Entries Tagged 'Public Relations' ↓

An effective positioning statement includes four things:

1) Your customers
2) The problem you’re going to solve
3) Why you’re different
4) Your competition

A positioning statement is for internal use only. It is not a “mission statement,” a “tag line,” an “elevator pitch” or anything for selling purposes. Those materials require language intended for external audiences. This is for internal audiences only.

A positioning statement is used to provide guidance during a marketing campaign. Every company and every product will have its own positioning statement. It ensures everyone is working from the same page and toward the same goals.

A positioning statement must be credible. It is not hopeful thinking; it is grounded in truth.

Define Your Customer

Your ideal customer is the person who you can help best, and in return, will receive maximum benefit from your products or services. Who are you trying to serve with your business?

Define What Your Customer Wants or Needs

People will pay a fortune to solve an immediate problem, but will hardly invest a dollar to prevent a problem from happening. What is the urgent desire or pain point that your ideal customer is experiencing right now that you can make better immediately. What is the compelling reason that customers buy from you?

Define Your Product Category

Be clear about who you are—and who you are not. If you don’t, your customers will decide for you, and it may work against you!

Remember, the human mind will categorize things. Your customers will label you in their minds, and they can only remember one thing about you at a time.

Tell your customers how you want to be remembered. Make it something familiar and easy to remember. Otherwise they will reject your label and come up with their own substitution. Be strategic and simple.

Define Your Key Benefit

Make sure your key benefit addresses the true needs and desires of your target customer. Look beyond the obvious. What secret hopes, dreams, fears or frustrations are your customers really dealing with?

Define Your Competition 

Who do your customers think of when they think about your product or service category? Who do you lose the most sales to? This might be a single entity, or an industry. If you’re a local provider, you might need to distinguish yourself from larger, more well-known brands. Be specific.

What Makes You Different? 

Tell your customers what sets you apart, and make sure that reason resonates with the reasons they need or want your product or service.

Now, tie it all together. Finalize your positioning statement. Sit on it for a couple of days, then look at it again. Are you being clear about who your customers really are? Are you able to succinctly define your key benefit? Does the value you provide align to the needs and desires of your customers? Are you able to explain what makes you different from the competition.

Download my Product Positioning worksheet to help you through this process. Or, leave a comment below with your questions or suggestions.

If you found this article useful, please click on the buttons below to share it with others.

You can listen here or read the article

On Aug. 23rd Facebook will be changing the way marketers work with Facebook. This is a reminder that when you use Facebook, you do not own your content. So when Facebook changes, you have to change with them.

The biggest change is the removal of boxes that once appeared in the sidebar. This is where marketers used to be able to add ”Opt-In” boxes for their Constant Contact lists, or badges from Twitter and Skype. Boxes are what allowed people to tie in many components of their social media campaign into their Facebook landing page. They were very powerful. On August 23rd, they’ll be gone. So any content in a Facebook “box” will need to be recreated.

Boxes were also used to appease lawyers. They were where you put “community guidelines” and “rules” to keep everyone out of trouble. Now, this content will have to be moved to the “About” tab or “Info” tab. Neither tab supports FBML, but URLs do turn into hyperlinks, which is nice.

Over time, I think marketers will need to make more use of Facebook Markup Language to get the utility of boxes. FBML is HTML used specifically for Facebook. FBML allows you to create landing pages in Facebook that look and feel just like regular Web pages on the Internet.

If you’ve ever wondered, “how do I make a Facebook page engaging,” this is how. Examples of FBML are Gain detergent, Coca-Cola and Chick-Fil-A. 

Facebook pages will also appear more narrow. If you’ve developed banners or images for Facebook, you may need to resize them. (Did a whole lot of graphic designers just make money?)

If you haven’t figured it out yet, all these changes are to make more room (and provide more value) to Facebook advertisers. Facebook is taking real-estate away from “free sites” and giving it to those willing to pay.

To see an example of the new Facebook page layout, look at a Facebook Event, like the one taking place at  Big Island Seafood Farmer’s Market.

E-Marketer published a list of 2010 predictions for social media today. Among them, unpaid articles and those generated by word-of-mouth will play a larger role in how public relations and marketing departments measure the value of online campaigns. Until now, metrics have been largely advertising-based, but as public relations moves into the social arena, managers will expect more ways to measure outcomes. You can read the full report at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007410.

Another prediction is that digital streams of video — such as those found on YouTube, UStream and other user-generated sites — will find an easier path into living rooms and television sets. Personally, I’m making the prediction that the upcoming Apple tablet computer, due out April 2010, will be the  transformational  device to make this connection. I predict tablet computers will be the bridge between streaming video and broadcast television in daily lives, similar to the way iPhone brought the Internet to our pocket.

Since video is going to play an enormous role in the success of 2010 marketing and public relations campaigns, now is the time to begin adding video to your Facebook page or blog.

For best results, limit clips to just 60 to 90 seconds. Make just one key point per video and encourage sharing by using YouTube or UStream.