Something to Remember when Positioning Yourself
Positioning yourself in the wrong way is easy. Your focus needs to be on your market and their needs. Forget your market and you position yourself according to what you enjoy doing or to distinguish yourself from your competitors.
Your Identity
The big challenge is not so much finding a position as maintaining a consistent identity once you take up the position. Your market will not necessarily hear or understand you the first time. Or the second!
This does not mean you have to say exactly the same thing every time but you need to deliver a coherent message over time. Your offers evolve as your understanding of your market and its desires increases. But your overall message to your market must remain consistent over time.
So, today is as good as any other to start delivering a consistent message to your market.
Questions about Your Position
- How successful have you been in delivering a message that is both distinctive and consistent?
- How does your message show empathy for your market?
- Where you have a clear position, what are the opportunities for collaboration with competitors?
How to Focus on Your Market
Nothing beats knowing your market. Make a list of their needs or desires. Remember you are listing the needs of a particular market, not the needs of people in general. Choose two of those needs and draw them as axes on a graph.
See if you can place yourself on these axes. Where do your competitors fall on the graph? Do you have a degree of separation? Note your competitors aren’t really competing, they serve a different group of people. If there is little or no separation, change one or both axes.
Find a couple of needs that give you separation from the rest of the marketplace. Position yourself so that you stand out from the rest for a particular market. Aim to get your message across to those people so they know you are addressing them and like what they hear.
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