TRANSCRIPT:
YOUR POSITIONING STATEMENT
A positioning statement is a tool typically used in business to identify how a brand is positioned in a market. It put into words what makes your brand important and what differentiates you so that it gets noticed by those who we want to see it.
We need a personal brand to get attention.
We need a personal brand to get attention. Relegating 50% of the benefit if a brand builds trust when someone lands on a website and they see that we are an expert, we are missing out on the other 50% of the benefits of generating inbound leads and more referrals if we don’t have a brand that grabs the attention of buyers.
To build our draft market positioning statement we can run through five steps –
One – Define your target audience
If you haven’t already been making notes now is the time to start. Who do you want to be in front of? Both the audience that can make you more money right now, and who you inspire to work with in the future.
Two – What is your point of view on the industry?
Do you have the same thoughts as your audience or do you disagree? Are you on their side and want to maintain the status quo, as in your selling or account managing industry-leading product? Or are you working for a start-up that is massively trying to disrupt and so your thoughts on how things have been done so far is that they can be improved.
Three – How are you unique in all this?
What’s the one or two points of difference that make you different from the others in the space you play? Perhaps come with one demographic and one psychographic elements of your ideal customer profile play on that.
For example, with me while family wrapped up in the NHS and so I want to give you the best deal so it can thrive could be my psychographic element. My demographic element is that I live right bang in the middle of my sales territory and at most an hour away from each of my hospitals whereas the competition is a good two to three hours journey and so they’re gonna visit you less.
Four – Evidence that you’re not full of shit
Here you have to support your positioning statement is true. Again, to me I classically did this by explaining that worked the two biggest companies with in the endoscopy and imaging markets, so I know that 99% of the products my customers were using inside and out, so you could trust me to give you informed advice rather than just speculating on 50% of the products that my customers were working with.
Five – Your Promise core benefit
This is where the magic really happens. Here you pull all of the previous four pieces together explain what the net or overall benefit is for them. Remember the only focus here is what is in it for them?
This positioning statement perhaps never leaves the notebook on your desk. But is a powerful tool is having your arsenal because when you have all this defined and someone asks you face-to-face why the hell should I work with you, you have a preprepared answer that you can respond with rather than fumbling around and spitting out nonsense in the moment.
