Why Positioning is Key to Business Growth

The way we market and sell products is constantly changing. Recently we have seen the emergence of account-based marketing, growth hacking, content marketing, video marketing, visual search, voice search and chatbots. You could forgive any conference organizer for thinking that there are more current and exciting topics out there than positioning.

Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.

Want to create better marketing content? Understand your value and differentiators better. Want to grow revenue faster? Understand what makes a best-fit customer. Positioning is a fundamental input into ever tactic we execute, every campaign we launch, every piece of content we create, every sales pitch we make.

If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales. If we fail at marketing and sales, the entire business fails. LIKE SPEAKING JAPANESE slowly and loudly to a person who speaks only English, putting a bigger marketing budget behind confusing and unclear positioning doesn't work. And it's hard to blame the sales process when it takes several meetings for a customer to figure out what your product is, let alone whether or not they want to purchase it.

Weak positioning diminishes the results of everything we do in marketing and sales. It's a wind in our face, constantly slowing us down, making the effort required to meet our business targets just that much more difficult. It's like trying to make an omelet with rotten eggs- your cooking technique is perfect, but nobody wants to eat what you're serving.

Great positioning supercharges all of your marketing and sales efforts. STRONG POSITIONING FEELS like we're cheating. It lets us draft along with the forces of the markets we operate in, making everything we do in marketing and sales easier. No matter what direction we face, the wind is blowing at our back.

The first step to optimizing positioning is to really understand what it is. I LIKE TO describe positioning as "context setting" for products. When we encounter something new, we will attempt to make sense of it by gathering together all of the little clues we can quickly find to determine how we should think about this new thing. Without that context, products are very difficult to understand, and the whole company suffers- not just the marketing and sales teams.

Customers need to be able to easily understand what your product is, why it's special and why it matters to them. WHEN POSITIONING IS not working, it often looks like a marketing or sales problem; dig a bit below the surface and you can see that something else is going on.

Pairing weak positioning with strong marketing and sales efforts leads to customers abandoning your product soon after they have purchased it--particularly bad news for subscription-based businesses that depend on renewals.

Do customers complain that your prices are too high? One can't charge a premium for a product that seems exactly like everything else on the market, and weakly positioned products are seen to offer little beyond their competitors. Clear positioning helps prospects understand that you are a leader in your market segment and that one offer considerable value, making it easier for you to charge a premium.

When customers encounter a product they have never seen before, they will look for contextual clues to help them figure out what it is, who it's for and why they should care. Taken together, the messaging, pricing, features, branding, partners and customers create context and set the scene for the product.

FOR THOSE OF us who make and sell products, the frame of reference that potential customers build around our offerings is critical to staying in business. The trouble is, making sense of all the offerings is becoming an increasingly difficult task. There are too many products, all competing for shrinking attention. With so many other offerings on the market, it's easy for products to get lost in the noise or, worse, completely misunderstood and framed in ways that make them unappealing, redundant or merely unremarkable.

As product creators, we need to understand that the choices we make in positioning and context can have a massive impact on our businesses-for better or worse.

ONCE OUR PRODUCT is released into the market, we often fall into the trap of thinking that there is a "default" context around our offering. Our product simply is what we set out to build.

However, the road from an idea to a market-ready product is rarely a straight line. After we have an idea of what we want to create--a better email app, a faster database or a yummier chocolate cake--we go through a process of building proto-types, or ugly first versions, that we put in front of prospects to get their feedback. We then incorporate new ideas, adding and removing features based on that feedback. We repeat the cycle, often for months or even years, until we have something that our early customers really seem to love.

Source : Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It by April Dunford

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45166937-obviously-awesome

Read Next Article : https://thinkingbeyondscience.in/2025/04/08/unlocking-effective-product-positioning-strategies/