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A Deep Dive into the Power of Brand Positioning
287 Plays2 years ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans and Clay Ostrom discuss the importance of brand positioning and how it applies to marketing, sales, HR, product development, and raising capital.
We explore how positioning is about finding a unique place in the market and creating a memorable connection with customers.
We talk about the importance of clear and effective positioning in order to stand out in a competitive market and avoid being lost in the crowd.
We also discuss improving a company's positioning, including understanding customers, analyzing competition, and developing an offering that aligns with customer needs.
We also touch upon the key deliverables of the brand positioning process and how to measure the ROI of the work done.
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Transcript
New Course Announcement
00:00:10
Speaker
Hey, it's Mark Evans. Before we kick off today's podcast, I have some very exciting news. I just launched a new live cohort-based course on how to create better brand positioning. This is something that I've wanted to do for a long time, and thanks to Maven, I finally made it happen. It starts May 9th,
00:00:31
Speaker
It consists of five sessions. We'll cover insights into why positioning matters. We'll do worksheets and exercises to turn ideas and approaches into tangible assets. And I'll walk you through my positioning framework that I've used with dozens of companies over the past 15 years. To learn more, visit maven.com slash mark hyphen evans forward slash brand hyphen positioning.
00:01:01
Speaker
Check it out. If you have any questions, you can email me at mark, at markevans.ca. Now, let's get to the podcast.
Interview with Clay Ostrom
00:01:09
Speaker
So what happens if you put two brand positioning geeks in a room? Well, you get a very animated conversation about why positioning matters, how to tell if your positioning is not working, what are the keys to positioning deliverables,
00:01:25
Speaker
and what to do once you've developed brand positioning. I was excited to interview Clay Ostrom from Map and Fire, someone who I follow on LinkedIn, who shares my belief that positioning matters to everything within the organization, marketing, sales, HR, product, and raising capital. My conversation with Clay covers a lot of different topics from different angles, and I'm excited to share it with you today.
Basics of Brand Positioning
00:01:56
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark, Clay. Thank you so much, Mark. It's great to be here. Super excited to talk about this stuff.
00:02:01
Speaker
Let's start with the basics. And for many people, this will be new information for people like you and I who obsess over positioning. This is positioning 101. What is positioning and why is it important? Loaded question. We can go on all kinds of different places, but I think it's a good place to start. It's a great place to start. It is, it is a loaded question. The most simple terms possible, I think of positioning as
00:02:31
Speaker
your unique place in the market. At the end of the day, what we're trying to figure out is where you fit, where you can occupy a space that people can understand and remember. And within that, there's a lot of pieces that we can dig into. But I think that's
00:02:52
Speaker
At the end of the day, that's kind of what we're trying to drive at. We're trying to drive at creating something memorable, a connection that people can understand, and again, understand the value that you're providing, that your brand provides. Would you agree with that? Do you have a different, nice, clean, simple way of describing it?
Essentials of Differentiation
00:03:10
Speaker
The way that I talk about positioning, and it's weird talking to someone who is a positioning guru as well, right? It's like talking to a like-minded person. I'm like talking to a person in the mirror. The way that I describe it is positioning really,
00:03:21
Speaker
clearly articulates what you do, who you serve, why what you do matters to them, and how your unique, different, or better. How does that align with the way that you look at the world? So if we move past that just initial top line statement, yeah, we immediately get into the who you serve, the
00:03:44
Speaker
which market you're in, the what value you provide, the how you're different, all of those different pieces that you often see when you're, maybe if you're looking at, I think anybody who's done any work around positioning has probably stumbled onto a template or two that tries to distill all of this into a simple statement and it's often built around those fundamental building blocks. Of course, the devil's in the details and really understanding those things on a deep level and understanding
00:04:13
Speaker
your differentiation and your value, those are the things that we end up spending a lot of time talking about when we work on it with companies. You and I understand the importance of positioning and we advocate it continuously and enthusiastically. Do you think that many entrepreneurs
00:04:33
Speaker
don't understand what positioning is and why it's important. And as a result, they give positioning short shrift. It's not seen as a priority. Tactical execution often takes so much of their attention and then we need to go to market plan and that's important. And position is almost like
00:04:52
Speaker
the person who sits in the corner when everyone's having a good time at the dance, they're there, no one's really paying attention to them. Does that strike you as the way that you see most entrepreneurs and how they view the world, the positioning world? I think somewhat. I would say it's encouraging to me that I feel like the conversation is evolving and getting more sophisticated.
Strategic Importance of Positioning
00:05:16
Speaker
Now, I always have to check myself a little bit because, again, I would love to hear your thoughts on this, but there's always a little bit of the danger of being in the echo chamber of other marketers or people who are in the space, who do understand it. Just like any business, it's easy to take for granted certain things or overestimate people's understanding of certain things.
00:05:39
Speaker
But I do feel like the conversation has grown and people are getting more sophisticated about it, talking about it more. I will say that to your point about maybe being the person nobody wants to talk to in the corner at the party, we position our own work around positioning
00:05:56
Speaker
within brand. We think about brand positioning and I feel like that is a way to help make it a little bit more accessible or kind of get our foot in the door with people to a certain degree. And then we sort of introduce them into more of the
00:06:11
Speaker
nitty-gritty of what really goes into the positioning conversation. But I feel like people at least have some touch point with it. Maybe they don't fully understand it, or maybe they haven't gone through a process to dig super deep into it, but they have some kind of touch point. So what do you think? Do you feel like the people you talk to have varying levels of understanding of it?
00:06:34
Speaker
Some get it, some don't. I think that what you may be sensing is that there's a growing interest in positioning. If you look at the B2B, B2B SaaS landscape, second half of 2020, 2021 for sure, in the first few months of 2022, we were in this robust digital transformation ecosystem
00:06:58
Speaker
Everybody was doing well. The rising tide lifted all ships. It really didn't matter if your positioning was good. It really didn't matter whether you were firing on all cylinders when it came to your marketing and your sales enablement. It mattered as if you had a digital product and that you were actively open for business. Even crappy companies with okay products did well and the good companies obviously did very well. What I'm sensing now is that as sales become more challenging,
00:07:28
Speaker
as companies become more desperate for leads, they recognize that if they don't send out from the crowd, if they don't establish a competitive edge, then they're just going to spin their wheels at best. Or they could be one of those companies that fades away. Maybe positioning is getting more attention because they recognize that it can be a way to outflank the competition. Your thoughts? Yeah, I think that I think there's a lot of truth to that for sure. I think
00:07:57
Speaker
I think when people start thinking about positioning, it is often a byproduct of a struggle or a plateau or some, we're not growing fast enough. We're not achieving the things we want to achieve. So how do we better do that? And sometimes there's a natural inclination to jump to the end of, well, what's our message or what's our, what is that head campaign or what's that thing? And.
00:08:23
Speaker
Ultimately, as we know, it all comes back to positioning to drive those things, to make those things effective. So maybe there's a little bit of a backtracking that happens to get into positioning, but I agree with you. I think when there's struggles in the market or struggles within a particular company, it's always critical to really think about that stuff. Also, when you're in a market that's super commoditized, if there's just a ton of competition, it's super saturated, obviously, then it also is critical.
00:08:50
Speaker
That's something that exists all the time, regardless of up or down market. If you're just in a space that happens to be super, super saturated, it's really hard to stand up. Yeah, well, and you could argue that every single B2B SaaS marketplace is super saturated because the barriers to entry have come down. Launching a company is relatively easy, I say relatively in quotation marks, that if you haven't got
00:09:12
Speaker
position, you haven't got a robust marketing budget, then you're really at a disadvantage. I want to pick up on something you said in terms of how a company knows that it has a positioning problem. What are some of the symptoms or some of the signs that our position isn't working? And what do you think tips people over from thinking about it, exploring the idea to actually saying, we got to do something about it?
00:09:37
Speaker
Again, because it is really at the heart of the business, I think it's easy for me and then maybe you feel the same way to say, well, almost any struggles that you're having from a business perspective could be connected back to your positioning probably on some level. Certainly, if you're thinking about marketing and sales specifically,
00:09:57
Speaker
There could be anything from we're not getting great engagement
Risks of Poor Positioning
00:10:01
Speaker
on our website. We're not getting people to dig deeper into the site. They're bouncing. They're coming and staying for a few seconds and leaving because they don't maybe even get what we do, let alone put us in the right consideration set for something that might be applicable to them.
00:10:18
Speaker
On the sales side, it's longer sales cycles and longer conversations and having to have three conversations with a client instead of maybe one or two because there's so many questions and you're not able to tell a succinct story about what that value is. When we think about our customers and we think about the evaluation process, say they
00:10:41
Speaker
They actually do have a sense of what they need and they spend a bunch of time evaluating a bunch of competitors in your space and they're going from site to site to site to site. You just don't have a lot of opportunity or you don't have a lot of time to make your case and to occupy, again, some kind of place in their mind that's memorable and they can come back to.
00:11:04
Speaker
Yeah. So again, I think it affects all of those things. I think it really affects virtually every expression of your marketing and sales. I don't know. Do you think that's overstepping at all or do you kind of look at it the same? I think it sounds really good in theory. I think that as someone who spends a lot of time and focus on positioning, it's something that you believe. But I would say that many companies when they look at
00:11:31
Speaker
the fact that their website's not converting or they've got high bounce rates or their sales cycles are long, they're looking for quick hacks, this whole growth hacker movement. If I change the color of the CTA or the wording of the CTA, if I reconfigure my navigation or put my social proof higher up or embed a video in the homepage, those kinds of things are going to change the ballgame.
00:11:58
Speaker
make a difference and then I'll be able to measure it using data because they always go back to data. It's almost like they're scratching the surface. They see the symptoms, but they don't see the root cause. And I would argue that a lot of them don't see positioning as a problem. I think it takes them time to get their heads around. It's almost like
00:12:13
Speaker
They panic and they realize, oh my God, I got a story problem after they've gone through this checklist of change that, change that, change that, and nothing's changed. Maybe I'm being overly dramatic, but I think that a lot of companies think that way because they're looking for quick fixes and positioning takes time to develop.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. I think, of course, and all the things you mentioned do matter, right? Those things are important. The UX, the experience of the site, the choice of color, the choice of CTAs, all of these things matter. It's not that they don't.
00:12:47
Speaker
But like you said i think it's easy to get in a cycle of tweaking a hundred little things because you feel like you're doing something you feel like you're you got a new thing to test you got a new idea that you can quickly implement but it really may not be like you said really it's kind of scratching the surface it's not necessarily getting at the heart of stuff and.
00:13:09
Speaker
And I really do believe that, yeah, you can be moving all of these little pebbles around, but then you've got this giant boulder in the middle that is your position and is ideally being expressed through your core messaging. And again, if that story is missing the mark, it kind of doesn't matter if you're moving all the little pebbles around. The boulder is just kind of sitting there like a lump or it's pushing people along, whichever you want to use that metaphor, I guess.
00:13:37
Speaker
We started the conversation with a positioning one-on-one question. Let me ask you another. What are the dangers of ignoring positioning or not having clear positioning, positioning that resonates position that makes an impact that differentiates you from the competition? If you don't have good positioning, what are the consequences? What are the ramifications?
00:13:58
Speaker
Well, I think again, it comes back to all the stuff we've been talking about. I think at the end of the day, nothing you do is going to be particularly memorable or effective. It's going to be extremely hard for any of your customers to
00:14:17
Speaker
to really remember who you are in the space. There's just so much noise out there. As you said, I think there's not a lot of categories out there that aren't super saturated. And if you are ignoring the position and you haven't nailed it down, you're just going to continue to struggle. You're always going to be limited by that on some level. I don't know if maybe there's more to that question. So were you just saying, what are the other challenges you run into?
00:14:47
Speaker
What are the consequences of not having clear positioning? Because, you know, as we mentioned, every company operates in ultra competitive marketplaces. Lots of things will give you an edge. It could be the fact that your product is user friendly or that it's less expensive than the competition, or it has an amazing brand because your customers love it. That could set you apart. That could be the way that you could rally around.
00:15:13
Speaker
positioning the marketplace. But if you don't have that, if you really haven't nailed down what you do and why it matters, then the risk is that you'll be lost in the crowd, is that you'll have a product, but it'll be more man than anything else. People won't love it because they really don't know why it matters to them. And I think that's ultimately what it comes down to. Does this product, is it relevant to what I may need, could it deliver
00:15:38
Speaker
the experience that I want. Yeah. That meh, that meh sounds not like the worst thing in the world, but meh really is super dangerous. We actually did an interesting research study recently where we were, we did a survey of business leaders. We surveyed final numbers over a hundred or so, and we were essentially having them self rate their
00:16:06
Speaker
their brand overall, their positioning and their messaging. And we were just kind of, I just, it was curious to see how people would, where they would place themselves. What was interesting was there were, of course, a segment of people who we had them rate on a scale of one to 10. And there was a segment of people, of course, in that nine to 10 range who felt like we're super solid.
00:16:29
Speaker
And there was also a segment of people in that one to six range of, they probably really do need to do some work, but there was a real, the biggest segment was in that seven to eight range. And what I think is so interesting about that is to me, that is the embodiment of meh. That is absolutely the segment that you really can be super dangerous in a sneaky way because
00:16:58
Speaker
It means we're probably okay enough to maybe it's not raising a super giant red flag internally.
00:17:06
Speaker
but nobody's going to remember you in that range. And it's kind of like, uh, NPS scoring. And that's kind of what we used as the crux of it, where nine to tens are your, your, your people who super they're, they're supportive of your brand. One to six are the detractors and the seven or eight are basically nothing there. They don't really count because they're kind of, you just kind of in one year and out the other.
00:17:30
Speaker
So I think that's a really interesting piece of what we're talking about right now, which is maybe people being in that seven to eight range, not fully recognizing there's an issue at hand, but secretly suffering from having a lack of clear positioning as well.
00:17:46
Speaker
The results that you saw make sense to me. I think one of the things that we suffer from or companies suffer come in a fast-moving marketplace is good enough. This acceptance of good enough. It's not bad. It's not awesome, but it's okay. And so companies will continue to operate with
00:18:05
Speaker
Good enough positioning good enough messaging good enough marketing and sales they'll think that they'll be able to run their business efficiently that they'll be successful good enough and i think you and i recognize a good enough isn't good enough is that unless you stand out from the crowd. Then there's no way that you're gonna get the success that you want the business momentum that you want the competitive edge that you want,
00:18:26
Speaker
And that may be the biggest thing that we struggle against as positioning advocates is that people don't really appreciate the importance of positioning, going back to the original question where we started off this conversation. I think the danger again of pretty good is bigger than most people think. And I think a lot of it can come back to lack of expertise, lack of process to go through positioning and really dig into it in a deep way.
00:18:54
Speaker
Again, there's plenty of templates out there that help you sort of fill in the blanks, Madlib style of here's your customer and here's your value and here's your market and here's your differentiators.
00:19:06
Speaker
I think that's where you end up in that meh range, where you kind of check the box, you answer the questions, you fill in the blanks. And I think a lot of the times it ends up that you end up answering them with sort of, well, this is the first thing that came to mind. These are the ideas that we've been talking about for years. And of course, these are the answers.
00:19:26
Speaker
And you're really not digging below the surface and thinking about it in a super, again, structured or deeper way. And that's how I think you end up in that big meaty man range. So we're aligned in the fact that companies don't understand the importance of positioning. Most of their position is pretty bad. I'm not going to paint everybody in that.
00:19:50
Speaker
But I think we're agreed that a lot of companies can definitely improve their positioning if they recognize that their positioning needs to be improved.
00:19:59
Speaker
So let's assume that I'm an entrepreneur or CEO or CMO, and I recognize that I need better positioning.
Starting the Positioning Process
00:20:06
Speaker
My customer story isn't as powerful, isn't as compelling as it should be, or it pales in comparison to the competition. How do companies start with positioning? What are some of the things that the checkpoints along the way that a company is going to go through with, whether they do it
00:20:23
Speaker
themselves or whether they do it with someone like you or me that will take them from bad positioning to the end product where they've got much better positioning walk me through that that process we have spent a lot of time refining our process over the years and really trying to really trying to get it as lean and
00:20:43
Speaker
clear as possible. A big part of, just to go off topic slightly, a big part of our mission and how I like to work is I really want to go through this type of work with companies and help them understand the process, not just spit out an output or give them an answer or whatever, but really take them through it and give them tools and frameworks that they can continue to use because
00:21:09
Speaker
I'm sure you would agree that positioning just like every other part of your business is an evolving thing. It's obviously not a one and done exercise, even though some people might treat it that way at times. So we do have a really strong process, I think, and that's what I really like about going through the work with people. And we kind of break it up into three major pieces. So we start with customers. The three pieces are essentially customers, competition, and offering. That's how we, at least that's how we think about it.
00:21:37
Speaker
I think it all starts with customers. I think everything ultimately starts with customers and understanding them on a deep level. And specifically, I think it's really valuable to think about your customers needs completely separate from what you do. So not even getting into your offering yet or exactly how you solve their needs, but just
00:21:58
Speaker
On its own, what are your customers trying to achieve, obviously related to your business on some level, but what are their motivators? What are the outcomes that they're seeking? What kind of value do they most prioritize? I don't know. Are you a Jobs to be Done guy, fan?
00:22:18
Speaker
Do you have a take on jobs to be done as a framework? The jobs to be done methodology is interesting because to be totally transparent, it wasn't something that was part of the way that I worked with clients until probably about a year ago. Interesting. For whatever reason, I recognize that a lot of the time we're ignoring the end user. We say that we're aligned with what the customer wants and the experiences that they're seeking, but we forget about the fact that people go to work, they fire up their computers or
00:22:46
Speaker
however they do their work. During the day, they're doing different little tasks and that we need to be aware of the fact that this is their world and our job is to make that world easier. So yes, the long answer to your question is yes, I believe in the jobs to be done methodology. Nice, yeah. I think, again, going off of what I was just saying, I think, again, what I really like about it is that it does create this nice, healthy separation from
00:23:12
Speaker
what their needs are, what they're trying to achieve separate from what you have as an offering and what your solution is.
00:23:20
Speaker
And so we, we lean a lot on that and we also use the elements of value, which is another framework created by Bain and company. You're probably familiar with that one too, but, but those, the combination of those two things, I think is a, to me, a great starting point for really understanding your customers. So understanding again, what are their needs and what do they value in a solution or what are they considering when they make a purchase essentially?
00:23:44
Speaker
So that's kind of where we start. We spend a lot of time on competition. I know people have, I'd actually love to hear your thoughts about this too, because people have differing views about competition. Some people kind of fall into this camp of ignore your competition. Competition doesn't matter. Just focus on yourself, focus on your customers. I've never really.
00:24:04
Speaker
understood that point of view. I don't know where you fall on the spectrum of how much to focus or a little to focus on your competition, but what are your thoughts on that? Ignore the competition is something that you see
00:24:18
Speaker
gurus, marketing gurus on LinkedIn posting time and time again. And every time they post that I go, you're full of it. That is, that's such an ignorant view of the world because two things happen. One is if you ignore the competition, you have no idea what they're doing. You have no idea how they position themselves in the marketing that they're doing. So you're operating in blissful ignorance. The second thing is that if you go through the process of developing this positioning and you come out the other end,
00:24:46
Speaker
and your positioning is the exact same as your biggest competitor, then you really haven't done a good job positioning. That's my view of the world.
00:24:59
Speaker
And sometimes I've seen some of the posts you talk about and I do feel like they're sometimes presented as this sort of mutually exclusive idea of like, well, either you believe in your customers or you're all focused on your competition and you're wasting your time with that. And to me, it's not an either or kind of thing. You need to understand both. And, and like you said, you need to know the positioning of your, of your competition. You need to understand where the openings are and where you fit into that space. And.
00:25:25
Speaker
As we're thinking about the value that our customers need, we're trying to think about where do we achieve that on a really high level and where do we create the most divergence from other things they're considering. It's that combination ultimately that is at the heart of the positioning for the business.
00:25:46
Speaker
And then the last piece of that, again, that sort of three-point process is the offering. So then once we figure out your customers, your competition, then we really think about, okay, now what is your offer and how does that align with the things we know your customers care about and where you can stand out the most? So that's, again, that's kind of a high-level view of how we think about it. Do you guys have a similar kind of connection of those things?
00:26:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's similar. It's interesting the order that you put it in because I usually start with the product or offering to get a sense of what do you do and what are the biggest benefits. Then I focus on customers competition and then I boil down the ocean because you've got all this information and you've got to make sense of it. And eventually then you go to testing. One thing I didn't want to ask you about is when you are looking for that point of differentiation, whether it's being unique or being different or being better, how
00:26:44
Speaker
big does that differentiation need to be? One of the views of position is that I need to be dramatically different from the competition, so I stand apart. Does it have to be that big or can it be relatively small so that you have enough of a point of difference that you can rally around it and say, hey, we're different from everybody else, even in a small way? Yeah, that's a good question. I guess I would say, optimally, you want to be as
00:27:12
Speaker
far apart as possible. I almost think about the competitive landscape as laying over a map on your customer's brain. And it's sort of like, well, how far apart is your flag from the flag of your competitors? And the further apart they are, I think the more likely it is to stand out as a unique piece of information in their mind, and they'll be more likely to remember it. The closer they are together,
00:27:41
Speaker
the more likely they are to blend together and maybe even kind of get used interchangeably. I do think it is important to find those areas of separation. Now, it doesn't mean everything you do is going to be...
00:27:55
Speaker
have that kind of separation. There's a lot of points of value where you probably are going to be overlapped with your competitors, and that's totally fine. It's just finding those, if you have maybe 10 points of value that your customers care about, one or two where you can really create a big separation.
00:28:15
Speaker
I'll just say, I'll give you a really quick example of this. We were working with a company just in this past six to 12 months, and they have a business where they make Turkish towels, beach towels. It's a commodity space. It's a space that's just
00:28:31
Speaker
filled with companies who are making similar types of products. In their case, specifically focusing on Turkish beach towels, there's a big market leader called Sandcloud. If you've ever heard of them or run across them on Instagram, they've grown quite a bit. We were really trying to figure out how do we not just stand out but really separate ourselves from Sandcloud and
00:28:54
Speaker
Sandcloud's whole positioning is really built mostly around high quality but variety. They have a million different styles that you can pick from, whatever your personality is. And they've got partnerships with now lots of big IP companies, like Disney's and all those kinds of things. And the company we're working with is much smaller, growing quickly. So when we were thinking about their positioning,
00:29:19
Speaker
We really thought about two things. So one was the size of their towels. So we did customer research. We found that size in the towel category, size really matters. People really want a big, luxurious feeling towel. I think that's something we can all kind of relate to. And our clients towels were about
00:29:44
Speaker
20% bigger than almost all of the other companies, all the other competitors' standard towels. So that was one big advantage. And then the other one was, while SandCloud is worried about doing a million different designs for every occasion, our client had a very classic
00:30:03
Speaker
a single color type design and it's a classic Turkish beach towel design if you've ever seen those it's kind of one color it's got tassels it's got some basic stripes that go across it but they have a lot of different colors but it's very classic it's very it looks very elegant it looks like something you could put in your bathroom and be proud of but also take it to the beach or take it on a trip
00:30:27
Speaker
Very long story short, that's what we built the positioning around was this very clean, elegant, modern style, meaning we weren't leaning into variety, like their biggest competitor, and size. And those were the things we built it around. And we felt like those were things that we could get people to remember about the brand. Again, very long story, but just trying to highlight the idea that
00:30:52
Speaker
There's lots of things that your customers will care about, but if you can find a couple where you really stand out, you can hopefully be remembered. That's really interesting because it demonstrates the value of positioning, how it doesn't necessarily have to be the biggest difference in the entire world.
Real-world Positioning Success
00:31:09
Speaker
I mean, the simply the fact that a towel was 20% bigger than the competition in and of itself is.
00:31:14
Speaker
That's kind of interesting, I guess, but if it allows the brand to stand out, then that's super important. So thank you for, for sharing that insight. Cause I think it brings all the theory that we're talking about to life. One thing that I did want to talk to you about is after you've gone through the positioning process, you looked at yourself and the competition.
00:31:34
Speaker
and you've got a real sense of the fact that your towels are 20% bigger than the competition. What are the deliverables? A lot of companies will say, well, what do I get? I'm paying you all this money. You're going away or you're doing all these things. You're doing competitive research. You're spending a lot of time with key stakeholders. What are you going to give me? Is it a big document full of all the things I should think about? Is it simply a way of thinking? Is it stuff that I could
00:31:59
Speaker
I don't know, use for my marketing sales? What is the end deliverable that says to the CFO or the CMO, okay, you paid us all this money and here's this thing? What is this thing? I know, I know. It really is the million dollar question. And for us, it's a mix. So it's, again, we go through this very in depth process together. So there's
00:32:24
Speaker
In my mind, I don't think this is what necessarily customers would latch onto necessarily as like, this is the real value. But in my mind, a big part of the value is the process. It's going through it. Taking the time, taking a few weeks to think about this stuff on a deep level, obviously also taking the time to do some research and talk to your customers and all those things.
00:32:47
Speaker
But it's the process. It's the giving yourself some space, some dedicated space to think about this stuff and not just again go through and kind of check the box of what we've always done. So that's part of it. But at the end, yes, there is a
00:33:02
Speaker
distilled down document or a book, a guidebook that comes out of this that crystallizes all of these really important findings and ideas that we've had together. We also do a lot of work around messaging. So that's, to me, one of the most important outputs of this is that core messaging. And I wouldn't call it a full narrative in terms of how we work, but the story essentially of the brand.
00:33:32
Speaker
Because again, that's gonna be coming through in really everything you do. Every piece of marketing you do, the first sales call that salespeople have with clients, that pitch that they're talking about, that they're telling them has to embody those ideas. Again, it's prioritizing the points within the positioning, it's messaging examples, it's the story that's gonna be told by salespeople. And we also, again, I know we're really focused on positioning in this conversation.
00:34:01
Speaker
When we do work with brands, we're also thinking about what does that position translate into from a visual perspective and how do we communicate this in other ways beyond just the messaging. But those are kind of the core outputs for us. Do you guys have any other specific deliverables that? No, I would say that the fact that you
00:34:22
Speaker
identify the process as one of the key deliverables. I was very happy to hear that because I think that that is actually the key deliverable because as you say, you don't get a chance to do serious navel gazing very often because companies are so busy doing tactical execution and looking beyond the horizon and looking at their data that they don't have time to think.
00:34:42
Speaker
and reflect on the brand and the value delivered. And I've run into situations, one recently, in which I'm in the midst of with the chief revenue officer and the CEO. We're developing the story and we've highlighted the positioning, but it's not finished. It's not polished yet. But the CRO is super excited and he starts going to conferences and starts telling the story even before the engagement is done. And he's saying, this is resonating. It's working. Like he's AB testing it on the fly. I think
00:35:10
Speaker
that reflects the fact that as you go through the process things surface and they resonate and executives get very excited the other side of it is the idea of taking value propositions or brand positioning statements that you've developed or even brand promises that you put together.
00:35:27
Speaker
having that appear in the public in the wild to on your website on your about page and your social media profiles on your one pagers or your sales tax is that what you're talking about it when it comes to Taking position and move it into the messaging world. Yeah. Yeah, exactly We do often put it in the context of what we will literally say to clients think about this as the headline on your website because I think for modern businesses
00:35:52
Speaker
the website is still typically the number one touch point for people. It may not be the first touch point. You might run into campaigns and social content and all that good stuff, but the first place they're gonna come to to learn more is still gonna be the website. So I think it's definitely about that. But I really loved what you were talking about with those conversations that people are having, that C-suite people or whoever the leaders are of the company are having with other people to test out
00:36:21
Speaker
the position to test out the message and the idea of it and seeing how it resonates with people. I do think that's often where the first real test happen is with those real life conversations. And those are super important. I'm sure you've done it a million times, getting on a first call with a client and you're kind of pitching them about at least giving some general idea of what you do and why you're different and are they just, uh-huh,
00:36:49
Speaker
Or are they smiling? Are they leaning in? Are they listening? Are they responding to that in some way? And that qualitative feedback is super valuable. I think that's a great signal for things are working. So the $64,000 question is after you've gone through your positioning process and you develop your messaging and
00:37:09
Speaker
you feel good about the work that you've done and the client's excited because they've got a new story, then how do you and how do the client quantify the ROI of the work that you've done? Because at the end of the day, it's all about, am I getting value for money? Is this going to move the needle for the business? Because otherwise it's just positioning for the sake of positioning, just like a lot of companies write content for the sake of content. So how do you measure or how does your client measure the success of your work?
00:37:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I'll keep my answer brief and then I want to hear what your conversations with this CRO are like to hear what the expectations are.
00:37:50
Speaker
with some of these people, but it's sort of the reflection of what we talked about at the beginning of, well, where do you see symptoms? So what's the natural improvement that you would see as a result of improving your messaging, improving your story, improving your pitch, improving, again, from our perspective, even sort of the look and feel of the visuals of what you're communicating.
00:38:12
Speaker
I mean, there's lots of little tactical things we could talk about. We could talk about lots of different metrics from a website perspective. Are people spending more time on your site? Are they digging into the site more? Is awareness of your brand growing? Because now people have a way to tell other people about what you do in a succinct way, which is a really valuable part of this process. Are you equipping your customers
00:38:40
Speaker
To repeat the story to other people in a way that is easy. I think that's another great signal that you've got a strong position is. Can someone not just remember it, but can they retell it to other people and ideally that's the other potential customers, but sometimes that's.
00:38:57
Speaker
the maybe that's the marketing lead who has to tell the CRO and the CEO and the other C people why this is valuable and why we need to shift things. They need to tell a convincing story too about it. So I think it's all of those things, again, shortening of sales cycles. At the end of the day, it's improving revenue, but those things take time. It's not like a
00:39:21
Speaker
It's not like launching an ad campaign with just instant results. I think it's something that is a little bit of a slower burn. So setting those expectations is part of it too. So again, I want to throw it back to you. I'm curious what you hear from the other side, what they want. I think one of the biggest challenges with positioning and trying to demonstrate the effectiveness of your work is some of it is quantifiable.
Review and Adaptation in Positioning
00:39:47
Speaker
And, but it may not be there. They may not be a direct correlation between we develop position and here are the results we're going to get right away. Because as you say.
00:39:54
Speaker
It takes time to demonstrate whether bounce rates have gone down on the website or whether there's more brand awareness or sales cycles have been reduced or retention rates are better. All that just takes time to percolate and to see if it actually has an impact. So in some sense, it's quantifiable. In some sense, it's not. It could be very anecdotal. It's the way that you feel about your story. The salesman feels like he's got a much better, sharper,
00:40:19
Speaker
story that resonates. And a lot of it comes back to what I call leap of faith marketing, because if we're going to go off on a slightly different direction, it's very hard in the marketing world to drive attribution.
00:40:30
Speaker
direct attribution is becoming increasingly challenging. So even if you're doing ad campaigns, you don't know whether it's the ad campaign that's working or something else. It comes back to the work that we do with positioning is that, yes, it could be positioning or it could be something else, but it's all part of this big marketing mix. And I think at the end of the day, it comes down to, at least in my view, is does the CMO, does the CFO, does the CEO feel that they've got a much better story?
00:40:56
Speaker
a story that they feel resonates. And if they says, yes, this is it, then in that sense, that's ROI, that's success. But we live in a data-driven world in which people want to say, if I do X, Y will happen. And that's the biggest challenge that we run into. Yeah, I totally agree, though. I think the confidence in the story has just far-reaching tentacles across the entire company because it really shifts
00:41:26
Speaker
how everyone, potentially how everyone can feel about what we're talking about, what we're trying to tell people about, the story we're trying to convey to people. And as we all know, especially when it comes to sales, confidence is such a key part of it. And if you come across with a certain level of confidence and energy around that, because you know that this is a really great, clear concept and you see it resonating with people over and over,
00:41:54
Speaker
your sales will improve as a result of that. And again, some of it is the positioning itself and some of it is the adjacent energy of knowing you have a good position and being able to tell a compelling story to people. And so yeah, unfortunately confidence doesn't get put down in our deliverable list. Maybe it should be, honestly. We do talk about it certainly, but yeah, I think when the budget's being approved,
00:42:21
Speaker
I think if you came to the CFO and said, you're going to be so much more confident, I think they'd probably laugh in your face. But it's the truth. It really is the truth. When everybody's united around a position and a story like that, it makes a huge difference. We were just, again, just a quick, quick aside. I was just working with a company. They're in the IT space and working with their marketing lead. And in working through some of the customer research we did and the positioning work,
00:42:47
Speaker
She felt so much more empowered to be able to tell a compelling story to their customers and again.
00:42:55
Speaker
That can go so far because not everyone is the owner or the founder of a business. There's a lot of people who are just being driven by the internal story or an attachment to the company in some way. Obviously, also salaries are dependent on these things as well. But if you can get someone really excited about telling that story, it's going to come through in so many different ways, I think.
00:43:21
Speaker
One final question is how often should positioning be reviewed? As you mentioned earlier, it's not a set of forget it kind of process. It's more about drawing a line in the sand and then revisiting positioning on a quarterly basis, half year annual. When you're working with clients, what do you tell them in terms of yes, we're good for now, but you should revisit this thing in what period of time and how do they go about doing that?
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, the last thing you want to do is end an engagement by saying, don't hold your breath on this. We're going to have to revisit this really soon. But yeah, I think some of it depends on the maturity of the business because I think if you're much earlier on, I think you do benefit from checking in more frequently. I think that's a
00:44:09
Speaker
probably just kind of a natural insight. So I think if you're early on and you're still trying to find your footing, you haven't totally nailed that product market fit yet, I think
00:44:19
Speaker
Checking in every three months is probably a good idea because that gives you enough time to test things out, get some actual feedback, qualitative and quantitative, and be able to say, okay, we were right about these things. We were a little off about this. Here's where we could try some tweaks to do our next iteration. I think if you're a more mature business and you
00:44:41
Speaker
have a pretty strong footing in your market i think i can see it being maybe every six months i still think it should be more than once a year no matter what just to kind of check in and. If nothing else just reaffirm that we're still on track that this stuff is working and again check the data check the.
00:45:03
Speaker
the confidence level of people who've been delivering it. I think it's at least a twice a year kind of thing, but I think if you're younger, if you're earlier, it's a frequent check-in kind of thing. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I think that your approach is the right one. I think a lot of companies think that, okay, I've done this, check.
00:45:25
Speaker
Now I can go on to the next thing, got my story down, but these stories change, markets change. I mean, last year was all about acquisition and growth. And now this year it's about productivity and efficiency. Same product, but customers are looking for different things and your position, it needs to change to reflect that. One final, final question.
00:45:42
Speaker
is where can people learn more about you and map and fire? Yeah, yeah, the well, the main spot is our website. So map and fire calm is is the main spot. And we've got a whole bunch of great resources on there about positioning and lots and lots of other stuff related to brand strategy and marketing. I'm a big believer in sharing what we do and how we do it pretty openly. So if you
00:46:12
Speaker
Even if you don't want to engage with us, you can probably go there and get some value out of it, hopefully. But yeah, there. And I've been posting a lot more on LinkedIn. I know you're a presence on LinkedIn. I feel like that's becoming a more important part of our connection points with people. But yeah, I would love to connect with anybody who found this interesting or wants to chat more. Well, thanks, Clay, for the great insight. I felt like it was two positioning geeks sort of nerding out at each other for an hour. Nothing real with that. Nothing real with that.
00:46:41
Speaker
Hopefully other people will understand our enthusiasm and the fact that we're willing to get into the nitty gritty to talk about the importance of positioning and why it matters and why companies need to have clear and powerful positioning. If they're going to stand out in ultra competitive marketplaces, if your position is off.
00:46:59
Speaker
then it's hard to stand out from the crowd and you'll struggle for reasons that you think have everything to do with tactics, but really have to do with your customer story. It's such an important piece of work, but we just need to convince the world that they need to care about it as much as we do. I agree. I agree. And I am happy to geek out about it anytime. So thanks for having me.
00:47:17
Speaker
Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I work with BB SaaS companies as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor, and positioning and messaging development, email mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.