Piece #3: Brand Positioning

With key messaging statements

May 07, 2020

If you don’t position your business, someone else will do it for you.

It could be your clients/customers/users, based on how they understand what you do and what you offer.

Or, it could be your competitors, based on how big of a threat they see your brand to be (beware, competitors might be aggressive in diminishing your worth).

So, wouldn’t it be better to tell your own story in your own way, determine exactly what you offer, to whom, why, and how valuable it is for your audience? That way, no one needs to guess, assume, misinterpret, or misunderstand your brand.

But, there’s a catch.

Even if you do the brand positioning yourself, have all the taglines, pitches, propositions, and statements in place aligned with your values, there still might be a chance to be misunderstood by your audience.

Why is that?

There are several possible reasons:

You haven’t defined your target audience properly
You have several audiences clearly defined, but you communicate the same message to all of them
Your key messaging statements aren’t speaking clearly enough to your audience
You think you have it all together, but you haven’t actually talked to your clients, customer, or users, to see things from their perspective
You haven’t clearly differentiated your brand from the competition

Here is some excellent advice from a business coach and digital strategist Kyla Roma that I read in her newsletter last week.

Interview 5-10 people who are struggling with what you do - without pitching them anything or asking them about your work. Have a video call with them, and ask them about what's most frustrating about their problem, and why they feel it's blocking their success. Ask them to tell you about what winning would mean for them. Dig. Use phrases like "Tell me more about that." Make notes on the words, phrases and ideas that were repeated the most. (If these aren't aligned with your offer, you may be speaking with the wrong people or you might have a positioning problem!)

This summarizes what we are talking about so perfectly. It's the essence of the positioning practice.

So, if you find out that you have a positioning problem, here is how to fix it:

Know exactly what you stand for (personally, as a business owner, and professionally, in terms of your brand core values)
Know exactly who you serve (be as specific as you can while defining your target audience or audience groups)
Know exactly what your audience wants (talk to your customers and clients, like, really talk to them – get them on the call, quick chat, group call, discussion board, or anything else that works best for your business, to learn all about their needs, wants, and pains before making any positioning changes)
Know exactly why you do what you do (what is your Why, what is your driving force, why do you care so much about bringing your brand to people, why to those particular groups of people, is there a greater mission that you want to accomplish, etc.)
Know exactly how you differ from your direct and indirect competitors (how is your offer different, what do you do differently, what makes your brand unique, what makes your products/services unique, what makes your buying process or an onboarding process unique, how do you delight your audience, what makes them say “wow” after interacting with your products/services, etc.)

Once you think through all of that, you can start creating key messaging statements for your business, brand, company, or organization.

Messaging Framework

Remember: Brand positioning is not about what you think your brand is, but what your audience thinks it is. It's about communicating clear messages to your prospects, clients, or users.

As HubSpot puts it in their blog post about brand positioning strategy:

Brand positioning is the process of positioning your brand in the mind of your customers. More than a tagline or a fancy logo, brand positioning is the strategy used to set your business apart from the rest.

Also remember: Your brand position is not set in stone. It is a living thing and you need to tweak it and iterate it if needed.

Define your core values (+ make a manifesto)

Core values are the foundation of your brand. It is something that you strongly advocate for, something that you authentically stand behind, and something you want your brand to be recognized for.

For instance, here are my six core values as an independent writer, marketer, and strategist.

Integrity: Being righteous, principled, and honest.
Competency: Owning the knowledge, expertise, skills, and proficiency.
Commitment: Being profoundly dedicated to every little detail.
Consistency: Persistently providing the highest quality of service.
Empathy: I see you, hear you, and truly understand you.
Transparency: I play with open cards, and I play fair.

Make sure that your values are visible and easily understood by your website visitors, or your business partners, clients, stakeholders (in brochures, partnering materials, marketing assets…).

If you want to take it a step further, you can write your brand manifesto to help people understand exactly what are the key values, ideas, and principles that are incorporated into your company’s culture and your overall business matter.

Nice manifesto examples that I came across recently include Manifesto for Society-Centered Design from Projects by IF, and Toggl Hire’s Fair Recruitment Manifesto. One of my favorites comes from the Soulful MBA that showcases 23 practices for building an intentional online business within The Digital Artisan Manifesto.

It doesn’t matter whether you are an entrepreneur, a creative freelancer, a small business owner, a start-up founder, part of the founders’ team, or you run a larger organization. In every case, your own personality and your personal values will shine through your brand. So, make sure you practice what you preach, show up consistently, and never stop being your genuine self.

Go with a tagline

A tagline is not a necessary positioning asset, but if you come up with a single 2-5 words line that is so perfect you see it aligned with your brand’s values for the next 150 years, then go for it.

Why only 2-5 words? Because the practice has shown that short, catchy phrases work the best. To be more precise, 3-word phrases seem to be the sweet spot for a tagline.

Think about Nike’s Just Do It, Simon Sinek’s Find Your Why, Bitly's Shorten. Share. Measure., Adidas’ Impossible Is Nothing, McDonald’s and its I’m Lovin’ It, Jaguar’s Grace, Space, Pace., KFC’s Finger Lickin’ Good, and TED’s Ideas worth spreading.

When crafting a tagline or a slogan, these are some key points to address:

Make it simple yet memorable
Convey the message in customers’ language
Bring the benefits in the front
Make it original and distinctive
Keep it consistent with your brand (tagline usually goes together with the brand name or the logo)

It might not be a good idea to change the tagline too often. You can change it within a major rebranding campaign, but if you change it frequently, then it’s not actually a tagline.

Craft a clear value proposition

Okay, now you have your tagline and your brand values defined. But what about the value you provide to your audience?

It goes into your value proposition.

A value proposition is a single sentence or a set of sentences that clearly state what benefits your product or service gives to your clients/customers/users, describe how you solve their problems, and answer the question of why they should choose you over the competitors.

Remember: Value proposition is not a place to put some overused buzzwords, industry jargon, and meaningless fluff.

It is your best chance to make a great first impression (it is usually what your website visitors read first on your Home page), so you’d better put some thought into it.

A value proposition needs to be:

Clear and concise
Simple and powerful
Attractive and relatable
Immediately understandable

Here are some of the good examples of the value propositions highlighted on the brands’ website Home page.

Airstory
The Copywriter's Writing Software
Airstory helps you write big content faster by putting all the pieces in one place

InVision
Design better. Faster. Together.
The digital product design platform powering the world’s best user experiences

Webflow
Break the code barrier
Build better business websites, faster. Without coding.

FreshBooks
All-In-One Small Business Invoicing and Accounting Solution

Evernote
Take notes anywhere. Find information faster. Share ideas with anyone.
With Evernote as your note-taking app, nothing falls through the cracks.

Dogstudio
We Make Good Shit
Dogstudio is a multidisciplinary creative studio at the intersection of art, design and technology.

In addition to these goodies, Fibery is quite an interesting example. They decided to play with key messaging and the Home page content, so they’ve created four different home pages – Freedom, Connect, Build, and Anxiety – each of them with a different look and feel, each addressing different target audiences. Except for the funny Anxiety page, which was actually made just for fun, as Fibery founder Michael Dubokov explained in his Medium post. But, that particular funny page is what gained Fibery an unexpected visibility boost in a highly competitive and oversaturated market – project management software – while they were still in the Beta phase, just silently starting out. That particular page also brought them 2,000 new users in a few days.

Two key takeaways for all of us from this short Fibery case study:

Don’t be afraid to experiment and play with your content.
It’s a good idea to create a different page for a different target group if you serve several different audiences.

Make a distinctive elevator pitch

When someone asks you what do you do, what do you tell them?

Or, when you meet a potential client while networking during a conference break (you know, back in the days when conferences were IRL and hopefully in the near future again), how do you explain what your business is all about?

With a clear, concise, and easily understandable sentence, of course. Your elevator pitch. Your one-sentence statement that sums it all up.

If you don’t have such a sentence prepared to pull it out of your sleeve in the middle of the night, well, what are you waiting for?

If it feels overwhelming to come up with a single sentence, you might find it easier to start with a bigger picture.

So, you can create a pitch deck first, and then deduct a single-sentence elevator pitch from there.

A pitch deck? What is a pitch deck?

It's a brand presentation, a set of slides, a slide deck if you will. It's a way to present your business (or a business idea) in front of investors and stakeholders. If you've ever founded a start-up or been involved in the start-up preparation for different funding phases, you've probably seen some pitch decks before.

If not, you can start with some pitch deck presentation templates in Canva, and take it from there.

Pitch deck is usually used for:

Defining the problem you want to solve with your product
Presenting your product as one of the most obvious solutions
Talking about timing, product development timeline, and traction
Defining the target market and market size
Showcasing competitors
Explaining your competitive advantage
Setting your business apart from competitors
Laying out your business model
Creating a future development roadmap

If you are at the beginning of your business journey, this might be a good way to start. Once you have it all clearly defined, it would be much easier to craft that single sentence as an elevator pitch.

One of the possible writing patterns for an effective elevator pitch goes like this:

You know how ___________? [Ask a rhetorical question to mention the problem you are solving]
What I do is ___________ [explain how you solve that problem] by helping ___________ [explain who you serve and what benefits you bring to your clients, customers, or users]

Tell your story the right way

Everyone has a story to tell. You, too.

Your personal story might be intertwined with your business story. Maybe you've walked on a remarkable path to success that you want to share with the world and teach others how to succeed, too. Or, perhaps your business road was full of bumps and failures, so now you have some lessons to share. The best place to share your story is within the About page on your website.

When crafting your brand story, think about your starting point, development phase, and transformation you achieved. There must have been some superhero-like situations and you certainly feel like the hero of your story. Except, you are not.

It's not about you. It's about your people, your community, your customers who soak up, get inspired, and end up being completely immersed in your brand's world.

Your users, clients, supporters, donors, advocates, and raving fans are the heroes of your story, in a classical Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell kind of a way.

Learn what drives your audience, what obstacles they are facing, and how to help them transform. Then, tell your story in a way that resonates with them and aligns with their needs, goals, and desires. Walk them through their development, be the mentor they trust, and help them grow. Then, and only then, will your story shine through and your brand will start to evolve.

Read on

If you are struggling with your brand positioning right now, here are 5 branding do’s and don’ts for the lockdown era from Creative Boom.

If you want to know how to make your audience fall in love with your product or service, check out this ultimate guide to creating a brand messaging strategy from IMPACT.

For some creative branding ideas and actionable tips to make your business stand out, take a look at the blog post from Top Branding Companies.

Here are 6 steps to effectively position your company and create a clear, compelling messaging framework. You’ll find them invaluable if you are preparing for the product launch, pivoting to a different business model, or starting your business from scratch.

Find out about the ways to master brand positioning with content marketing, and learn about five positioning principles to guide your content marketing efforts in this blog post from Lean Labs.

Watch & Learn

What do Gojek and Grab from South-East Asia and Jumia from Africa have in common? Well, these are all online marketplaces that have positioned themselves differently and achieved great success (while also helping local economies). Watch Amane Dannouni's TED talk to learn how.

In the Coming up with a business model episode of their video podcast The Future Belongs to Creators, Nathan Barry and Barrett Brooks of ConvertKit talk about discovering the right business model for you, the way to test your hypothesis and find out whether or not you are positioning the right offer to the right audience, as well as how to fix it, and how to scale it.

Watch this beautifully animated video to learn more about the Monomyth or the Hero's Journey as Joseph Campbell explains it. The video is part of TED-Ed Animations, it's animated by Chad Yapyapan and narrated by Matthew Winkler.

Listen & Thrive

How to know how to position your brand? This advice from Daniel Rowles on the Strategic Positioning and Brand Purpose episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast can be really helpful. And you can start by asking yourself this: "What will I talk to my customers about when I'm not trying to sell them stuff?". That should give you the clarity for content planning and outcomes.

To learn all about Jason Halstead’s The Brand Spectrum model, and listen to him speaking about the insights, difficulties, challenges, and tips on brand positioning, go straight to the brand positioning episode of the Let’s Talk Branding podcast with Stef Hamerlinck.

If it feels like it's easier to launch a business than sustaining a business (especially as a freelancer), you’re gonna love this episode of the Creative Class podcast where hosts Kaleigh Moore and Paul Jarvis discuss something that Seth Godin calls The Dip. The Dip is that period post-launch when interest drops off and you’re not quite established. So, here you’ll find out how to get through that period, and how to realize when you are actually running a successful business.

And remember: Words are powerful. Words matter. And every word counts.

So choose your words wisely for every message you put in front of your audience and go nail this brand positioning thing.

Work hard and stay inspired,
Nadja

Content Puzzle

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