Competitive Positioning Strategy: How To Stand Out Without Getting Overlooked
Last update: 22 December 2021 at 09:52 am
5.00/5As we inch forward towards reopenings, after over a year of on-and-off lockdown, one thing that every brand has learned is that competitive positioning is one of the most important aspects that will impact their sustainability in the long term.
Winning your customers’ trust among the myriad of businesses offering services and products in your segment requires you to produce ‘reasons’ that are concrete enough for them to come to you instead of elsewhere.
With this being said, it is noteworthy that creating your competitive positioning is neither rocket science nor as simple as photocopying- it’s about how to view, perceive, and project your brand in a rapidly changing market.
In a way, it defines how and why your customers connect with you. In this article, we will show how you can save yourself from getting overlooked with help of a well-curated competitive positioning strategy.
What Is Competitive Positioning?
Your future profitability is determined by competitive positioning as it induces the required growth to evolve against your competition and win market share.
Competitive positioning is about determining how you’ll ‘differentiate‘ your offering and create value for your market.
It is all about carving out a place in the completion landscape, putting your stake down, and winning mindshare in the marketplace, being known for ‘something special,’ different from others.
A good competitive positioning strategy is influenced by, market profile (competitors, stage of growth, size), competitive analysis (weaknesses, strengths, opportunities, and threats), customer segments (groups of prospects with same needs and wants), and methods for delivering value (how to deliver at the highest level).
When your market sees how your offering is different from that of your competition, it is easier to attract the market and win revenue generation opportunities. One of the prime elements that many mid-size organizations overlook is how they provide value at the highest level.
Why Competitive Positioning Is Important And How To Develop A Competitive Position?
The proper positioning improves your professional services’ probability of success. Properly executed, competitive positioning is a strong business strategy tool that helps you to identify your market segment, brand identity, and competitive frame of reference.
Competitive position always comes before branding because if you aren’t clear on what clients can count on you for, no attractive logo, cutting edge front, and the eye-catching color palette is going to influence people to use your services.
There are four components of your brand strategy that should be included to develop your competitive marketing position:
Other approaches include:
- Gaining a more in-depth knowledge of your clients through data analysis, research, and other information sources such as surveys.
- Developing an organizational culture that attracts the brightest and best talent.
- Creating partnerships with complementary professional services.
- Devising a unique customer experience that offers unparalleled value to your buyers and that becomes an exclusive part of their association with you.
Brand Identity In Business
The foremost purpose of branding is to help your professional services business stand out. Branding your business means developing trusted relationships with customers and sharing its brand values with them.
Brand identity includes all the components related to your organization and services, such as tagline, font, logo, and tone.
It differs from a brand image in that it’s how you want your target clients to perceive your organization. Brand image is just the perception clients have of your services.
It is a result of how a customer attributes a quality as a competitive advantage and reflects your vision among your target audience.
Developing A Competitive Positioning Strategy
In this section, we will have a quick look at how you can develop your competitive positioning strategies:
Conduct Quantitative Market Research
A good competitive positioning strategy requires a careful evaluation of market research.
The first step, to begin with, is to check the total market size and opportunities.
Market data, such as external market data, your own experience with the market, and industry reports, will help you to underline the total number of potential clients and net potential sales to efficiently market your offerings.
The next step is to highlight the market characteristics to determine whether your market is stable, contracting, or growing and what external trends or factors are influencing your market.
Running a quantitative analysis of how products undergo an entire lifecycle in the current scenario will help you with refining your approach to competitive positioning.
Research Market Psychographics
Quantitative market research will guide you to understand the attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making processes of potential customers and prospects in your markets.
These are the psychographics of your market. By understanding how your clients and prospects think, knowing their problems, how they attempt to solve them, and how you fix their issues, you will better understand how to fulfill their demands and market to them.
This understanding will also help you to define market personas and segments, the distinct subgroups of your market, that will allow you to more effectively market to each group.
Without the necessary resources, it can be hard to do this on your own. You may want to ask for some expert advice from one of our branding agencies in Australia or elsewhere to help you in your competitive positioning tasks.
Regulate How You Truly Provide Value
A prime element of any competitive positioning strategy is how you deliver value to the market at the highest level.
The three essential methods for delivering value are:
- product leadership
- customer intimacy
- operational excellence
The focus should be reflected in your competitive positioning, pricing, brand, messaging, and distribution.
Aligning them with your brand strategy and understanding how your competitors deliver value to the market will guide you while creating new campaigns and sales strategies and improve the outcomes of your marketing activities.
Evaluate Competition
A detailed competitive analysis is a strategic thinking exercise that will help you to better understand the competitive landscape, allowing you to clear your strengths as well as the challenges you’ll need to control to beat your competition in the marketplace.
You will find your future, indirect or direct competitors and the criteria you’ll use to evaluate how each compares to you.
Along with your qualitative and quantitative market research, it will give you the foundation to complete your SWOT analysis, analyzing your weaknesses, strengths, threats, and opportunities in the marketplace.
You might also include the avenues currently being exploited by your competitors which you wouldn’t be able to win over as well. At the minimum, it will provide you an objective view of where you stand in the marketplace and where you can win your client activities.
Describe The Positioning Of Your Brand Strategy
Positioning is about describing how you will differentiate your offerings and carve out a place in the competitive landscape, and winning mindshare in the marketplace.
At the core, your competitive position strategy describes what you want to be known for and how you plan to achieve that over a few years of timeframe.
Your competitive positioning strategy considers all aspects of your market, characteristics, size, demographics, and psychographics, how you deliver value, and how you stand out in the competition.
When developing it, it is a good idea to evaluate more data than to speculate for creating an understanding of what you are currently known for, the opportunities in the market and what you finally want to be known for, and how you will get there.
Using Competitive Positioning To Gain Market Share
Competitive positioning is the process of setting your professional services apart from your competitors that builds preferences for your brand among your target market.
The goal is to associate your organization with one or more specific types of services or ideas in the minds of clients who might invest in your services. We live in a time when every business wants to gain an edge in a hyper-competitive market.
Unique brand positioning blooms your company’s visibility and its top-of-mind recall for potential clients and helps to stand out in the competition.
A solid competitive positioning strategy provides value to your prospects and finally persuades them to make a purchase from you despite most companies offering identical deals.
Summing Up
Before we part ways, it is necessary that you fully understand that a competitive strategy isn’t based on sales growth.
Instead, a good positioning strategy acts as a key driver for your targeted audience and a positioning map for new customers to find the experiences they seek.
It will help streamline your entire marketing strategy to resonate with your ideal buyer persona, build a suitable product line, and cover every single touchpoint that impacts customers who are willing to pay. We hope that this article helps you thrive and acts as a silver bullet for your competitive positioning strategy.
Remember that you can always team up with a branding agency to help you in your competitive positioning strategy.
