best of these in our own formula to help you through this difficult exercise.
You first need really understand your customer. Who are they? What keeps them up at night? List all of the problems your customer faces and then map those to either solutions you can help provide or things that are outside of your preview. Once you understand their biggest problems you need to find a way to explain what you can do for them in a way that resonates with them. Once you have that figured out make sure that all of your materials sticks to this
This may sound like an easy process, but it tends to be one of the hardest and most worthwhile activities a company can do.
Messaging.
What’s your pitch? Do you understand the value that you bring? Can everyone in your business clearly articulate your sales pitch? Can your team articulate why you’re different from the competition? Those with the easiest to understand story are usually those to get the business. It’s important for everyone in the company to understand the value that you bring to customers. Your customers and prospects with interact with many people across your organization and you should all be onboard with how to best share your mission. You need to have consistency from the marketing message to the sales pitch, to the customer service rep. Audit your content to ensure this is happening. Look at your website, social media, emails, brochures, sales presentations and other materials for inconsistencies.
In addition to looking at your own marketing materials, it’s not a bad idea to look at how your competitors to understand what their value proposition is and to identify what your differentiation is.
Don’t Forget to set your marketing budget.
While some marketing efforts are free, you’ll need to think carefully about setting an annual budget for marketing efforts. It’s easy to cut marketing costs from the budget, but remember that marketing is absolutely essential to the success of your business. Many can see upwards of 10 times the return on their marketing dollars if they are well spent.
As you begin to gather costs for the marketing tactics you outlined in the previous step, you may find you’ve exceeded your budget. Simply go back and adjust your tactics until you have a mix that’s affordable. The key is to never stop marketing—don’t concern yourself with the more costly tactics until you can afford them and don’t hesitate to reach out if you need help!
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