One of the most important places to start with marketing, in my opinion, is positioning.

Being able to clearly articulate why you.

Effective positioning serves as the strategic cornerstone of your business and will help guide your marketing efforts, ensuring every message resonates with your ideal customers.

Simple Positioning Framework

Whether working on a new product launch, new campaign, or simply just gut checking positioning every 6 months or so, here’s 4 simple questions I use:

1. What is the problem you are solving?

Everything we buy or do is to solve a problem.

The problem could be needing more sales, needing new customers, needing to retain talent, etc.

And here I go again with “the need behind the need”.

When you think about the problem you solve, I encourage you to think about the need behind the need. Why does your potential customer need to solve that problem.

2. Who are you solving this for?

Here we define your best customer (or ICP, Ideal Customer Profile). What do they look like?

Yes, all the demographic information such as job title, specific industries, etc but we need to go beyond surface level demographic information.

We need to know their challenges, pain points, triggers, goals and more. Simply targeting by geography and/or demography is not enough.

3. How are they solving this problem currently, or what are their alternatives?

This is where we start to get to the competitive landscape.

There’s direct competitors of course, so who are the companies who offer what you do to the same or similar customers?

Then beyond direct competitors, there are alternatives. What are the other ways that your customer solves this problem that doesn’t involve what you offer?

Maybe you sell a software and while you most likely have competitors selling a similar software, an alternative to software could be that your customer builds something to solve their problem in-house.

So in that case, you’re not competing against the other software company providers, you are competing against building in-house.

4. Lastly, why would they choose you?

Now we’re at the good stuff! Why you. Why you are a better solution to the problem they have than the other competitors and alternatives.

So, there you have it. A simple exercise to help you get clarity on your positioning.

While there is a lot that can go into this and then being able to translate it into a strong positioning statement, this framework is a good place to start and keep it simple.

If you made it this far, thank you!

I’d love to hear from you - what problem do you solve and why you?

Rooting for you!

‘Til next week 👋

Maeve