Brand positioning is a marketing approach to identify the place you want to occupy in the minds of your customer and how it separates you from your competitors and rivals.
Brand positioning is all about defining the place you want your business to occupy in the minds of your customers and how you differentiate yourself from the competition. To define your brand positioning, you need to understand and build your audience avatars. A lot of businesses make the mistake of thinking they can target everyone in a certain region or demographic, but that’s just not realistic. To truly understand your audience and create a strong brand positioning, you must research.
The key to understanding brand positioning lies in how well you can define and build audience avatars for targeting.
Ok Honestly, I have heard a lot of businesses say they want to target all people in X region or X professionals or X companies, or millennials or gen Z. Believe me, That’s a myth – you being feeding your business with.
To create a brand positioning and understand your audience, you need to dive deep through scientific research and method. You need to know and study
- know and study the market reports
- know and study the behaviour pattern of your TA
- know and study the exact words (customer vocabulary) they use
- know and study the motivations that will drive sales or say trigger their minds Seems complicated?
Step 1: Look Up For Research Reports, Industry Studies
The trick here is to find them right on Google.
Use the following keywords in your search
<market/product/service> + Report|survey +filetype:pdf
This way, you will find the gold mines and hidden gems that normal searches won’t disclose. Now, scan these pdfs and documents and copy+paste the relevant information into a separate doc.
Step 2: Define your segments
In the previous step, we learned how to find market reports and trends. In this step, let’s dive deep into our target audience.
Don’t be generic. Curate your target audience according to their behavioural pattern. For example, a generic segment in #RealEstate Selling would be Home Buyers. This way your brand messaging will address everyone and persuade no one.
So how to define segments? You can do that by defining them according to their behaviour and psychological preferences.
- In the example of real estate selling the ideal avatars can be any of these:
Lifestyle upgraders – people seeking better lifestyle comforts.
- Investors – people seeking #ROI on their investments in the property
Working Professionals – people seeking to invest for the first time in the property
In this way, you can understand different people’s pain/ gains, anxieties/ fears, and goals/ aspirations. Now you can target specifically and create strategies that focus on triggering directly to their minds.
This was an example of behavioural segmentation. Sometimes, you can also segment by demographics, seasons, and patterns, – but that works better for media selection and targeting and to some extent in your messaging.
Hence,
Step 3: Listen to your defined target audience
Once you know them, find out their exact words. How?
- Direct Interviewing (Self-explanatory)
- Social Listening
Here, search reviews, feedback, survey and forum threads on
- Reddit, quora, FB/ LinkedIn discussions in Groups
- Review sites – look at competitors if you are starting out – Mouthshut, BBB, TrustPilot, Yelp, etc
- Book Reviews on Amazon, or GoodReads under the subject, category – look at negative comments
Using these two ways, you can mimic how your customer expresses their pain and gain and use the words in your marketing messages and strategies.
Caveat: Stay away from industry jargon and buzzwords. Because —
Your Marketing is not about YOU but about Your Customers.
Step 4: Identify the Motivations your Brand Can Trigger
After segmenting your target audience and listening to their conversation, it’s time to define the motivation your brand will trigger while offering your product or services to them.
This is the actual part where you position your brand according to the motivation factors that drives sales and revenues.
This is a heavy topic. To understand it better, start by understanding Dave Grey’s Empathy Map Canvas and refer to this blog by William Leach – 9 Human Motivations that Drive Consumer Behavior.
Note (again): This is done for behavioural segments only. Not for generic customers.
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Hope this piece of content added value to you and will help you better position your startup. In case you require any further assistance in understanding or implementing this concept, feel free to reach out to me by booking a quick no-obligation cal (click here) or Just DM me.
Allah ma’ak.
Yala Bye!
3 Responses
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