Is your value clear? Make smarter positioning choices for more website sales
When you’re done reading this post, you’ll know:
What positioning your offer in the right context can do for your business
How to find out if your offers are positioned in the right context
How to stand out to your customers with the right positioning
Are you accidentally letting your potential customers hide your value?
If you’re a coach, course creator, or expert looking to transform your website into a growth asset for your business, you’ll want to pay special attention to this post.
Let me explain—
When you position your offer correctly, the value you provide to your audience is obvious.
You, in turn, become the obvious choice when they pull out their wallets.
People are faster to get:
who you are
the problem you solve
and--most importantly--why they should care
But if you can't communicate your positioning in seconds, your audience will decide for you.
They’ll make assumptions that hide your value, hurt your brand, or they’ll scroll right by and forget about you.
Your customers will make assumptions so often that, according to the study “23 Years of Research on Market Positioning: A Future Research Agenda” by Cikal Rambasae N Universitas Gadjah Mada, “Find and fill empty slots in the minds of potential buyers” was mentioned as a definition of market positioning 55 times.
In this post, we’ll look at a few examples where big companies and small freelance businesses lost sales because of their positioning and how they fixed it.
When you’re done reading this post, you’ll know:
What positioning your offer in the right context can do for your business
How to find out if your offers are positioned in the right context
How to stand out to your customers with the right positioning
So let’s dive in!
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If you have a business friend who could benefit from better positioning, forward this post to them!
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How Snickers went from declining sales to growth with a simple shift in perspective
Imagine this:
You’re the head of a business that sells candy bars.
And not just any candy bar either–you’re a household name.
In fact, you’re so well known that you’ve never had a reason to be concerned by sales, which have grown steadily since you launched in the 1930s.
Until…
one day, you notice that your steadfast sales aren’t so steadfast anymore.
In fact, they’re lower than expected.
What’s going on? you wonder.
Why aren’t people buying like they used to?
Better yet–why are people still buying?
Customer loyalty?
Nostalgia?
Boredom?
You’re smart enough to know that unless you talk to your customers, these are just guesses.
So you chat with your marketing director about a new project:
Talk to current customers to understand why they’re buying your candy bar.
Because if you can understand the needs behind their purchase, you can shift your marketing to address more people with the same needs and get your sales back.
Six weeks later, your marketing director presents her findings:
Having completed customer surveys and followed up with jobs-to-be-done interviews, her team’s discovered that your buyers don’t reach for your candy bar so much when they’re craving candy–but instead when they’re hungry and want a snack.
Meaning your product isn’t competing with other candy bars on the market.
It’s competing with more substantial snacks.
Based on this discovery, your company shifts your candy bar’s positioning from being a tasty treat…
to being the easy, on-the-go snack that’s there whenever your customers get hungry.
And voila!
One positioning pivot later, your sales are climbing back up.
***
Shoutout to Snickers–and their marketing team–for the inspiration behind this story!
Snicker’s re-positioning in the 2000s is the stuff of marketing lore.
(I say “lore” because while I hear this story cited often, it’s hard to find a version from a reputable source. But luckily, I found one. Here’s a post written by Bob Moesta on the Snickers repositioning.)
Snickers’ sales were dandy until the new millennium, when a decline prompted customer research.
That’s how Snickers discovered their customers thought of the bar as a way of satiating hunger rather than a candy treat–hence the new logo “You’re not you when you’re hungry.”
Bob Moesta explains more about the “struggle moment” he used to discover why Snickers was competing with protein bars instead of snack bars here.
Why am I bringing this up today?
Because it illustrates the power of positioning when it comes to sales.
Let’s break down what positioning means. 👇
For smarter positioning, look at your service or product’s context
To draw from the queen of positioning, April Dunford, and her book Obviously Awesome--
positioning in a word is about context.
If you think of the category your service or product falls under, your positioning is relative to everything else in that category.
And while everything we sell has a default context, we can manipulate that context. That's what Snickers did in repositioning their product from candy bar to snack.
Why should you bother with positioning?
Because if you can't communicate your positioning quickly, your audience will invent one for you--one that might hide your value.
(Imagine if Snickers had never told us they could be a snack and instead coasted along being a candy bar when sales started declining.)
But when your positioning is strong, the value you provide to your audience is obvious.
People are faster to get:
who you are
the problem you solve
and--most importantly--why they should care
Let’s get into an example of how context can reframe your value.
Context tells you what’s important and how much to charge
The example Dunford draws on to illustrate her point is the experiment professional violinist Joshua Bell did in the Washington, DC subway in 2007.
At the time, Bell's concert tickets sold for $300+/seat and he sold out venues.
But playing in the DC subway one morning?
He made $32.17.
For playing the same classical pieces on his 1713 Stradivarius.
So whatever your business sells, context matters.
If it's live classical music, the context of a beautiful concert hall with a black-tie orchestra tells you it's a high-end event.
The same classical music from a guy in regular clothes in the subway?
Apparently, DC commuters who didn't recognize Bell showed us it was worth $32.17.
Context tells us what's important...and thus influences what we can charge for what we sell.
Need a hand with your copy?
Here’s how I can help:
💥 The Small Start, Big Wins Copy Polish, where I optimize your webpages for sales
💥 The Quick Clicks Email Polish, where I optimize your emails for opens and engagements
💥 The Messaging Playbook, where I hone in on messaging that attracts the right clients
Example deep dive: How Cynthia shaped her context as a service provider
My friend Cynthia writes fantastic content.
Rightfully so, as she has a corporate marketing career under her belt.
In her business today, she helps women starting their businesses learn how to market.
Her ideal clients tell her they have "marketing problems."
So the obvious way for Cynthia to position herself is as someone who solves their "marketing problems."
In this context, she's competing against everything else that targets that problem, and anyone who's been in business for a minute knows how much there is:
business coaches
group programs
Instagram courses…
… the list itself is exhausting to think about.
That's not to say it's wrong for Cynthia to position herself as such. It is a position based on customer research, after all.
However.
However.
There's a reason I named my newsletter Smarter Customer Research. (Sign up for my newsletter to get insights before everyone else here.)
Because here's the smarter thing to do--
Anyone who's been in business for a minute also knows how overwhelming it is.
And there is SO much overwhelm behind what people just call "marketing problems," especially at the beginning.
(Who do you market to? What offers do you market? What is copy? Do you really need to be on social media? Who do you trust for info???)
The smarter way to position marketing services isn't by solving a marketing problem.
It's by solving an overwhelm problem.
Stop guessing what your
ideal clients will pay you for
Cut through your marketing overwhelm with my newsletter, Smarter Customer Research.
Sign up to understand how to do smart customer research and translate it into conversion copy!
How Cynthia applied the new context to her website copy
You know what copy that sells marketing to new businesses looks like--most of it is pushy. (Ick.)
In contrast, here's what copy that solves the problem of overwhelm looks like:
"What if I told you your EXACT next step--and helped you work on it for 5 minutes.
Then another 5 minutes.
Then another 5 minutes.
Until you're done--
turning the thing that seemed impossible into something that no longer seems scary.
You see, I've been in that place where you're so flooded with decisions, you can't make any of them.
And I can help you get out of it, one step at a time."
Simply by changing the positioning, you go from an overcrowded field with icky competitors...
to no competition--because I don't see anyone marketing themselves as a solution to overwhelm.
And that's the power of changing your positioning.
(Shoutout to Cynthia for letting me share her positioning story! You can find Cynthia's business here--check out her blog content.)
This positioning story came out of a conversation we had in Betsy Muse's Focused AF community, a group for freelance entrepreneurs where I lead monthly Friendly Review sessions.
We look at copy and offer friendly review as a group. If you're curious about joining a gang of freelance entrepreneurs who have each other's back, get more details about Focused AF here.
Btw, these are not affiliate links. I'm sharing them simply because Cynthia and Betsy are awesome.)
Smarter positioning comes from smarter research
I think the most important takeaway we see through our examples is that smarter positioning comes from customer research.
And not just any customer research but smarter customer research (the kind I do in my done-for-you work–ask me about it whenever you’re ready 😁).
Here are steps to guide you as you think about positioning your offers to customers:
What’s the default context your offers are in? Is that where you want them to be?
If so, how do you stand out to your customers in that context? If not, is there another context your people see you in? (This is where you need to run your surveys and jobs-to-be-done interviews.)
Once you understand your positioning based on data, try it out! Then keep talking to customers and adjust as necessary.
Happy positioning!
Until next time,
Mimi
PS. This was a hard post to write--positioning is hard to explain! It's not a part of copy, exactly, not the way messaging is where you can draw a direct line between the two (messaging is what you say--which you find out through customer research--copy is how you say it).
But my Instagram analytics tell me that there's interest in positioning because my posts on it get bookmarked twice as much as my other posts. Which is why I thought I'd take a stab at positioning in this blog post.
Want to work with me?
Hi, I’m Mimi!
I’m a conversion copywriter for coaches and course creators. I give you the words to connect with your audience without the guesswork of what they need to hear to become clients.
Here are a few ways we can work together:
💥 The Small Start, Big Win™ Copy Polish, where I optimize your webpages for sales
💥 The Quick Clicks Email Polish, where I optimize your emails for opens and engagements
💥 The Messaging Playbook, where I hone in on messaging that attracts the right clients
Questions? Want to chat?
