Everything You Need to Know About Product Positioning
Mastering marketing for eCommerce takes a lot of time, and there are many elements you need to prioritize in order to connect with your target audience and sell your products successfully.
One of the most important things to keep in mind is proper product positioning. Not sure what product positioning is or if it’s even relevant for your marketing campaign?
Let’s break down everything you need to know about product positioning in detail. By the end, you’ll know just how crucial product positioning is and learn some useful tricks to ensure you position your products to obtain the best results.
What Is Product Positioning?
Product positioning is how you frame or position your product to connect with your target customers so they understand your product is an attractive (or the best) purchase.
Product positioning involves doing two things:
- Making an emotional connection between your product and your brand with your target audience
- Showing why your product or service is a better solution compared to your competitors
In some ways, product positioning is the hardest part of marketing. It could be thought of as the last part of setting up your sales funnel and as a key aspect of marketing. Yet product positioning is also distinct from “traditional” marketing in many ways.
How is Product Positioning Different from Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing is all about getting people interested in your brand or products. However, regular marketing isn’t focused on positioning your product.
Regular marketing is about selling your product. Product positioning is about ensuring your product is framed in such a way that it is ready to sell.
For example, say that you want to sell a newly-designed pair of comfortable, durable shoes for athletes on a budget. You should position your product by showing:
- That the shoes are quality
- That the shoes are ideal for runners or athletes
- That the shoes are budget-friendly, so they won't break the bank
Marketing the shoes actually involves selling the footwear using advertisements, social media marketing, and direct conversations with customers.
Put another way, product positioning is a part of marketing, but not vice versa.
Is Product Positioning Important?
Absolutely. No product is the perfect solution for every need of every person. If you build your marketing story so broadly to try to appeal to everyone, the odds are you’ll appeal to no one and waste your time and marketing budget.
Your messaging needs to be tightly focused, and resonate with your core audience in order for your brand to be successful.
Product positioning is how you tighten the message or framing of a specific product or service so that it has the best chance of resonating with key consumers.
When done correctly, product positioning allows you to:
- Market more effectively to the segment of the market most likely to find your product appealing and, therefore, make a purchase
- Understand the true value of your product and adjust further marketing efforts, make pricing adjustments, and make other marketing decisions for more success down the road
When seen in that light, it’s clear that product positioning is of critical importance for any eCommerce brand that wants to succeed. This is especially true in the modern market where there are dozens of products for any need, all competing for limited customer attention.
Successful Product Positioning
There are several ways you can successfully position your product, even if you don't have a lot of experience. And here’s some good news: Even as your marketing expertise grows, you'll continue following the steps below for all product positioning efforts.
Craft a Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is an avatar consumer that you create based on marketing research and data, demographic information, and research from your SEO and online marketing tools. Using this data, you can form a buyer persona that represents the “perfect customer” who is most interested in your product or your brand.
Let’s say you have a business that sells affordable exercise equipment to athletes. In that case, your buyer persona might look like this:
- Male and female
- Mid to late 20s
- Still building up money, so looking for budget-friendly alternatives to expensive exercise gear
- Wants quality so they don’t have to buy lots of cheap gear over and over
- Willing to put in the time to find quality and budget-friendly exercise gear if it saves them money and helps them meet their fitness goals
Once you craft a buyer persona, you’ll know:
- What your target audience is looking for
- Whether your product or brand meets those needs
- If not, how you can adjust your product or brand’s representation or features to be more appealing to your target audience
With product positioning, the first step always lies in understanding who you are marketing to.
Analyze Your Competitors
You’ll also need to thoroughly research your competitors and figure out how they market to your shared audience niche. This isn’t to say you should copy the marketing or product positioning of your competitors directly. That would be disastrous.
Instead, you should analyze your competitors and figure out what they do well, what they could do better, and use that information when creating your own product positioning strategy.
Assess Your Product
Next, take a hard look at the product you want to position or sell and analyze its:
- Unique selling proposition or USP — You’ll need to understand what makes your product or service uniquely different from the rest.
- Special features or elements that should be advertised — How can you present your USP to your target audience?
- Current Perception — How does your target audience currently perceive your product or service?
As you do each of these, you’ll need to get in the mind of your target audience and think about what they might feel if they were to see your product right now. When you do this, you’ll be able to identify ways in which you can improve how your product is positioned.
Let's continue with our budget-friendly exercise shoes example: Currently, your product is designed well and built to last, but its marketing materials and ads make it seem like a type of premium footwear more marketable to high-budget shoppers.
When you put yourself in the mind of your customer avatar you may find that you probably wouldn't purchase your shoes because you would assume that the shoes weren't affordable for your price limits.
Armed with this information, you can adjust your marketing campaign to emphasize the budget-friendliness of the footwear and potentially draw your target audience to your brand.
Determine How to Connect Your Product to Consumers
As you work on product positioning, you’ll want to get back in the mind of your customer avatar and figure out how you can emotionally connect your product to your consumers.
Emotional marketing is the cornerstone of successful eCommerce branding, plain and simple. You need your products and brand to connect emotionally with your target audience no matter what you sell or do. In many cases, this is a simple as introducing a problem that your product then solves.
But it might be more complicated depending on what you sell or who your target audience is. Our advice is to think about how you want your target audience to feel about your product.
Once you decide this for yourself, you can tailor your marketing or product design toward that goal. In doing so, you’ll position your product for greater success.
Consider Your Brand Identity, Too
One more thing — don’t forget to consider your brand’s overall identity and how that might affect a specific product’s positioning or emotional resonance with key consumers. In some cases, your brand identity can give you some insight into how you should position your product.
Here’s an example:
1. Your footwear company is known as a quality sports apparel and exercise equipment organization, but you’ve also set up your eCommerce brand to seem a bit high-priced for your target audience.
2. Knowing this, you can redouble on remarketing or rebranding your company as a budget-friendly alternative to more expensive exercise equipment providers.
3. Since your brand identity already includes "quality" as one of its chief characteristics in the minds of consumers, you'll benefit from an assumption that everything you make is high-quality. The fact that now you are providing budget-friendly footwear is a bonus to consumers who might be attracted to what you sell.
As you can see, this is a bit technical and it takes some time to master. But with enough effort, and the right coaching you’ll be able to leverage product positioning to sell all of your products as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Summary
Learning the ins and outs of product positioning takes some dedication and effort on your own, but you’ll learn quickly with assistance from the experts. Resources like Building Blocks can teach you product positioning, eCommerce branding, and marketing.
Building Blocks offers a masterclass in eCommerce marketing. Enroll with Building Blocks now and begin your brand-building journey today.