Be an Ethical Entrepreneur, Marketer, and Business Builder

The cornerstone of your Marketing RoadMap – A solid Positioning Strategy

A positioning strategy is the position you occupy in the minds of your prospects and customers.

As a start-up, you have the awesome power to define that position from scratch. For an existing business you need to know your current position before you can plan how to change it.

First some background…

Thirteen months ago I started an internet marketing company.

My expertise and experience were in IT, mechanical engineering (BS from Kettering University), technology consulting, small business management (which I learned at the first business I acquired), and then a bit of business brokerage.

So starting an internet marketing business seemed like the best way to leverage all of those experiences, right? Right?

In fact it was…

First, I had to understand what would make my business and team unique.

Why would someone hire a computer-geek, mechanical engineer, entrepreneurial-junky to generate leads online instead of maybe someone with actual experience marketing?

In those words it actually sounds somewhat ridiculous. (Now that we’ve repeatedly proven our team can outperform anyone we’ve come across in internet marketing for service businesses, I’m finally fessing up.)

Here are the steps I took to position ourselves uniquely in the market as a start-up going up against multi-million dollar teams with more years of experience than I had years breathing.

  1. Study your competition – Know what they do, why they do it, and how they communicate.
  2. Study yourself – What does my team have that no one else does? What problems can we truly solve?
  3. Study your target market – If possible, survey them. What is important to them? What annoys them? What one thing would most help them?

Now take all of that information and formulate your Positioning Strategy. Your Positioning Strategy is the BIG PICTURE of what people will think of when they think of you.

It’s the stake you drive into the sand that separates you from everyone else. 

If you don’t know what makes you unique, your customer’s don’t know either.

Know Your Competition

Our competition fell into 2 primary segments… Web Developers and Ad Agencies.

By reading through their websites, reviewing their marketing, and talking with their customers, it was quite obvious that they both positioned themselves basically the same way.

They focused on:

  • Advertising Awards
  • Creativity
  • Uniqueness
  • Cleverness of phrases and headlines
  • Branding
  • Decades of Experience in the above
  • Measuring success objectively by the client’s appreciation of the design

It was obvious we could not possibly beat them at their own game. Instead, we defined our Position in the marketplace as:

  • Results Driven
  • Analytical (we use the scientific method not popular opinion)
  • Systems focused
  • Constantly testing to learn what works. (We openly admit we don’t have all the answers while pointing out that  no one does.)
  • Direct-Response
  • More experience where it mattered (in the industry and with a new marketing medium)
  • Success measured objectively by the number of increased leads

As engineers, we could present a completely new skillset that was perfectly aligned with the internet marketing world. For the first time in history, we can test and optimize ALMOST EVERYTHING. Headlines, pictures, offers, videos, buttons, and calls-to-action can all be tested.

None of our current competitors knew the power of testing, or they simply weren’t communicating that they did, so we positioned ourselves against them to highlight our unique skillset. 

Hence our (thoroughly tested) business name, Optimized-Marketing.com.

Know Thyself

Yeah. We’re geeks and we know it.

  • Engineer– This has numerous advantages in the world of internet marketing. We understand how to setup scientifically sound split-tests  for Google Ads, landing pages, and other online marketing.
    • We are trained to build systems to solve problems. The problem is you need more leads and the solution we built is Traffic, Conversion, and Follow-up. Notice I didn’t say it’s about websites or SEO or Social Media. All of those things can change… But the system to leverage all of them may only need slight adjustments to keep up.
    • We love numbers. Of course, you can’t measure absolutely everything, but we can measure a whole lot more than most marketers will ever tell you.
    • We focus on the outcome. Ever watch an episode of the Big Bang Theory? Engineers dislike fluffy, opinionated people. Until you show us the results, we don’t believe anything you say. That obsession with results, in the form of generating leads, makes us quite unique.
  • GM’s in the industry – I’m one of you! Amanda and I can identify with our target customer’s struggles because we’ve both been General Managers in the water treatment industry. Identifying with their struggles goes a long way in building trust.
  • Technology consultant – Experience doesn’t matter when the technology is brand new. Every time a new marketing medium like Adwords, Facebook, or YouTube comes out, we’re all back to square one. So, even though I had less marketing experience, I had a lot more experience using technology to improve businesses. Which is EXACTLY what we do.
  • Obsession with motorcycles – A lot of our target market, small business owners, are men with an appreciation for cars and motorcycles. I’m about 10 steps beyond fascination to full out obsession so I often use that connection to become more memorable. On a regular basis I hear things like, “Oh yeah, you’re the motorcycle guy.”

You have to keep in mind that, in a small business, building your “brand” is as much about your corporate positioning strategy as it is about how people perceive you personally.

Know Your Target Customer

Let me reveal one of the most under-utilized secrets in marketing.

If you actively do this, you are one in a hundred businesses… Maybe one in a thousand.

If you want to know your target customer, <drum roll pleasesimply ask them what’s important to them!

Here are a few ideas:

  1. Ask your customers AND prospects what’s important to them, including the prospects who don’t buy. Don’t forget to ask the ones who don’t even take the time to contact you why they didn’t contact you.
  2. Track ALL customer complaints to Fix, Review, and Follow-up with them. Only about 1 in 8 customers who have an issue will complain about it so treat those complaints like gold. There are few better ways to learn how you can make it easier for customers to do business with you.
  3. Use surveys to ask the same question the same way. In other words, hearing 10 customers say similar things 10 different ways is not the same as their quantitative response to the question on a 1-5 scale.

How did we learn about our target customer?

I joined the trade organization of our target market to get access to our target customers’ emails and, instead of sending out an email saying “buy from me,” I sent out a survey.

The survey was a free tool for businesses within the industry to benchmark their marketing plans against other businesses within the same industry. All for free. Whether they were interested in our help or not, it was a great value to the market.

That’s how I got my first 4 clients.

My first few emails never even told them what I did or how I could help. I simply asked them where they needed help and then built a business around those needs.

Eliminate Competition

The net result of a strong positioning strategy is that you become so unique, you literally don’t have any more competition. No one can compete with you because you don’t offer the same products or services as anyone else.

So, what is your Positioning Strategy ? If you don’t have one yet, when are you making the time (open your calendar and schedule it now) to create one?

To better positioning yourself for success, Bryan

Small Business Marketing – Strategy/Clarity

My last marketing blog discussed the importance of your company vision, mission, and culture on both your marketing and overall business. Now you need to separate your business according to your 3-5 primary revenue streams. More streams then that and you’re probably diluting yourself and not effectively controlling each. Reference Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins and Winning by Jack Welch for more reasons to keep focused on a few key revenue streams.

Separating revenue streams is relatively straight-forward, however developing your Strategy and Clarity for each stream is a bit more work. The reason for separating and developing a unique strategy for each is that, more often then not, each stream has a different type of customer. As quick and obvious proof of that fact, if your business caters to residential, commercial, and industrial clients, you’re well aware that the way you handle, communicate with, bill, and market is different for each one.

For each revenue stream, the Strategy/Clarity stage include 3 things:

  1. Target Customer – Who is your ideal client?
  2. Unique Selling Proposition – What separates you from all competition so you no longer can compete on price?
  3. Positioning Strategy – What position do you currently occupy in the consumer’s mind? How do they view your business?

Of the 3, defining your Target Customer is the easiest. To do this, go through your database, pick out your top 10, 20, or 40 best, most profitable clients, and figure out what they have in common. Even better yet, pay them (in goods and services or even cold hard cash) to answer a detailed survey to give you an excellent picture of who they are, what they do, and where else they spend their money. Once you have this information do 3 things:

  1. If a non-competitive business regularly pops up as a place where your top customers spend their money, approach that business owner and try to setup a partnership.
  2. Develop a simply, yet crystal clear “picture” of your perfect client similar to Trader Joe’s, “unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.
  3. Empathize with and put yourself in that target person’s shoes before developing any marketing. Talk to him directly.

Once you have that picture of your target customer, gather information from all of your competitors via their websites, public marketing, and a mystery shopping service like teleXpertise. Gather all of that information and determine where the hole is… In other words, what do your perfect customer’s want that none of your competitors are offering? By now you see where this is going; this will be your Unique Selling Proposition. Simply put, your USP makes you so unique that you no longer have any businesses who can compete with you on price. You can often do this by offering additional services, warranties, products, guarantees, or features with your package that your competitors can’t match.

The final step is your Positioning Strategy and this one is the most challenging as we’re literally trying to read people’s minds. Right off the bat, you need to separate these (in addition to revenue stream) into people who are currently customers and people who are not. An existing customer should have a better picture of who you are and what you do and so have a more defined position in her mind than someone who has never purchased from you. In your customer survey of your top 10-40 customers, you need to ask questions about why they decided to work with your business and how they learned about it. Ask what they tell friends and family about your business. That’s the true picture of how they perceive you… Not by what they tell you, but by what they tell others. As for finding out what non-customers think about you, you have to ask them. That includes prospects and complete strangers you meet. When you meet someone new and they ask what you do for a living, once you tell them your business name, ask them what they’ve heard about it. Most people aren’t going to tell you anything negative so keep that in mind. To find the negative, search Twitter, Yelp, Ripoffreport.com, and Google for your business. Within the constraints of a small business marketing time and budget, we don’t really have the ability to get beyond those few pieces. However, if you’re interested in learning more about positioning check out Jack Trout and Al Ries’ book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

Now that you have an idea of what position you occupy in the minds of others, do 2 things:

  1. Determine if your Position Matches the needs of your target customer and your USP. In other words, if people see you as the low-cost solution and your USP is to be the best service provider, there’s a disconnect. Your options are to either revise your USP to match the position of your business (which is the far simpler and easier option and what I recommend) or start re-positioning yourself (which is complicated, costly, and takes a lot of time).
  2. Consider the position you occupy in your customer and potential customer’s mind when developing any new marketing. In other words, you know everything about your business and all of your competitors and you need to forget all of that. It’s called “the curse of knowledge” and you have it.

Here’s the bottom line… As a small business owner or leader, you don’t have a $100 million marketing budget or even a $1 million marketing budget so you need to make every dollar count. To get the most out of your marketing dollars, you first need to track everything, beyond that if you know and talk directly to your target customer, from the position you occupy in her mind, with a Unique Selling Proposition that will be important to her, you’ll be far ahead of your competitors.

To your Targeting, USP, and Positioning success, Bryan