How to position your brand to be seen by future clients

And no, not positioning or inventing a new product in a missing gap, but your brand itself!

Firstly, what is brand positioning? Brand positioning means defining your brand externally. It means finding out where your brand is in the marketplace, without focusing on a physical location or storefront. This is a place inside your audience’s and competitors’ minds. The goal when creating your brand positioning is to ensure that this space belongs only to you and your audience and competitors know not only that you exist, but also who you are.

Positioning your brand correctly helps you create the benefits you want your audience to think of when they think of your brand. To get there though, they should think of your brand first. The whole idea is not to sell your products or services. The idea here is to make your brand be memorable to a specific audience, not a commodity for everybody to ignore. What this also means is that now is the time to start positioning yourself and talking to people about your brand.

I’m not saying to go out and start selling your offerings. I’m saying to talk to people about your passion and why you want to do what you do. Even without a product on sale or a visible website, you’re starting to plant the seed in those minds you’ve touched that you exist, and your brand is a passion that you love. Remember that enthusiasm is infectious, so don’t hide how much you love what you do.

“When positioning a brand, aggressively avoid becoming a ‘me too’ by assertively being a ‘who else?’” – Crystal Black Davis

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FINDING YOUR PLACE IN THEIR MINDS

Now, one very important thing to note here is that you are positioning your brand, not your business. When you are looking for that gap in people’s minds as to where to position your brand, you are not looking for a gap of missing products or services. You can have the exact same product or service as all of your competitors! Don’t struggle trying to find a new product or service, or to create yet another thing to keep in mind when marketing. No, you are looking for the missing feelings. When positioning your brand, you want to look for what desires aren’t being met by your competitors.

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WHY YOU SHOULD POSITION YOUR BRAND

There are many benefits in creating your brand positioning but the main one is that it can maximize your brand value. What? Yea, that didn’t mean anything to me either. The first time I heard it, it sounded like a very nice marketing spiel. But the thing is, those benefits and ideas that you want to plant in your audience’s heads? You want to know whose head they’re going in (target audience), you want to make sure that they remember your name and not somebody else’s (competitive advantage), and you want to know how to get it in there (platform distribution).

In order to understand them better, you will want to do extensive research on your audience, competitors, and awareness goals. These three main factors that you want to be conscious of when positioning your brand. Keep in mind that all of the information gathered during this stage of your brand strategy is important in many other aspects of your brand including your content strategy, visual identity, website creation, marketing campaigns, and more.