Understanding your users is crucial in the competitive world of marketing and software products.
Yet, in a recent project, I discovered a critical misalignment between our internal positioning and the reality of our customers' needs. Despite a robust user base, our messaging and feature prioritization fell short, leaving us disconnected from what truly mattered to our audience. The repercussions were big, and our efforts were ineffective.
On another project, our outdated positioning statement led to fragmented efforts across teams. The marketing team honed in on one set of customer challenges, while distribution chased after different visions of our customer base, and the product team prioritized another user problem. The result? Chaos and inefficiency reigned, with no internal guidelines to steer us toward success.
This experience underscored the vital importance of a clear positioning statement. It's the map and compass that navigates every aspect of your product, brand, and marketing strategy, ensuring alignment and focus across teams. Without it, you risk drifting aimlessly, unable to capture the hearts and minds of your target market.
What is a positioning statement?
A positioning statement summarizes your product and how it fulfills the target audience's needs. It defines how your product fits in the marketplace and how you better solve your customers' problems than competitors.
You use a positioning statement internally. A positioning statement clarifies for the internal team who the customer is and what problem your business aims to solve. It's not a description of the product or its features, but about creating an internal understanding of why a product or feature is built.
A positioning statement should also guide your team to help customers find and choose your product over the competition. It connects what was built with why it was built, rippling through the product and marketing decisions to reach the target customer.
How to write a positioning statement
Now, let's get down to business. How do you create your positioning statement? It is simple — you define and combine a couple of items, and then, voila!
Many frameworks and templates suggest how to do it, and it comes down to defining these four items for your product or new feature:
1. The customer
Who are you creating this for? You can begin by identifying and defining your target audience or customer. This becomes the foundation of your positioning statement.
How:
- If it's an existing product, use your product data stack to figure this out. Who is using this product? Where are they from? Analyze the users using your core features and segment your target customers to identify their demographics and behavior. Reach out to your users and use qualitative methods to identify similarities between them and define your customer
- If it's a new feature of an existing product, use your current customer, but further segment it into the customers who will be using this specific new feature
- If it's a new product, do market and field user research to identify the customer you will focus on. Dive deep to understand their demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns
A saying goes that if you cater to everybody, you're catering to nobody. You must be explicit and specific about who will benefit. Being specific here will be invaluable in your product and marketing messaging. I've felt the pain of not being specific. Then, everyone focuses on different targets, or the messaging becomes diluted because you don't want to exclude anyone.
2. Their pain
Let's define the customer's needs and the friction you want to solve. What are their challenges, pains, needs, desires, and motivations? These insights will help you define your product.
How:
- Dive deeper into your customer research to identify trends in pain points and understand their needs and motivations. Map out pain points, identify trends, and prioritize the pain points based on frequency and severity
3. The market
What is currently available to help this customer and their pain point? Identify key competitors, their products for the customer, and their pain points. This enables you to carve a unique position for your product within the market landscape.
How:
- Do a market analysis. Compare and identify differences, similarities, and gaps in the market to address the customer's pain point. Highlight areas where your product, feature, or idea is a strong competitor. Where are others lacking capabilities? Where are you uniquely situated to serve the customer?
4. The solution
Now that you know the customer, define your solution. How are you addressing their pain point? Turn the customer's pain into something they can gain. What job could the customer "hire" your product to do? This will form the basis of your positioning statement, which will help customers grasp why your product is preferable to other alternatives.
How:
- Articulate your solution to the customer pain point (your value proposition), how it differs from competitors, and why it resonates with the customer
Positioning statement template
To help make the process of writing a positioning statement easier, you can follow this template:
Examples of positioning statements
Here are some examples of positioning statements for communication products broken down by the four items discussed above:
- Product — Whatsapp lets people communicate and stay in touch with friends and family without barriers
- The customer — Mobile phone users
- Their pain — Expensive communication reliant on cell phone coverage, budget constraints
- The market — SMS and emails on phone
- Their solution — A messaging service that works fast and reliably anywhere in the world
- This later expanded into media services and business support
- New Feature — Whatsapp's community feature helps people better organize and engage with related groups, improving large-scale communication and collaboration
- The customer — Organizations like schools, local clubs, and non-profit organizations
- Their pain — To communicate and coordinate securely and effectively within Whatsapp group/s
- Their market — Whatsapp groups, Slack, Email newsletters, Intercom
- Their solution — To organize related WhatsApp groups under a single umbrella, creating structured, streamlined, and private communication
- Product — Slack aims to make work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive for people working
- The customer — Businesses
- Their pain — Complicated and unproductive communication
- The market — Emails and MS Teams
- Their solution — A communication tool that brings all of the business conversations, apps, and customers into one place
- Product — Grammarly democratizes great writing in English so anyone can communicate effectively, efficiently, and persuasively with the right tools, supporting people anywhere important writing happens
- The customer — Anyone writing in English
- Their pain — Time and expertise needed write well a stumbling block
- Their market — Spellcheckers
- Their solution — An AI-enabled English writing assistance technology across platforms and devices
Tips for refining a positioning statement
As you get started working on your positioning statement, consider the following tips:
- Keep it simple — It's not a list of all your features, and all the pain points you solve. It's intentionally simplified to help you focus and ensure your prospective customers understand what makes your business unique
- Focus on the problem, not the solution — Your goal should be to help customers solve their challenges by offering the solution. It's about the value you bring and the problems you solve. And you need to sell that story, not the product
- Use it — Keep referring to it, bring it up in different meetings, and use it for planning and decisions. This is your map and compass, but it will only be useful if you use it
- It's iterative — You might notice gaps in your statement when you use it, which is okay. Your positioning statement doesn't have to be perfect. It can grow and evolve. Improve on it as your services, features, or market change, and use user feedback and data to validate that it still holds
- It's hard work to get it right — Defining a value proposition can be messy in the real world. However, the exercise of defining it is invaluable. Just go for it!
Final thoughts
A positioning statement clearly defines the problem the product solves, ensuring alignment across teams to deliver effective marketing to the right audience.
It provides the internal team with a map to clarify what they're building for and why. A positioning statement becomes the compass that guides product, marketing, and business decisions and bridges the product and the target audience, communicating a clear motivation for choosing this product over alternatives. Lastly, as more users adopt and use your product, it becomes the wind in your sails.
With a powerful positioning statement, you can confidently navigate the market and chart a course toward success.
Featured image source: IconScout
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