Positioning is the way your market consciously or subconsciously categorizes, ranks, and compares your brand compared to others in the same market.
A brand is positioned in the minds of the marketplace whether or not you are actively working to influence perception. Every single person on the planet has been developing this skill since they were young. As adults this task runs in the back of our minds helping us make thousands of decisions a day.
Think about driving in traffic.
Your brain is processing differentiations in everything happening around you, so that you can jam out to your favorite song or focus on the minute details in that true crime podcast. In this metaphorical "marketplace" your brain is categorizing types of vehicles, ranking them in order of risk, and predicting everyone's next ten to thirty seconds.
The brain helps you do the similar work when you're shopping on Etsy, walking through the mall, or sifting through social media platforms.
The objective of Positioning is to use personal attributes such as tone, expressiveness, and attitude to differentiate your brand from competitors in order to build an authentic community of customers.
Positioning empowers you with consistent and authentic things to say, which attracts the right clients and streamlines your sales cycles.
Have you ever noticed that having lunch with a group of people you don’t have anything in common with creates an awkward and quiet meal?
Everyone has something to say, although no one knows who at the table might want to hear it. Most people will simply play it safe and keep quiet. On the other hand, they may take no social cues at all, only to become the annoying one at the table.
There are the rare few who always know how to bring a table to life and carry on with interesting conversations. When you find the right niche of Social Positioning for your brand, it keeps the conversation from going silent and allows your brand to have the rare ability to flourish, bring the table to life, and keep that conversation flowing.
When you apply this strategy to your business, you will confidently create a smart messaging strategy which will easily translate into:
When you understand your position in the marketplace, you can effectively design engagement opportunities that don’t seem awkward.
Joshua Grace
Your boosted posts will be perfectly suited to your community. Additionally, having clear positioning for your business means that your social engagements will build awareness and trust in your brand so that your prospects can move quickly through your sales funnel and closing process.
An Effective Positioning Strategy will streamline all communications saving you from the dreaded blank page as well as the blackhole of digital ad spend.
Before I explain that last statement, consider this last analogy.
My partner, Candace, is a beauty queen!
I’m not Josh’n ya!
She actually won the Little Miss Texas Beauty Pageant when she was 2 years old. Candace’s mom recalls the story with a sense of romantic nostalgia and with a sigh of relief that those days are over. She is the first one to tell you that no one should try and make a 2-year-old act and dress like an adult princess.
Even though they were ultimately a successful duo, it turns out that the effort outweighed the desire to EVER do it again.
It was no fun. Turns out, Candace is more of a Derby Darling and doesn’t like spending that much time primping and preening.
Today, she does like to be the occasional Primped Princess who turns heads at restaurants. However, most of the time she’s more comfortable in skates, knee pads, and a helmet knocking people over than she likes to model clothes and pose for pictures.
The Derby Darling is miserable when she's required to act like a Primped Princess.
Similarly, if your business is rooted in roller derby and you sell skates, knee pads, and helmets, then social positioning your business towards primped princesses means you’re going to have a very difficult time growing.
While there might be some overlap, your goal is to make your message as clear as possible and target that message to the exact right clientele.
In this case, you want the derby darlings of the world to feel like your brand is the one that most closely relates to them. As they compare your brand to the others, they might say that your brand is for the competitive and serious derby community, while other brands are for the leisure skater.
As you send out signals, be your authentic "derby-darling-self" and your communications will naturally attract your ideal customers.
