Positioning a B2B brand in today’s age of cluttered technology start-ups can be a maddening endeavour, says Cory Treffiletti. There are endless companies out there trying to garner the attention of the same target audience, so you tend to come to a positioning already owned by someone else.
To be unique, you have to understand two things. First: What doesn’t work? Second, what’s the right process to use to develop effective positioning?
What doesn’t work is what I refer to as the trifecta of lazy positioning — that your company is “first, biggest or best”. Unscientifically, I can say at least 75% of the companies you see in B2B marketing hang their hat on one of these three positions. They’re easy, and they make a statement. If you’re “first”, that translates to innovation. If you’re “biggest,” that translates to scale, which implies effectiveness. If you’re “best,” that might even imply that your competitors are also using your product.
Biggest and best are lazy positioning statements because you can use them without necessarily having to back them up. Even if they do help you drive results in the short term, you need more substance for the long term. When you’re “first”, your competitors will say you’re old and behind the times. When you’re “biggest”, your competitors can say you’re no longer nimble enough to respond to innovation in the market. When you’re “best”, there’s always someone gunning to take you down. Positioning needs something more defensible than these three broad statements.
How to create a better positioning statement? The first stage is to align yourself with what you’re actually selling, rather than focusing solely on the vision for where you want to be. You need to balance vision (the future) with the present, which will establish credibility that the market trusts you know what you’re doing.
Stage two of the process is to dive into your customers to understand their challenges and how they use your products to solve them. Don’t get caught up in the product-oriented marketing cycle that most B2B companies fall into. Instead of explaining how fast you are, talk about the business impact of that speed. Don’t talk about how big you are; rather, talk about how your size enables scale, which results in more impact on customer’s businesses in a shorter period of time.
In stage three, you surface those benefits into a clear, concise framework that can be used to develop the creative portion of your message. That creative approach is where your brand personality will come alive, demonstrating character through the essence of the brand.
This process isn’t difficult. In fact it’s quite standard and actually pretty easy. There are specific exercises you can undergo to gather this information, but more than anything it requires you to ask questions first and dive into your customer’s businesses.
Positioning work can be hard, especially when you don’t have a process in place. However, with the right process, and an understanding of the pitfalls, you can come up with something unique and effective.
Cory Treffiletti is vice president of strategy for the Oracle Marketing Cloud, and is a founder, author, marketer and evangelist. This post was first published by MediaPost.com and is republished with the kind permission of the author.
