Discover powerful brand positioning strategies to carve your niche, stand out from competitors, and dominate your industry. Learn how to define your unique value, connect with your audience, and build a strong brand identity for long-term success.
IE 432: Strategies for Brand Positioning: How to Carve Your Niche & Dominate Your Industry
Understanding Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is essentially the strategic process of defining how a brand is perceived by its target audience in relation to competitors.
It encapsulates the key question: what makes your brand unique? Gaining clarity around your unique value proposition (UVP) is therefore vital.
Branding is the emotional and visual representation of your business.
It includes everything that shapes how people feel about your company, from your logo and messaging to your customer experience.
Marketing is the tactical execution of promoting your brand and products. It includes the strategies, channels, and campaigns used to attract, engage, and convert customers.
Identifying Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
A well-articulated UVP serves as the cornerstone of your branding efforts, making it crucial to identify what sets you apart.
it’s how to define what your brand is and how it is unique to you.
You can, in order to figure out that unique value proposition, it’s important that you look at the competition.
What do you do differently that sets you apart from everyone else?
And one of the examples I always give for unique value proposition is myself. When it comes to my unique value proposition, I am different than anyone else in the industry that is talking about marketing strategies for entrepreneurs because I have a teaching degree.
I can teach anyone to do just about anything, and that is where it sets me apart, because I can find ways to help people get clear on the strategies that we are trying to understand and utilize.
Now, once you are able to take a look at what everyone else is out there doing you again, you want to figure out the way that you are unique and how.
A look at what everyone else is out there doing you again, you want to figure out the way that you are unique and how you can set yourself apart.
You want to make sure that you are creating a compelling UVP that resonates with your target audience.
Are they connecting to what makes you different? And if you can have that happen, it will make all the difference in making sure that you are attracting your target audience.
Knowing Your Target Audience
The next piece, where we just kind of slid right into it, is knowing your target audience so that you can find your target audience.
You have to actually know this because in order to create that unique value proposition that is going to work, you have to understand who you are trying to attract.
So you also want to make sure that when you are looking at that target audience, how does your positioning attract them?
What is it about you that is going to make them different?
For example, when I am teaching marketing strategies, the fact that I am a teacher helps, because I have an audience that wants to be able to apply it themselves.
They don’t want to have to hire out and have seven people on their team that have all different roles and they can’t determine whether or not what those people are doing is actually affecting their business.
I teach them from the ground up how to make sure that those marketing strategies are actually working and impacting their business.
You want to make sure that you have a detailed customer persona when you’re talking about that target audience.
Who are they? What are they looking for, what problem are you solving for them and where can they be found? What platforms are they utilizing? Do they listen to podcasts? Are they going to YouTube? Are they on Instagram? Do they use TikTok? And, if they do use those platforms, are they looking for the solutions that you provide on those platforms?
4. Differentiating Your Brand from Competitors
You want to make sure that you are finding a niche that aligns with your strengths.
This is why, when I have given examples on the podcast in the past where we talked about an Italian food blogger, there’s tons of food bloggers out there that are creating Italian recipes, but, as an Italian food blogger, what is going to set you apart?
Are you specifically telling them the herbs that work for Italian food? Are you telling the tomatoes that they need to be using? Are you educating them in understanding the Italian traditions that go into particular recipes?
This is how you’re going to be able to differentiate your brand from your competitors.
It’s also going to be important that you apply storytelling also going to be important that you apply storytelling.
Telling us where the seven fishes dinner comes from and how your family, as an Italian family, has utilized it or conducted it or made sure to bring in the entire family to use those recipes, is going to be key in really being able to show how you are applying storytelling.
Crafting a Consistent Brand Message
You also want to make sure that you are leveraging innovation, quality or customer experience to stand out. Customer experience is so important in this day and age, where we know that there are a lot of bots that answer questions on our websites or in our emails.
We want to make sure that we are standing apart from whatever is out there as far as AI tools.
In order for that to happen, your customer service is going to be key.
You have to make sure that your voice is clear in everything that you create so that they can connect with it and it doesn’t feel like it’s simply a machine.
The next piece is you’re going to craft a consistent brand message.
You’re going to align that message across all platforms websites, social media and your email.
You want to make sure that they know that it’s you and not someone else that’s coming through into their space, so make sure that you have a clear brand voice and personality.
One of the people that I often talk about when I’m giving this example is Melanie from Mostly Uncontrolled, her voice comes through almost immediately the second you start to listen to her podcast or read her content.
She has a dry sense of humor and really talks about the fact that, as a mother, you have to be able to take care of yourself before you can take care of everyone else in your family, but there are certain ways that you can do this. I
t’s not simply taking a bath, so we wanna make sure that our brand voice is coming across when we are doing this.
6. Leveraging Digital Marketing for Stronger Positioning
All of us that are following along with me know the importance of SEO.
Understand that you have to be doing keyword research.
No matter how the algorithms change, seo is still going to be important Interlinking, making sure that people really truly know what you are an expert in, so that there is no sort of misunderstanding of why they are coming to you.
So you want to make sure that you are utilizing all of those SEO strategies as well as using social media.
Your social media should really not be the place that you are only sharing your first time content.
Social media is meant to build brand awareness.
The purpose of it is to give it an opportunity where your first piece of content comes out podcast, youtube, blog posts and in order to help people understand more and point them back to that first piece of content.
We’ve talked about this quite a bit.
This is something that I emphasize the fact that you cannot build your business on rented property, which is what social media is, but it’s still important to help continue to build your brand awareness and to make people aware of what you are up to.
Adapting & Evolving Your Brand Positioning Over Time
Over time, the way that you create content, the voice that you have, is going to change.
You are going to change. If you are in your business for more than five years, the content that you talk about is likely to change.
For example, the evolution and adaptation of your brand is going to change over time as well, because, as you go through the years, it is likely the way that you view your content, the way that you view the world, is going to be a bit different.
There’s going to be changes. There’ll be changes in algorithms.
There will be changes in your life that will cause you to want to take a little bit potentially of a pivot, and there is nothing wrong with this.
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