How To Develop Your Positioning and Messaging (And Make it Stick)

In a crowded market, it’s not enough to just have a great product—you have to have a strong and compelling brand.

It all starts with knowing who you are, where you fit into the landscape of other options, and what benefits your customers get from choosing you over the competition.

Jason Widup, VP of Marketing, and Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing at Metadata, join forces to break down the best ways to think about positioning and messaging for your brand. They share a few pointers and lessons learned from Metadata’s own marketing strategies (both the successful and the not-so-successful).

Check out the full episode to learn more or keep reading to hear our top three takeaways from this episode.

Watch the full episode

Three top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: Positioning and messaging are not for marketing alone

One of the common mistakes businesses make is to make positioning and messaging a marketing-exclusive responsibility. While marketing should definitely get a big say, you can get so much value when other departments chip in to help you shape your messaging.

If you don’t talk to the sales team or listen to sales calls, how will you ever know what prospects are really saying? By joining forces with other departments, you get a bird’s eye view of the customer journey, needs, and wants. That way, you can better position your brand in the market and tweak your messaging so it really resonates.

Takeaway 2: Focus on the audience, not yourself

So much sales copy out there is very “me, me, me.” Me being the business or product you’re trying to sell.

The problem here is that the prospect doesn’t really care about you, your product, or your business. So, if you’re packing your copy and overall messaging with promises about how great you are, you’re missing a trick.

Instead, laser focus on your audience. What do they need, want, expect? How will you solve their problems? Spend some time rethinking your messaging and copy and ask yourself: is this about me or my prospect? Make it about them, and your messaging will start to stick.

Takeaway 3: Don’t start with the website

Where do you begin when you want to sell a new product or launch a new business? The website? Wrong!

Instead, take a step back before you get into the nitty-gritty of managing a website and look at your brand’s positioning and messaging. What are you really trying to sell? What solutions do you offer?

Get clear on that and let it frame your messaging BEFORE you start building your website full of vague copy and no direction.