The word "strategy" in the context is marketing is becoming a bit overused. Boring, even.
It's tossed around in boardrooms and blog posts, often confused with tactics, tricks, or even just vague intentions. No wonder it's lost some of its sparkle.
But marketing strategy deserves better. Especially when we're talking about one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal: positioning strategy.
In this post, we're taking it back to basics—and then cranking it up. We'll break down what positioning strategy really means (no fluff, we promise), and show you real-world examples that boost visibility, drive engagement, and help you convert like a pro.
Positioning is part of a broader marketing strategy. It focuses on defining how your audience perceives your brand, product, or service.
It describes how your target audience, (your customers) perceive your brand and how they distinguish you from your competitors.
The basic goal of a positioning strategy is to craft a distinct identity that differentiates a business from competitors while aligning with their customer's needs and expectations, as well as market trends.
A strong positioning strategy carries several key elements that can help your brand stand out and stay in your customers' minds.
Don't worry, you won't find abstract theories here. Here's a brief overview of what will be broken down in the chapters that follow:
Up next: Brand Positioning vs. Product Positioning. Because yes, there's a difference—and knowing it can be a game-changer for your strategy.
These two strategies may sound similar, but they serve different purposes in the digital marketing and inbound marketing world.
Brand positioning is how people see your business as a whole. Under your brand, you may have multiple products or services, so the brand positioning strategy should cover them all.
Positioning a brand is about the big picture of how people perceive your business. By definition, a brand strategy is an overarching set of values, including mission and vision, of how you want the market to see you in the long run.
On the other hand, product positioning is about why people choose a specific product. A product positioning strategy can differ significantly from product to product. A decent product positioning strategy should clearly answer the question: Why do people choose your product over the others from your competitors?
For example, let's look at Ford.
This brand has a car for everyday, family-style driving—the Ford Fusion. Ford also sells sports cars, sport utility vehicles, trucks, and commercial vehicles—basically a vehicle for every possible use case and audience. Having a product for every potential customer is a smart strategy for a highly profitable vehicle company, helping to ensure steady sales.
So, the key differences in a nutshell are:
Absolutely! Here's an upgraded and more insightful version of the table. It keeps the original intent but adds more depth, clarity, and actionable nuance:
|
Aspect |
Brand Positioning |
Product Positioning |
|
Focus |
The overall perception of the company in the minds of your target audience |
How a specific product stands out in a particular category or against competitors |
|
Scope |
Broad and strategic, applies to the entire brand portfolio and customer experience |
Narrow and tactical, focused on a single product or product line |
|
Emphasis |
Emotional appeal, brand values, mission, and personality |
Functional benefits, features, performance, and value proposition |
|
Lifespan |
Long-term and relatively stable, evolves gradually with market shifts and vision |
Short-to-medium term, more responsive to customer needs and market trends |
|
Communication |
Tells the brand's story and purpose to build loyalty and trust |
Highlights key product attributes, pain-point solutions, and specific use cases |
|
Target Audience |
Broader audience segments based on shared values and brand affinity |
More defined customer personas with specific needs related to the product |
|
Differentiation |
Achieved through brand personality, tone, visual identity, and emotional resonance |
Achieved through unique features, innovation, pricing, or performance benchmarks |
Positioning strategy in marketing is about how your customers perceive you when they see or hear about your brand or product, while SEO is all about online visibility and recognition.
SEO is the key element in a positioning strategy, and they work together throughout the lifecycle of your brand or product.
Search engine optimization supports your positioning strategy in a couple of important ways:
The more backlinks from authoritative resources point toward your site and the more high-value traffic they generate, the more potential customers can find your brand.
However, in this case, visibility is just the intermediate goal, while the end goal is positioning your brand as trustworthy and credible.
How can you achieve that? Here are some best practices to follow:
Keywords are at the core of SEO. They represent the perfect touchpoints, the same language and terms that your customers speak and what they search for.
Imagine your brand is a B2B SaaS company that offers workflow automation for mid-sized marketing teams. Now picture a marketing manager typing into Google: "workflow automation tools for marketing teams" or "how to streamline marketing operations."
If your website content is optimized with those exact terms, your solution is more likely to appear in the search results.
In this scenario, keywords are the linguistic bridges between your product and the problem your target customer is trying to solve. But if your website is only using generic jargon like "next-gen business solutions," guess what? You're waving from the sidelines while your competitors scoop up the leads.
Competitive analysis is about understanding how you stand compared to your rivals, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to utilize what you learn about them to your benefit.
It is a must-have element of every market positioning strategy development and usually comes first as part of initial data collection.
Think of competitive analysis like planning a heist in a spy movie (minus the crime, of course). Before the mission, the team pores over blueprints, security systems, guard schedules—every detail about the "target." They figure out where the blind spots are, what tools they'll need, and how to move smarter than the opposition.
That's exactly what competitive analysis does in business. You're identifying where your competitors are strong, where they're vulnerable, and how you can use that intel to move more strategically.
Here's how that mission breaks down into actionable objectives:
Don't try to embrace the entire market with all players. Instead, identify and focus only on your direct competitors, i.e., the ones that operate within your immediate niche, offer the same products and services, have the same or similar pricing and positioning strategy, etc.
While the goals of the competitive analysis are more or less well-defined and clear, they can be achieved through various paths or methods. Newcomers often try to do everything at once and nothing in particular. Does it surprise you why their results are mediocre at best?
These are some of the most effective methods used in position strategy development:
Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is the reason customers choose you over the dozens (or hundreds) of other options out there. It's the "secret sauce" that makes your brand stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Your USP is what makes your company stand out from the rest, whether it's unbeatable quality, budget-friendly pricing, ease of use, alignment with cultural values, or a mix of everything.
A USP isn't just a catchy tagline or vague promise, it's your brand's superpower. And like any good superpower, it should have three core traits:
A strong USP is more than a statement: it's a promise that your audience can believe in and rally around.
This short guide will not let you get lost in the process of identifying a strong USP as part of your marketing positioning strategy:
Understand Your Target Audience
A USP is not only about what you offer but also for whom. The proposition you develop should matter to your customers. This step, also often called customer persona development, should aim to answer the following simple questions:
Analyze Your Competitors
What do your competitors offer to your target audience? Is their proposition better or worse than yours? Identify gaps in their USP and leverage them to your advantage.
Identify What You Do Best
What is your competitive advantage? What is it that you currently do or can potentially do better than your rivals? Consider these:
Test and Validate Your USP
Run a small focus group analysis to see how your USP performs. For example, open a small outlet in a local shopping mall with your brand messages and best product offerings. Or conduct an online survey asking customers to rate your propositions.
Content marketing's role in business strategy is often unjustly reduced to product descriptions and blog post writing. However, in capable hands (and minds), it can be a potent weapon of influence, shaping what your customers think and feel about your brand.
How can you leverage content marketing to serve that purpose? In several ways:
How much time a day do you spend on social networks? Most people spend a lot, while some virtually live there.
Social media has become a place where people communicate, make purchases, and do business. Therefore, its role in a competitive positioning strategy development and implementation is hard to overestimate.
Social media can be effectively used during the competitor and audience analysis phase. Social listing is a technique for collecting and then analyzing what people write about your brand and your competitors' brands.
Social media can also be leveraged as a powerful channel for public opinion influence, positioning your brand, and persuading the public to trust and buy your products or services.
Influencer marketing and partnerships are all about access to a wider target audience. Assume your brand has a YouTube channel or a dedicated Facebook page, and you have an audience of 10K on each of these channels. That's not much, and growing your reach can be time and cost-consuming.
However, if you partner with the right influencers in your industry who have 10x or 100x more of your audience coverage, you'll likely be much more successful in making your brand visible and trusted.
Here are the best strategies for utilizing the full potential of influencer partnerships:
Building a brand from scratch is oftentimes easier than changing or adjusting its course. In marketing, this is called repositioning, and an effective repositioning strategy is what we'll talk you through in this final chapter.
In real-life settings, repositioning isn't needed as frequently as positioning. Yet, the time for repositioning always comes sooner or later. When do you need to reposition?
Repositioning isn't just about adjusting the existing messages and refining band values. It requires a strategic approach, ideally step-by-step:
Reassess Your Market and Audience.
Run online surveys and conduct interviews with focus groups to perfectly understand your target audience's sentiment. Your goal should be to identify shifts in preferences, moods, and behaviors.
Brainstorm Your New Brand Narrative
Take as much time as necessary to develop an effective narrative strategy that accurately captures your audience's shifting preferences. Repositioning is costly, but repositioning twice can bankrupt you.
Adjust Your SEO and Digital Presence
Repositioning a brand requires revisiting all the strategic steps that you once took to bring it where it is now. This refers to SEO with backlink and keyword strategies, refinement of your USP, adjustment of content marketing, and so on.
Positioning strategy is ideally done once, and it should bring positive results for years to come. That's why successful big companies don't save money and other resources on crafting impactful and resilient positioning strategies for their brands.
A strong positioning marketing strategy builds meaningful and lasting emotional connections with the customers. It should target and continuously measure engagement and loyalty to ensure customers stay with the brand through volatile market fluctuations and abrupt technological shifts.
Need help building a marketing positioning strategy? Reach out to Roketto today!