Competitive Positioning: Standing Out Without Getting Overlooked
Last update: 8 August 2023 at 02:27 pm
5.00/5Approaching reopenings post-lockdown, brands recognize competitive positioning’s vital role in ensuring long-term sustainability.
Earning customer trust amid competition demands solid, unique reasons for them to choose you over others.
Crafting competitive positioning isn’t rocket science; it’s about adapting your brand in a dynamic 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 the help of a well-curated competitive positioning strategy.
What Is Competitive Positioning?
Competitive positioning determines your future profitability by fostering growth to outpace your competition and secure a larger market share.
Competitive positioning determines how you’ll ‘differentiate‘ your offering and create value for your market.
Success involves defining a unique niche, solidifying your position, and gaining recognition for distinct excellence in a competitive market.
A strong competitive strategy emerges from analyzing market dynamics, comprehensive competitor assessment, identifying customer segments, and delivering value effectively.
When your market sees how your offering differs from 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 vital business strategy tool that helps you to identify your market segment, brand identity, and competitive frame of reference.
Prioritize competitive position over branding; a clear value proposition trumps aesthetics in attracting clients to your services.
To formulate your competitive marketing position, integrate four crucial components of your brand strategy:
Other approaches include:
- You gain 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 customer relationships 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 results from 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.
Leverage market data, experience, and industry reports to quantify potential clients and optimize marketing for 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 refine your competitive positioning approach.
Research Market Psychographics
Quantitative market research will guide you in understanding the attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making processes of potential customers and prospects in your markets.
By grasping psychographics—client mindset, issues, solutions—you can effectively meet demands, cater to needs, and market strategically.
This understanding will also help you define market personas and segments, the distinct subgroups of your market, allowing you to market more effectively to each group.
Without the necessary resources, doing this on your own can be hard. You may want to ask for 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 delivering 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 improving your marketing activities’ outcomes.
Evaluate Competition
The thorough competitive analysis clarifies strengths and challenges, aiding strategic planning to outperform rivals in the market.
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 couldn’t win over. At the minimum, it will provide you with an objective view of where you stand in the marketplace and where you can win your client activities. You can also use the competitor price monitoring software Dealavo to help you understand your price positioning in the market.
Describe The Positioning Of Your Brand Strategy
Positioning describes how you will differentiate your offerings, carve out a place in the competitive landscape, and win 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 strategy embraces market traits, demographics, psychographics, value delivery, and distinctiveness for effective positioning.
Base your strategy on data, not speculation. Assess current reputation, market opportunities, desired image, and the path to achieve it.
Using Competitive Positioning To Gain Market Share
Competitive positioning is setting your professional services apart from your competitors, which 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 top-of-mind recall for potential clients and helps you stand out.
A solid competitive positioning strategy provides value to your prospects and persuades them to 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.
A solid positioning strategy guides your target audience and newcomers, effectively helping them discover desired experiences.
Aligning with your ideal buyer persona shapes marketing, product line, and touchpoints, enhancing customer value perception and willingness to pay. We hope this article helps you thrive and is 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.
