How to make Sales Easier by Properly Positioning Your Product
Got a cool product but people do not understand it? Improve your positioning!
Published:
When you have a really cool product but people in the market do not understand what it is and how it helps them, you've got a problem.
You could write more emails and social media posts to sell more, but: Would that help? Likely not.
Talking louder without being understood is not going to get more people to trust you. And when people don't understand what your product does, they will compare it to other products from the wrong category. This will make it even more difficult for you to talk to them.
So what can you do to make them understand your product, trust it, and eventually buy from your business?
This is where proper positioning for your product comes into play.
What is positioning?
April Dunford defines it in one short, focused sentence on page 4 of her book "Obviously Awesome":
Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.
This is a real espresso: Strong content, minimal water. There is so much we can learn from this one sentence alone:
- For our product to succeed, we need a market.
- A market is made of people who care a lot about something.
- Positioning puts your product into a place from where it appears as "the best" at that "something" from the previous point.
- You deliberately define how you are the best.
Now, how can you do that? Let's make an example.
Example of proper positioning for cooking software
Let's say you're a solopreneur who makes a software program that helps someone to decide what to cook for dinner.
You want to position your program as "the best" at finding out what to cook, for people who care a lot about cooking (or at least, they want to get it done quickly and reliably).
People might mistakenly think that your program is simply a recipe database. They put you in the same category. You want to avoid that because you want to charge more than what people pay for a recipe database.
That's why you want to position your product otherwise so they could clearly see that it is not a database alone.
How that?
The disadvantage of a database is that the user must enter search commands. That's time consuming: They have to go to the fridge, look what's in there (say, carrots, potatoes, and chicken) and manually search for a recipe that meets their taste and uses the ingredients from the fridge.
Now what if you position your program as an "AI cooking assistant" that obviates the need for manual searching? Of course, you would need to explain how that is possible at all.
You could make them go to the fridge, open it, and take some photos of the carrots, potatoes, and chicken. The photos would go into your app that detects what the food really is that's shown on the photos. (You could use some image recognition AI for that purpose.)
When your user says they are done, your app would search the recipe database immediately, producing good recipes where a cook only needs the given ingredients found in the photos.
As an entrepreneur, you could then argue that you are "the best" because all the manual work (typing in the names of the ingredients) has been eliminated. Your user would save time because everything works just smoothly and automatically.
In an advanced version, you could offer the option to add their food preferences so that the search results could match the family's taste even better.
In an even more advanced version, you could make them "like" or "dislike" what the search produces, and use an AI to learn what their food preferences really are. Again, this would save them even more time because they don't need to enter their preferences anymore.
Doing that, you positioned your software as "the best" solution for someone who really cares about preparing dinner in a short time with the ingredients at hand.
The Benefits you get when you position your product properly
As you see from the example above, positioning must precede all other marketing activities because it makes it totally clear and obvious why you and your business are simply awesome.
More than that, proper positioning provides these benefits to you as a solopreneur:
Better customer understanding: By first identifying the specific needs and wants of your audience, you can define a clear and unique position for your brand. This will help you tailor your products, services, and marketing campaigns to build stronger relationships with the people who care.
More profit: Effective positioning can help you attract the right customers who are willing to pay a premium for your brand. They will understand in which category you play, and your pricing will appear more natural to them when you position yourself as the best solution.
Increased brand recognition and recall: By creating a unique identity and message for your brand, you can make it easier for customers to remember and recognize your brand. This increased brand recognition can help you stand out and attract new customers. Over time, customers become loyal to you, and your business gets a stronger market position.
Competitive advantage: Proper positioning can help you differentiate. By identifying what sets you apart and highlighting your unique strengths, you can position yourself as the best choice for your customers' needs. People in the market will care more about your business than about your competitors.
Enhanced marketing efforts: Clear positioning makes it easier to create targeted and effective marketing campaigns to get word of mouth started. If you can deliberately define what makes you "the best", you can create messaging and campaigns that resonate with your audience and get more results.
Next steps towards your success
Okay, now what can you do as a first step towards good positioning, to get all those benefits?
To help you with this, I made 2Quiet2Market.com, a habit-building software that helps you get your marketing sorted and turn it into a sustainable habit.
First, use its easy "paint by numbers"-style positioning diagrams. They offer all the building blocks you need to make it totally clear why your product is "the best" for your customer:
- your customer persona
- your product
- its features
- the benefits of those features
- jobs that your users can get done with it
- qualities of your product
- stories you can tell that bring your customer from pain to pleasure.
You can start with all this for free, to try it out and see how it works for you. Once you got your initial position set up, 2Quiet2Market helps you with copywriting. Finally, you can run marketing experiments on different channels to get more customers and make more sales.
Get started today and sign up at 2Quiet2Market.com.
Comments welcome: