Stop Pitching Your Product and Start Marketing Your Point of View

How do you position your product in a way that speaks directly to your customers?

Your buyers have more choices than ever. And only focusing on your product doesn’t make it any easier on them.

April Dunford, Founder of Ambient Strategy and Author of Obviously Awesome, gives a full rundown on why you need to develop a good narrative so you can give your prospects a better (and clearer) way to think about their choices in a crowded market.

Learn how April breaks down what you should (and shouldn’t) do when marketing your products, how to position yourself compared to your competitors, and much more.

⚡️ Three top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: Positioning can completely change how we perceive a product

In today’s world of super-competitive marketing, how you position your product is crucial to its success. But it’s not just about what shelf in the store it goes on. Positioning can completely change how we perceive a product’s value and how we compare it to the competition.

Positioning your product in a certain market category or as an alternative to an existing big company sets off a series of powerful assumptions in the minds of customers.

If those assumptions are true, great! If they’re not, then your sales and marketing teams have to work extra hard to sell a product that doesn’t quite fit into its market category. A tough job for everyone.

Takeaway 2: The 5 components of positioning

Positioning is not a simple task. In fact, April sets out five different components of positioning for you to think about.

1. Competitive alternatives – If you didn’t exist, what would a customer do instead?
2. Unique attributes or features – What features do you have that the alternatives don’t?
3. Value – What value can you deliver for customers that the other guys can’t?
4. Customer segmentation – Who’s your best fit customer?
5. Market category – What’s the context of the product?

Once you’ve thought about all these different components and asked yourself some of the above questions, you can start to really narrow down your ideal product position.

Takeaway 3: Positioning isn’t set in stone

If you’re worried about picking the perfect positioning for your brand, don’t be! Nothing is set in stone. Your brand or product position can change and probably should over time.

For example, say you’ve designed a CRM tool and are targeting it toward investment bankers because they’re your ideal customer right now. That’s a great way to position your tool right now. But there’s nothing to say you can’t broaden that scope and approach banks or other financial services in the future.

Product positioning is fluid but having a good grasp of it right now is what’s important.