10 Steps to Achieve Your Brand Positioning Strategy
If you’re like most businesses these days, you have a lot of digital presence to manage. In an increasingly digital world, it’s essential for your business that you create a brand positioning strategy. With so many different social media platforms, search engines and e-commerce sites all competing for attention, it can be difficult to ensure that each one of them supports your mission as a business. Your brand positioning strategy is the key that unlocks everything else about your business. By establishing clear definitions regarding what makes up your brand and how it will be represented to consumers and the world at large, you’ll end up with a coherent, unified image that consumers will understand and respond to.
What is Brand Positioning?
Brand positioning is the strategic approach to marketing that ensures your company’s message gets across. In order to establish a brand positioning strategy, you need to define your company’s mission and vision, and how you want it to be received. It would help if you also determined what should be included in the content that you share or provide on each platform. When establishing a brand positioning strategy, many steps need to be taken and done correctly in order for the strategy to work for your business. For example, developing your branding language is vital in creating a clear image of who you are as a company. Other considerations include research on competitors, market research on customer needs, budgeting for digital marketing campaigns, reaching out to influencers in your industry and more. This can take time and effort but the end result will help set up everything else about your business for success.
Define your positioning strategy
The first step in creating your brand positioning strategy is to define your brand. How do you want to be perceived? What messages do you want to send? What values are important to you and your business? What are the most important goals of your business? In order to answer these questions, it’s best to conduct market research and speak with people who have insight into how consumers view your company. This will help you develop a clear understanding of what makes up your brand. Once you’ve defined what makes up your brand, it’s time to establish how it will be represented in digital space. For instance, let’s say that we’re talking about a retail store that sells clothing. The goal of the firm is to position itself as an accessible and modern retailer that specializes in fashion at affordable prices. As such, its main marketing areas would likely be social media, email marketing campaigns and on-site content like blog posts or product listings for their website. Now that you know what makes up the brand and how it should be expressed through digital channels, this leaves just one more step: defining where customers should go if they have questions or need additional information from the business whether on social media or in a call center setting. In order to achieve customer satisfaction, all customer touch points must be adequately fulfilled with quality customer service and appropriate response times. Put yourself in the customers’ shoes: If they had an issue with a product they purchased online, would they feel comfortable reaching out
Develop a Unique Value Proposition
First, you need to develop a unique value proposition for your brand. This means developing a vision of what your business stands for and how it can be different from other companies in the same industry. Your positioning strategy should then express this unique value proposition to consumers. When developing a unique value proposition, focus on what the company is trying to accomplish with their products or services and how they are trying to make an impact on their customers’ lives. For example, if your company is selling handmade artisanal soaps, you might emphasize that your soap is made locally and has a natural, earth-friendly production process. You might also emphasize that the product itself is made of natural materials without chemicals or additives.
Choose your key brand message
and tone Before you can create your brand positioning strategy, you need to decide what your company’s key message is. This message will be the foundation of everything you do, not just with your digital presence, but with any marketing and communications initiatives that you undertake. If your key message is “we’re the best,” then you’ll want to leverage visual content, like photos and videos, that are consistent with this sentiment. In contrast, if your key message is “we’re here for our customers,” then you might focus on testimonials as a way to show them how much they mean to your business. Once you have defined a vision for the future of your company and its brand identity, it’s time to select a tone for the overall brand positioning strategy. Tone is an important factor in developing a coherent and unified brand image across all platforms. It helps to establish consistency among all aspects of branding so that consumers will recognize the different ways in which your company communicates with them. With clear messaging from start to finish, consumers will connect more deeply with what makes up your company’s branding strategy and become engaged in what it has to say about their own lives.
Define your target audience
One of the first tasks in your positioning strategy is to define your target audience. This includes defining demographics to understanding your customers’ everyday struggles. Defining your target audience will help you create a consistent message for each and every channel that you choose, so that you can ensure consumers connect with them on an emotional level. Another key step in developing a brand positioning strategy is to understand the different ways consumers are engaging with your brand and how you want them to engage with it. There are many different touch points between consumers and brands these days, including social media and email marketing campaigns. You’ll need to carefully consider which channels resonate most with your target audience, and then develop strategic content for those channels accordingly. Identifying what makes up your brand will also help shape the brand positioning strategy that you build around it.
Plan how you’ll communicate with them
The first step in your brand positioning strategy is to figure out how you’ll communicate with consumers. If you are a brick-and-mortar business, you might have to rely on a website, e-commerce site or social media presence. If you have an online presence and want to establish a physical location, the two can be integrated seamlessly. It’s important that your brand communicates effectively in all channels and that your messages remain consistent across platforms.
Monitor and measure results
The first step of your brand positioning plan is to monitor and measure the results. You’ll want to track actions internally and externally using A/B testing, analytics, or other methods. Once you better understand how your strategy is performing, you can adjust as needed. For example, if you find that your website isn’t producing enough leads or sales, you can test different ad copy or messaging to see which generates better results.
Develop a new strategy if necessary
Brand positioning is not a static thing. Just as consumers and their needs are always changing, you need to keep up with that change and adjust your strategy accordingly. With a good brand positioning strategy in place, it will be easier for you to figure out which platforms and tactics work best for your business. Why Outsourcing SEO Can Be a Good Idea: Designing an effective SEO strategy isn’t a simple task. Companies have to consider how search engines are evaluating the content, what aspects of SEO offer the most impact, and where they could change their current content to better align with search engine expectations. This is especially critical as search engines like Google continually refine their ranking process. For example, page loading speed is now a factor in search result rankings. In practice, this expands the role of SEO; it’s not enough to simply weave in popular keywords and deliver high-quality content. Brands also need to consider the entire user experience. As a result, it’s often worth outsourcing SEO services to ensure that your digital presence is generating maximum impact and capturing the highest volume of prospective customers. In much the same way that companies outsource their marketing efforts to experts, outsourcing SEO provides a way for brands to identify key strategic goals and then leave the complex process of meeting those goals to industry experts.
Establish Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for brand positioning strategy
The first step to achieving your brand positioning strategy is establishing your unique selling proposition. This is the heart of what makes your business and its offerings stand out among the competition. Your USP will become a selling point that differentiates your company from others, giving you a meaningful edge over other businesses. Once you have this in place, it’s time to map out how you want your brand to be perceived.
Conclusion
Ultimately, a brand positioning strategy is about achieving the right balance. It would be best if you had a unique value proposition targeted to the right audience. You need to monitor the success of your communication channels and measure the results. And you need to know when it’s time to change your strategy and make adjustments. Your brand positioning strategy is the key to achieving high customer engagement levels, so ensure you’ve got your strategy in order before you get started.
