Positioning: The Key to Standing Out in a Competitive Market
Listen as Robert walks you through why positioning is key to everything you do... why should people buy from you and not from your competitors?
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:08
So what are we seeing? We're seeing right now we're seeing people coming to us and saying, Calm, we're not getting as many sales, the sales pipeline slowing down, it's not as good as it used to be. Everything used to be easy, we can't get enough leads, clients slowing down, it's just not working. And the issue, my friends in 95% of cases, is all about your positioning answer the question, Why should people bother to buy from you when they can buy from the competition when the competition is friendlier, faster, smarter, brighter, more AI, more digital, more digitally enabled, more programmatic, whatever it is, they always seem to be more. But the issue my friend has about your agency, I would say, is nearly always about your positioning. Because you look just like the competition.
Robert Craven 00:59
We are digitally enabled. Everyone is, We are a Google partner, everyone is, We have really great people everyone does, We are focused on the customer, everyone is, We speak at conferences, everyone does it. It's a doom loop. It's a doom loop of agencies looking at other agencies and saying, Oh, they've just said that their, their thought leaders will be thought leaders as well. And from the CIO, look at the competition, do what the competition does, confuse the customer, the customer wants more, you think you need more, so you do more, so you do more, so you do more. And yet actually, the secret isn't doing more. Interestingly enough, there's a piece of research with a whole bunch of managers, giving them a product and asking them to improve the product. 100% of the managers added stuff to the product to inverted commas to make it better, nobody thought about taking stuff away.
Robert Craven 02:00
So that's what I'm saying, there's a kind of a minus manager, not not an additive manager, who strips stuff away so that the proposition becomes more compelling to a certain set of people. The problem with most agencies that we work with, is that their positioning statement is, is pants, can't figure out why we should buy from can't figure out what they deliver, that's different from what everyone else delivers. They haven't bothered to do the hard lifting of figuring out what that is for themselves. And therefore when you arrive at the website of this wonderful agency, which has got wonderful people, which kind of we kind of go, it was just like the last website I looked at, it's just like, the next one I'm going to look at, I can't tell the difference you need to do is create a website that when your target customers, not all customers, when your target customers arrive, and they look at the website, they go. I arrived there talking about my language, the message, the messaging, and the brand. And the values are exactly what I want to do. And these are the people I want to talk to.
Robert Craven 03:10
Now this means that you don't have a massive audience of millions or 1000s of people, you have a selected audience that you're aiming at. But until you seek out your positioning statement of what you do for who and how you do it, and why they should buy from you in a way that is compelling to them, then you're going to struggle. So why aren't we getting more leads? Because you look the same as a competition? How do we get more leads? You need to kind of craft and map out a particular position? What do you stand for? What makes you different from the rest? What is it that you will do for my business? But you don't do it for others? But actually totally, totally. For me totally? What's the word really, it reverberates around my brain and it totally gives me a sense of resonance, it resonates and makes me want to buy from you. And that's what the really great brands do. Their positioning statement is correct. They tend to be niche they're really clear about what value they add. To whom not. And it might be your website, my friend, not. We do digital marketing and we focus on the customer because we're digitally enabled and what makes us special is we do what everyone else does, but we provide better value for money. Is that something that you buy? I don't think so. So, positioning, my friend, positioning. Why should people bother to buy from you when they can buy from the competition? And I'm going to ask you that question and I've got your phone number. So at three o'clock this morning, I'm going to sign you up and ask you why should people bother to buy from you when they can buy from the counter petitioner and if you can't answer me, I'm going to wait 10 minutes and I'm going to phone again and again and again, until we figure this one out.
Robert Craven 05:07
So important. Everything's based on this. Everything else is almost like a waste of time if we can't get the people through the door because we haven't done the heavy lifting to figure out what we do for them and why they should buy from us. And as I said, don't look at your competition because they're all looking at the competition and creating me to bingo digital agency buzzwords.