[Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash]
The Odysseus Files, Issue 31
Playing Your Own Game, Part 8
Sound Familiar?
You take sales calls, where you answer the same objections over & over, trying to prove your credibility.
You pump out content, week after week, fingers crossed that you can nudge a few followers one step closer to clicking that “buy” button on your landing page.
It doesn’t matter how good you are. Or how quickly you can build rapport with people. Or how much blood, sweat, & tears you poured into your products.
Because the hustle remains.
So, you get up tomorrow, and you do it again.
Sick kiddos? You can give ‘em a couple of days. But you’d better not stop for too long.
Feeling burnt out? Losing your joy for your work? Same thing.
If you stop making and selling, & selling and making…
It all starts to run dry. The clients start to slip away. The engagement you lean on to fill your product funnel dwindles. The algorithms start to get ahead, in the constant back-and-forth tug-of-war you do each & every day.
So, you get up tomorrow, and you do it again.
Breaking the Cycle
This cycle exists for one primary reason: because you haven’t answered your ideal prospect’s biggest question - “why you?”
In the roiling sea of sameness that is the internet today, standing out is harder than ever.
Yet, without a clear difference that gives people a reason to choose you over a competitor, you’ll never escape this cycle of doom.
There’s a lot of fluff around the topic of positioning online. In the worst cases, it’s reduced to personality or experience: those factors that make you, you. Yes, these can attract clients who like your vibe and enjoy working with you. But it’s not a long term plan for building a sustainable business that doesn’t rely on your constant attention.
At best, you get advice to “niche down,” which means either getting specific about who you serve or what type of problem you solve, or both.
This is ok, but it still ignores what “positioning” actually means.
So, let’s clear that up.
But first, to reiterate: positioning matters to you as a creator, entrepreneur, & small business owner because it offers a structured, intentional path to building a long-lasting, sustainable business.
You don’t have to “do” positioning; but if you aren’t intentional about it, it will happen anyway, and likely not in a direction you particularly like. Why? Because of how positioning works.
A Basic Framework for Positioning
Positioning is simply owning an idea in the mind of your audience.
Jack Trout & Al Ries, the fathers of positioning theory, explained the psychology behind positioning like this:
Imagine that every category of need that a consumer could have is a ladder in their mind. Because the brain has to process such a massive volume of information every day, it simplifies the process for what the mind needs to remember. Which means that the first brand a consumer associates with a given ladder, tends to take the top rung on that ladder. Every other brand that comes along gets a lower rung. After the third or fourth rung, however, the consumer can no longer keep track of who is on which rung.
This is why most markets are led by between two to four brands.
Other brands have two options: do nothing and remain forgettable, as a lookalike brand. Or split off the ladder and start a new one.
This is what happens whenever a category divides. For example, milk eventually split into cow’s milk, organic cow’s milk, almond milk, coconut milk, oat milk, soy milk, & others. On each of those new ladders, a brand came along and promoted a new idea: an alternative to the original category. If they were able to successfully build an association between that new category and their brand name (and were able to stimulate enough market demand for the new category, of course), they would become associated with it and take the top rung on the new ladder.
Ok, but how does any of this apply to a small creator brand?
Let’s look at some quick examples:
Sinocism - the China news newsletter for professional decision makers
James Clear - habits
Justin Welsh - solopreneurship
Dickie Bush/Nicholas Cole (Ship30for30) - writing online
The Tim Ferriss Show - high performance productivity hacks
Intentionally crafting your brand positioning is a marriage of the internal (your brand identity, competitive advantage, etcetera) and the external (what the market will allow you to do).
Here’s how you can apply this to your own brand:
Start with your ideal customers. Your goal is to uncover what ideas they already hold in their mind. What do they believe to be true about the category you’re in? What are their expectations of & frustrations with your competitors? What ideas do they associate with those competitors?
Whatever positioning idea you arrive at has to be relevant to your audience. If they don’t care, your idea has already lost.
Example: if you want to be the PPC ads specialist for small businesses in your area, but those business owners are struggling just to navigate online marketing in the first place, they probably won’t care about “PPC ads for small businesses.”
Move to your primary competitors. You need to understand what, if any, position your competitors hold in your space. You can’t hold the same idea in the minds of your audience as anyone else.
(If anyone else claimed to be the “habits guy,” people would laugh them off as being a James Clear copycat. But there might be an opportunity to become the #1 authority in a specific type of habit formation that no one else has claimed yet.)
Changing minds through marketing is incredibly hard (and costly). You’re better off aligning with what people already think.
So, you’re looking for a gap in the market. A place where you can stake your claim.
Back in the days of the soda wars, Coke owned the position of being the classic soda. Pepsi couldn’t take that from them. So, they became the soda of the new generation. Because Coke owned an alternative idea, there was no way they could adjust and compete for the idea of being for “the new generation.”
(Note that none of this had anything to do with the product itself. It was a pure battle of perception: did people prefer to identify with what they perceived as the original, or the new? In positioning theory, perception defines reality.)
This stage is all about differentiation: how are you distinct from your competitors, at a deeply strategic level where they can’t copy you?
Finally, end with your own company. You now have a set of constraints set by the last two stages: relevance & differentiation. Your last filter is your own brand: what is your brand identity? What are your competitive advantages? What are you really good at, and really bad at? What credibility can you bring to reinforce your idea?
If you’re a freelance writer with a background in designing compelling content strategies for clients and who values nurturing relationships over time versus hard selling, seeking to become known as the VSL writer for supplement brands isn’t going to be aligned.
Once you’ve run through this framework and believe you’ve found an idea to focus on, run a quick mental test. Ask yourself, “can anyone else lay claim to this idea in a believable way?” If so, you’re not there yet.
If not, congratulations! You’ve found your idea. Now let’s turn it into something usable.
Use the following template to create a positioning statement. This is for internal use only; it’s not a public-facing piece of copy. Its purpose is to drive all of the rest of your decision making in your business. Any time you face a decision or opportunity, line it up with this statement; if the decision reinforces it, go for it. If not, leave it.
It also anchors everything else you do in your marketing. Use it to confirm alignment with your messaging, branding, marketing channels & tactics, etcetera. Having a framework that keeps all of these things consistent is a proven driver of tangible revenue growth.
Here’s the template:
“For [target customer] who [biggest desire], [brand name] is a [type or niche of company] that [what you do]. Unlike [competition], [brand name] [what makes you unique].”
An example of this in action: back when Amazon still only sold books, their statement read,
“For World Wide Web users who enjoy books, Amazon.com is a retail bookseller that provides instant access to over 1.1 million books. Unlike traditional book retailers, Amazon.com provides a combination of extraordinary convenience, low prices, and comprehensive selection.”
Take a stab at this, and let me know what you come up with.
P.S. - Next time: once you have your positioning idea, how do you actually communicate it to the market? And, one of the best approaches I’ve seen yet to applying the principles of positioning to creators & expert-led brands.