Good day PROs!
Positioning has always been hard, but in a world where our buyers have hundreds of choices, it is more critical than ever. Today's short provides practical guidance on "finding the frequency" your buyers will hear!
Start Simple
The typical Positioning project results in a "positioning document" that serves as a guide for any and all communication going out to prospective Buyers.
But let's be honest. If you've been through one of those projects, chances are high that within 6 months (maybe less) that document is lost somewhere in the cloud.
This is especially true for companies in the lower middle market ($5MM - $50MM in revenue), because they rarely have the complexity to warrant a broad, comprehensive document.
What they really need is something that helps clarify their value to the market, and quickly!
A critically important vehicle for communicating this message is the homepage of the website. And that's where the trouble begins.
One Medium. Multiple Masters.
The company homepage is precious (and sometimes contentious) real estate.
The CEO wants it to convey the vision sold to investors
The VP of Product wants it to convey the breadth of capabilities
The VP of Sales wants it to deliver leads. Lots of them.
The VP of Marketing wants a clean, crisp, well-designed site that performs.
But what about the Buyer? What do they want from our website, specifically the homepage?
In the lower middle market, the homepage is our storefront. Therefore, we need to tell the buyer:
what we sell
for whom it's relevant
what value it delivers
how it works
and more, all in seconds
The homepage is often our one fleeting chance of getting a prospective buyer to decide to learn a little more.
Getting to Good
Last week we hosted Anthony Pierri of Fletch PMM. He and his partner Rob have worked with over 150 companies in the last 12 months updating positioning for their homepages.
The key to effective positioning? Deciding on and committing to a Target customer.
Listen to Anthony's perspective.
It is so common to see companies exert considerable time and resources updating positioning, but the work involved in determining the Target, the Ideal Customer on which the entire GTM engine is based, is developed with weak data and strong opinions.
Once the Target is established, we can then determine which of three "anchors" on which to establish positioning:
Competitive Positioning - do this, not that
Contextual Positioning - for this use case
Category Creation - desired outcome
In the lower middle market, it is highly unlikely we are creating categories. More realistically, the category has a (much bigger) leader and we are working to attract a subset of that category.
Intense Specificity
To carve that niche, it is critically important that our Target, and therefore our Positioning and Messaging, is developed with "intense specificity."
In the same discussion with Anthony, Gary shares this observation about the importance of getting to the right "frequency."
Nobody Cares About Our Product
We've all heard it. Benefits > Features, Outcomes > Benefits.
We therefore need to tell our customer about the outcomes they can expect with our product. True but …
In a world where there are 30, 50, 100 companies in a category all saying they deliver the same outcome, how does the Buyer sort it all out?
They don't.
They just pick 3 and move on.
Are outcomes important? Of course they are. But they need to be relevant for our Targeted Buyer and we need to show them how we deliver those outcomes.
This all comes back to the depth to which we understand our customer. The deeper our understanding, the better we can "tune" our message to resonate with our Buyer.
To further complicate the process, people don't read websites.
They skim them.
So it is especially critical that we don't succumb to the desire to "just add one more thing" to the home page, or cater to the wrong audience. Less is more in this case.
Wait, so why, exactly, are we spending all this time on the words on the homepage?
Because simple is hard.
Clearly conveying what we do, for whom, how it works and more, all in "skimmable" form, is extremely difficult. This process is made exponentially more difficult if our Target is not meticulously defined.
Have you been through a Positioning project lately? Reply and let us know what you've learned!
We also invite you to follow gtmPRO on LinkedIn and join us in the discussion!
