Hosting Marketing Best Practices: Messaging & Positioning

Doing messaging and positioning well means using persona-defined messaging.

Positioning is the strategy and plan you create to fit your products or services into a market niche. Messaging is how you communicate this positioning to your market audience.

Key Questions

Who is the real customer?
Have you spoken with real customers directly? How well do you understand them?
Have you crafted personas to describe your customers’ motivations and behaviors?
Who are the influencers in your customers’ buying process?
Are your offers positioned so that they are relevant to your customers' lives and work styles?
Are you using language that appeals to real customers, rather than technical and business jargon?

Strong positioning begins when you create a product or service that addresses the needs of a specific market segment or segments. Understanding your target market segment enables you to find areas for competitive differentiation. Incorporating your customer understanding enables you to create truly innovative solutions.

Such positioning provides the basis for believable differentiated messaging that speaks to your customer's situation.

Identify your best candidate buyers and important influencers via their similarity to a personal description, or persona. You can then align your offerings and demand generation activities to the persona behavior patterns.

Why it's important

Marketing campaigns can persuade someone to become a buyer, but the most effective approach is to target buyers who are ready to buy - now.

Applications of the best practice

The most successful partners position themselves with benefit-focused messaging based on a targeted segment's understood needs, motivations, and pain-points, rather than focusing on products.

Benefit messaging is best articulated when it describes the fundamental usage aspects of the solution. For example:

Anywhere Access (remote access to calendar, email, contacts)
Get More Done (collaboration, document sharing)
Peace of Mind (secure hosted environment, strong SLAs)

Messaging best practices:

Easy to read, understand, and remember
Invoke emotion that draws customers toward your solution
See examples how you can increase competitive differentiation
Key Success Factors: Messaging & Positioning (PDF)

Next Best Practice: Packaging & Pricing

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