Creators Positioning Strategy to Gain a Better Market Share
As a creator, you do not want to be everything to everyone. In a previous article on acquiring your first 100 paying fans, we talked about building your tribe? The idea is to have a customer segment — fans and brands, that really dig you and want to do business with you by giving you their money.
Your offering has to be positioned rightly to appeal to your tribe.
Tip: When you start thinking of your product in the form of ‘your offerings’, it takes you away from talking about features and focuses more on your product benefits.
For a better offering positioning, a radical prioritization of your offering should happen, and it should be deliberate. What is it? Cut out all the fats and nail it.
Don’t do positioning by proxy. Be the driver of your positioning in the market (how are you different from the competitor), with your customers (know your customer segment) and how it affects your business bottom-line — growth and margin.
Tip: Your offering positioning can affect your share of the market you’re going after.
According to Hubspot; “positioning statements are internal tools that help marketers appeal to their buyer personas in a relevant way. They’re a must-have for any positioning strategy because they create a clear vision for your brand.”
Product positioning isn’t just about making sure that your products are priced right — it’s about making sure that they’re positioned right as well.
To position rightly, you should know your:
- Target market: If you’re for everybody, then you’re for no one. You should define your target market. That is, the people you’re going after. Who are the people that will consume your product? Where are they? How do they want to be served? How are they being served without you? How will you serve them? It doesn’t help when you’re doing the ‘spray and pray’ thing. This will help you move away from the feature mindset and focus on the benefit.
- Market category: Are you operating in an emerging market or a matured one? If you don’t want every brand to dump their campaign on you, then you should know what market category you’re serving. As a creator, to keep yourself from the pain of criticism, you should know the fans your offering is for. Sometimes, we tend to think the broader the category the better. Well, not in all cases. It helps when your category is streamlined at the beginning and expands as you grow.
Read this too 👉 Product Growth Strategy: Driving product adoption with a ‘Highway’
- Customer pains: To know your customer and be able to serve them well, you’ve to understand their pain. That’s one leverage you want to explore to drive business growth and margins. But, you can’t serve them well if you’re not obsessed about them enough to feel their pains. Not knowing their pains means you cannot provide enough value for them. And money follows value.
- Brand promise: Now that you know your customers’ pain, will your product or services help solve it? As a creator, you serve two customers — your fans and the brands. The whole deal is to extract enough value from both of them and that means you must provide them with enough value to enjoy such a benefit. This your brand promise is what each customer that comes in contact with you should get. For instance, if you get paid to endorse a brand’s product, your fans should trust the product because they know you. Also, the brands should be at peace knowing they will get set traction from your endorsement. That’s one reason to really understand and know the market you want to serve or you’re serving. That’s the promise. Never break it. For instance, you know what you’ll get when you buy an Apple product.
- Brand identity and values: What’s the personality of your brand? In this case, you’re dealing more with the externality of your brand — from the logo colour to the website design to the perceived voice and sentiments of your messages. How do I identify that this is XYZ’s creator? While value guide how you run your business — from decision making to company culture. They’re the intangible method of how you carry out your day-to-day business — how you work with your team, how your team treats your customers and how your customer responds to you.
Tip: Don’t rush your brand identity. It takes time to build. The ingredient is to be consistent. Let people know what they’ll expect at every interaction.
Positioning enables you to capture more market share by making sure that your offering is the preferred one in its category. It’s not just about looking good — it’s making sure that the people who need what you’re selling value what they’re getting from you. You need to be in their mind.
Your consumers should be convinced that your product is valuable enough to be worth their money. They’d be convinced that it will give them more value than any other product on the shelve. But how do you do that?
Tip: Build a culture of experimentation. For instance, for every content you produce, you’d check what works and what didn’t. Do something different in the next production. Measure, rinse and repeat.
Now, every step written above is as vague as vague can get. The real thing is how do you do it? We know why you should it and what you should do. What is the how? You already know that you need to get all of these steps right for a better offering position that ultimately helps you gain a better market share from your competitors.
Tip: The tricky part is that there are many factors involved in using product positioning as a tool to capture a better market share.
This is a two-part post. We will talk about “the how factors” in the next.
PS: This is a part of an ongoing series for Creators who wants to build a successful business. For creators moving away from passion to building a business. Read previous articles here. Especially, if you want to know how to do it in #web3.
