Marketing positioning: The ultimate guide in 2024

What is positioning in marketing? (with examples)

Positioning is the perception that your customers and prospects have of your brand or product compared to competing brands or products in a specific category.

But positioning is also the process of influencing the perception that your customers and prospects have of your brand and your product. This process is the sum of your marketing message, your campaigns, and the experience that your customers and prospects have with your brand and product.

The final objective of marketing positioning is to make strategic decisions concerning your target, your category, your unique value proposition as well as to align your product, your marketing, your sales and your success with the targets you have defined.

example

For example, let's take software for sending cold emails. Do you see added value and additional benefits compared to the basic email automation function that this tool offers?

Attacking the cold emailing software market is, without a doubt, a hell of a red ocean (Difference between a Red Ocean vs Blue Ocean strategy).

To make matters worse, the market was decimated by the GDPR regulation in 2018.

And yet, right after the introduction of the GDPR - Lemlist grew from 0 to 3 million dollars in sales in two years - without external funding.‍

To listen to the story of its founder Guillaume Moubeche, do not hesitate to watch these two videos:

How Lemlist grew from 0 to 3 million dollars in turnover in two years without external financing?

They questioned the status quo in the marketplace, where response rates for massive unsolicited emails were falling. Their positioning statement could have been as follows:

Lemlist is a cold email sending tool [category] that allows sales teams, agencies, and B2B [target market] businesses to personalize their [differentiator] awareness campaigns so that their emails get responses [value].

Their main differentiator was the implementation of unique personalization features to help their users get more answers.

Why is marketing positioning essential for B2B businesses?

“The mind, in order to defend itself against the volume of current communications, filters and rejects much of the information that is offered to it.

Guess when this text was written?

40 years ago.

In their legendary book “Positioning, a Battle for Your Mind,” Al Ries and Jack Trout described market conditions in 1980 as a “communication jungle.”

While it was so hard to stand out back then, how are you going to stand out today?

- Your buyers are in crisis mode and more critical than ever

- Your competition is growing exponentially (for example, the marketing technology sector grew by 5233% since 2011).

- Your buyer's attention is constantly being solicited by messages, updates, and especially by “desperate marketing attempts by everyone.”

But marketing positioning is more than cutting through the noise of the “communication jungle”.

Remember the Lemlist example mentioned above:

How will a customer choose Lemlist or one of its competitors?

If your prospects don't see the difference between you and your competitors, they'll focus on things like:

• The Prize
• Customer reviews
• Integration

And in our world where the offer is virtually endless, this means a relentless struggle: Your marketing campaigns have low response/conversion rates. Your sales cycles are long. You have to fight hard for every deal — and maybe even give discounts to close deals.

The development of a strong marketing positioning is no longer a luxury.

Effective positioning helps you:

• Stand out and attract customers without coming across as a spammer
• Win a customer when serious competitors also bid for the project
• Gain an ideal type of customer who appreciate your product and will gladly recommend it to others
• Raise your prices
• Facilitate the sale of your business or the acquisition of an investment

etc...

The difference between marketing positioning and value proposition

Marketing positioning is about the place your brand or product occupies in a specific market category. It is a key part of your go-to-market strategy and should be implemented through marketing messages, campaigns, and customer experiences that align with this positioning.

The value proposition is a key marketing message that explains why you are different and worth buying. Essentially, it shows why your positioning is important for your ideal customers.

example

Instapage bills itself as a “landing page tool with unique post-click optimization and experimentation features for Google and Facebook advertisers.” Instapage's value proposition is: “Customers like you get up to 400% more of their digital ad spend with Instapage.”

Note that Instapage's positioning is both vertical (they focus on Google and Facebook advertisers) and horizontal (unique ad optimization features).

Lemlist's positioning is that of a tool for sending cold e-mails (product category) with unique personalization functions. Their value proposition is “Send cold emails that get responses.”

The 6-step process to define your marketing positioning (and strategies)

If you want to create or update your positioning, what are the practical steps to follow?

“The essence of strategy is choosing what NOT to do.

Michael Porter

How you position your business or product is about making a series of strategic choices about what you focus on (and what you say “no” to).

Let's look at the choices and practical steps you need to take.

Step 1. Choose your target market segments

Imagine that you are in the process of developing a SaaS business and looking for a CRM. You have two options:

• A CRM that organizes your sales
• A specialized CRM that helps organize sales, track recurring revenue, and churn rates.

Which one will you choose? The second seems to be a natural fit for a SaaS business.

That is the strength of market segmentation.

Most B2B businesses skip this step and create a customer avatar that is essentially the lowest common denominator of their potential customers. This leads to the two most common mistakes that deprive B2B businesses of revenue: unique positioning and broad targeting.

But what are the benefits of market segmentation?

1. Optimizing ROI : Target prospects that are better suited to your offer to improve profitability and encourage recommendations.
2. Customizing campaigns : Use unique selling points and targeted communication for a better match between the message and the customer.
3. Amplification of virality : Leverage well-connected networks to increase word-of-mouth and establish strategic partnerships with key players in the industry.

Step-by-Step:

Step 2. Develop an ideal customer profile

The ideal customer profile helps you capture the information you need to target and qualify prospects who are more likely to convert, stay longer, generate more revenue, and provide you with the best references, testimonials, and case studies.

An ideal customer profile is a list of characteristics that your best customers in a specific market segment have in common.

It describes who they are, their challenges and goals, the value they get from your product, their buying process, their objections and purchase criteria, and why they choose your product over those of your competitors.

Businesses often make the mistake of producing a generic version for all segments - or basing it on a biased interpretation. You need up-to-date (post-COVID) data from in-depth interviews with your best customers in the target segment.

Step-by-Step:

Check out our detailed guide to how to find and define your ideal customers by adopting an ABM strategy.

Step 3. Analyze your competitors

Positioning is essentially about determining how your customers perceive your brand or product compared to the competitors they compare you to.

You are generally compared to two types of alternatives:

• Your direct competitors - global or local market leaders, or products of a similar price range and characteristics.
• Other alternatives, such as Excel or “hiring an intern.”

This last point is especially important if you operate in an emerging category, which most of your prospects are not aware of. For example, when Drift started, most marketers didn't use chatbots on their website, so they needed to position themselves in relation to lead generation forms.

Step-by-Step:

1. Make a list of the competitors you encounter in your sales
2. When interviewing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP - step 2), ask questions such as: “What did you try in the past to deal with the problem you just described?” What have you tried in the past to meet the challenge you just described? What failed you - and what do you think should have been the right solution? What other solutions have you considered in the past (and why did you choose us)?
3. Analyze the marketing positioning strategy of competitors. Are they focused on a niche? How do they differ? What arguments do they put forward on their main web pages? How do they look? Analyze their reviews: what do their customers really like about them and what are their main complaints?
4. Perform a SWOT analysis. Considering what's most important to your KPI, what are your strengths and weaknesses, where are competitors underperforming (opportunities), and how can they beat you (threats)?

Step 4. Choose your market category (with positioning strategies)

From your customer's perspective, a market category is the label they will assign to your business or product. Each category comes with a set of expectations (concerning characteristics, prices...) and determines which competitors you will be compared to.

You can't avoid being “boxed” or labeled in a market category. This is how your potential customers face thousands of solutions and products that they will take for their peace of mind.

But you can influence how your customers and prospects perceive your brand or product compared to others in the category. This is the whole point of a positioning strategy.

Here are the 12 most common positioning strategies (taken from the article by fullfunnel.io):

Strategy 1: Face to face: winning through high-quality experiences

This strategy makes sense in large mature markets where leaders remain in the lead despite poor customer experiences. Think of banking or telecommunications, where, as Bain says, “the experience is the new product.”

We all know examples like Uber or Revolut where superior experiences were made possible by technological innovations that ended up becoming new categories in their own right.

Strategy #2: Change the battlefield: pivot to an adjacent category

What we don't always realize is that the choices we made early on about our product category can be handicapping us.

The good news is that categories are now much more “fluid”, that the boundaries between different categories are not always clear, and that categories are changing faster than ever.

So you can still choose an adjacent category.

Strategy 3: Vertical positioning: “Big fish, small pond”.

Your objective is to establish yourself in a well-defined market segment.

To do this, you are targeting buyers in a sub-segment of the general market who have different requirements that are not met by the current market leader.

Strategy 4: Stick to a niche

This strategy is aimed at B2B businesses in a highly competitive category with hundreds or thousands of competitors and developed sub-categories.

You're choosing both a target segment (for example, one or two verticals you want to focus on) and your specialty or unique characteristics (or your area of expertise for professional services).

For most service businesses, this strategy is essential. We will come back to the marketing positioning of service companies in more detail below.

But this strategy can also help B2B tech businesses, especially if they're active in categories with hundreds of competitors.

Strategy 5: Positioning for B2B services

Most service providers - especially professional service providers - tend to respond to most requests from potential customers and sometimes take on projects where they do not have in-depth expertise.

This attitude is often motivated by a fear of missing something. If I say no, I will miss this project, they say to each other.

Unfortunately, that is the path of mediocrity.

Why?

Because such a state of mind leads them to become “jack-of-all-trades, but masters of no profession.” This is exactly the opposite of carefully selecting an area of expertise and becoming a key expert in your niche.

Strategy 6: Challenge the status quo by focusing on unique characteristics

It's important to understand that this strategy is NOT about adding more features than your competitors.

It is about:

Understand what matters to your best customers and is not well supported by the market

Go further than anyone else in the market to develop specific, often unique, characteristics or combinations of characteristics.

Strategy 7: Challenge the status quo by responding to a common objection

This strategy is also based on a thorough understanding of your best customers. What are their most common objections and how can you respond to them?

Strategy 8: All-in-one or one-stop shop

This strategy can be applied when a specific segment of your market needs a variety of tools or services, often fragmented and poorly integrated, to manage (an aspect of) its business.

The first two examples below illustrate the importance of focusing on a specific market segment in order to succeed in this strategy.

Strategy 9: Head to Head: Redefining an Emerging Category

The fact of operating in a emerging category (a category that your potential customers may not be fully aware of) is both a blessing and a curse: it requires you to invest in awareness and demand generation, but it is also an opportunity to influence the buying criteria of your potential customers.

Strategy #10: Create a new category

It's the hardest and most expensive choice you can make, but the benefits can be huge.

This strategy is generally made possible by a perfect storm: the emergence of new enabling technology, changing consumer preferences, and a favorable ecosystem.

Creating a new category requires a lot of pedagogy because, unlike other positioning strategies, you cannot rely on what people already know about the category.

It takes time, patience and, often, significant resources.

Strategy No. 11: Dietary supplements

With this strategy, you position your product as a complement to other products - or you use the complement strategy as part of your go-to-market strategy.

Clearbit offers lead enrichment as a complement to your CRM or marketing automation tools. Popular platforms such as WordPress, Microsoft Office, or JIRA all have marketplaces full of complementary applications. However, many add-on categories have become market categories in their own right (think pop-up add-ons for websites like sumo.com) and require you to position your solution in relation to other add-ons in the category.

Integration companies (service companies that specialize in implementing and customizing specific platforms) can create add-ons as part of their marketing strategy (a way to connect with qualified prospects when they download their add-on).

In some cases, however, adding a supplement may be a viable positioning strategy.

Strategy #12: Change your position in a review site category

Review sites like G2 play a key role in positioning B2B SaaS providers, by influencing the perception of customers and prospects compared to competitors in a given category. A high ranking on these platforms improves the market position.

Going from “Niche” to “Leaders” or reaching first place can give credibility to your solution as the preferred choice in your category. B2B buyers rely heavily on reviews during their pre-purchase research, often guided by terms like “best in [category] software.”

Review sites, dominating searches with a high purchase intent, rank suppliers according to user reviews, thus determining their position in the market.

To improve this positioning, it is crucial to focus on acquiring positive reviews to outperform competitors.

But how can you change your marketing positioning with review sites?

There are a number of ways to do this.

• Change your position in an existing category
• Enter a new category
• Highlight your leadership position in a specific field

Step 5. Building a unique value proposition: being different in ways that matter

As explained above, the value proposition is a key marketing message that explains why you are different and worth buying. Essentially, it shows why your positioning is important for your ideal customers.

Step 5.1: List your unique characteristics

Start with interviews with your ideal customers to find out what sets your business and product apart. Ask specific questions about their preferences and reasons for choosing your solution. Analyze interviews to identify attributes and characteristics that are unique to your offering.

Look for things that add value and differentiate you. For example, if your product is easier to use without training compared to competitors, this can be a major advantage.

Consider not only the characteristics of the product but also your unique service approach, your business model, or your speed of return on investment.

Consider your unique “TASKS”: Talents, Attitudes, Skills, Knowledge, and Style. Identify what you do best in your industry, including your philosophy, mindset, and how you interact with customers.

Ask yourself what your business is all about, beyond profit. What motivates your team every day? Imagine your company as the leader of a movement, and consider the impact if your employees were volunteers.

These thoughts will help define the history of your positioning and strengthen relationships with your customers.

Step 5.2: Match your unique attributes to added value

In the previous step, we identified what makes us unique. We've essentially moved to the right on the chart above.

Now we want to go up, matching our unique attributes with the value we create for our ideal customers.

Note that:

1. The unique attribute is something that your business or product does or owns (and that your competitors don't have).
2. The benefit is what the attribute allows your customers.
3. Value is the correspondence to an important goal that your customer is trying to achieve.

Step 5.3: Write multiple value proposals

Now take the selected value themes and turn them into value proposition statements.

A unique value proposition is a brief statement that describes the benefits of your offering, how you meet the needs of your customers, and what sets you apart from the competition.

While there are plenty of great guides and suggested value proposition “formulas,” there's nothing magical about how you write your return.

You're just trying to find the elements of an effective value proposition:

1. Relevance - who is it for and what problem does it solve?
2. Value - what goal or result does it help customers achieve?
3. Differentiation - how is the product different in a way that is meaningful for customers and that can be proven?
4. What is it? The value proposition should make it clear what your product is or does, without leaving room for misinterpretation.

Feel free to use the extended “title+ subtitle” format to specify your value proposition.

Step 5.4: Validate your value proposition

Once you've written multiple versions of your value proposals, you can validate them with your ideal customers.

Create a validation survey with multiple options for your value proposition and ask your best customers to assess the various claims.

Step 6. Update your marketing message with a new positioning

The final step is to update the marketing message with a new positioning in order to influence the perception of your customers.

At a minimum, you should update key marketing and sales materials:

Your home page, your “About us” page, and your product/service pages

Your business profiles on social media and the LinkedIn profiles of your founders, sales staff, and marketing staff.

Your presentation and sales proposals

But by changing the way the company sees itself, you give it a new purpose and create new momentum and new energy.

You'll likely be inspired by your product roadmap, the way you serve your customers, and sometimes the business model as well.

Conclusion & Checklist

We live in a world where competition is growing exponentially, where desperate marketing attempts cause content blindness, and where we see the slow death of the cold approach.

In this guide, you've learned a proven, step-by-step framework for updating your positioning to stand out and become a natural fit for your best customers.