Crafting the perfect positioning statement

We’re in an era of information saturation. Our digital trail is used by advertisers across the globe to bombard us with information about products and services every minute of the day. As we spend countless hours building products and services, it’s important to realize the importance of a strong brand. In a world of information and sensory overload, how can us marketing and product folk create engaging messaging that doesn’t just help cut through the BS, but encourages and energizes our audience to take the necessary action and journey through our funnel?

Furthermore, with the increasing number of channels available to market and sell products and services, consistency in brand across these channels is of utmost importance. Having a fun playful tone in your social channels and a serious, corporate tone in your website messaging can have your audience conflicted and confused. Branding plays an essential role in a business’ development and consistent brand presentation increases revenue up to 23%.

This is where a strong brand positioning statement can be of utmost importance. I’ve had the good fortune of helping craft the positioning statements of some stellar products in the market, including LoadNinja, a performance testing platform on the cloud, and tools of the Swagger API family like SwaggerHub and Swagger Inspector. In this continuing journey, I’ve learned a lot from different experts on how to craft a great brand positioning statement.

But before, we get there, let’s understand what exactly is a positioning statement.

What is a positioning statement?

The positioning statement is a concise description of what your product or service is, the value it brings to the lives of the people it’s meant for, and how it is unique from others in the market. The statement is foundational to all of the promotional messaging efforts you undertake, and is meant to serve as a beacon to guide your internal teams on what the product is, and what it is not. Every product and marketing decision you make regarding your brand has to align with and support your positioning statement.

Over time, I’ve learned that a good positioning statement isn’t just something that’s articulated to check off an item in your go-to market to-do list, it’s fundamental to every piece of marketing and sales effort undertaken by your organization. For example, it informs -

• What should be headline and sub-headline for your press releases
• The keywords you pick to optimize for SEO
• The messaging on your websites
• The kind of tone you use in your social media outreach
• The kind of influencers you partner with for promotion
• The kinds of buyers your sales team will encounter

Elements of a good positioning statement

A good positioning statement -

1. Details what the product or service is
2. Describes the target audience and their challenge
3. Details the value that the product or service offers that uniquely and competitively addresses the market’s challenges
4. Is simple and memorable
5. Resonates with your target audience

You cannot write a good positioning statement without having all of the above items understood and formally agreed upon by different stakeholders in product, marketing and sales. This is also why it’s important to dedicate a good chunk of time to think through all of these items. Depending on the nature of the product, it’s taken me anywhere between a few weeks (with Swagger Inspector), a month (eg: LoadNinja) to several months if the product encompasses many different business lines (eg: the Swagger family of tools).

Template for a good positioning statement

I’ve shared a template I’ve used during my time at SmartBear Software to craft positioning statements below.

Product {insert product name} is

For: Name the target audience. Eg: Software engineers, dog walkers, people comfortable buying clothes online

That: Describe their needs and challenges, and how the product and service addresses them. Eg: automating functional tests on applications without any code, purchasing clothes online with confidence about size and fitting through Augmented Reality

So: The tangible value that the target audience will benefit from. Eg: Saving over 50% time and effort during the test script creation process

Unlike competitors, our product is: Detail the competitive differentiators. For example, 2 minute support response time, abstracts the need to code to build a website

I use this template to organize my thoughts and make sure I’m focussing on what truly matters to build a competent and invigorating brand positioning statement. For example, we built an AR scanning app as a hobby project that scans physical music merchandise to unlock personalized messages musicians leave for their fans.

We Provide: A mobile app platform

For: Artists seeking to use new technology to build their brand and fan base

That: enables them to create create immersive digital experiences that fans can engage with, record and share across different social platforms

So: they can effectively promote new releases, merchandise, their ideas or their brand in general using a medium that blurs the lines between physical and digital realms at low costs.

Unlike: Instagram and Snap

Our: platform allows artists to create more exciting experiences without stringent limitations on quality and time, and allows fans to record their interactions with their favorite artists’s augmented experiences, and automatically save them on a platform so they can view and easily share them across any platform they want in an open ecosystem

Summary

A positioning statement should serve as a blueprint to guide you in articulating the core business value of your products or services to investors, prospective employers and your target consumers. The examples above should hopefully provide you with an idea on how you can capture the essence of your business in a clear, concise and crisp way that can pique the interest of those who hear or read it.