Giving Your Business the Proper Positioning For Success

Your business has a position, a status.

Even if your exact same products can be found right across the street, your company has a position. Maybe you’re nicer about bagging them up. Maybe you’ve been in business longer and can help people out with the problems they’re having.

If your company didn’t have a position, you wouldn’t be in business. Yet hundreds of business owners aren’t using that positioning to sell products and reach more people. And that’s just as bad as not having a position at all.

What’s your positioning message?

Have any of your customers have taken time out of their day to tell you why they chose you over the competition? That’s great news if they have. What makes it even better is that they’ve basically written your positioning message for you. After all, the question of what makes you the best choice isn’t always one that you can answer yourself.

Listen back to what your best customers have said about you. If you haven’t heard from them, you could always ask them some questions through the use of carefully-written surveys.

Your presentation matters

People are going to find the services they are looking for, one way or the other. It’s just a couple of keystrokes away. After they’ve found you, the challenge becomes to sell them on your service.

At the same time, your challenge is not to sell them away from your service – something that you could be doing without even noticing it. Is your website design out of date? Have your social media pages not been updated? Are you faced with negative reviews?

People want to do business with a company that’s active, engaged, and passionate. If you are – show it! If not, you could have sold people away from you without saying a word.

Give first

Supposing your motorcycle dealership put out a guide on the top-selling motorcycles of the year on the Internet. That’s not doing anything for the Internet; there are a lot of other places to go for guides like that, put out by people who sell a lot more motorcycles. By putting out that guide, you’re not using your web space for a catalog system, or an order page, or something else that will funnel money into your pockets. So why put one out?

Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine, said, “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”

What you are doing is showing the customers you care. You’re giving somebody local to listen to, as opposed to the sea of anonymous contributors the internet represents. It’s a little extra work on your part, but you’re not doing this for yourself. It’s a great reflection on your company’s character, wouldn’t you say?

People want to do business with you. They want to see the businesses of their town thrive and grow. Some people even want to work for you. They put their best face forward, and go out of their way to assure you that they’re the ones who can solve your problems.

This is the give-and-take of business – and if you’re not taking in as much as you’d like from your marketing, perhaps it’s time you gave it a little more.

It all starts with finding your position.

Are you the one with the most stock, the fastest, the most caring – it’s easy to pick out the qualities we like from the businesses we patronize.

In which ways is your business like the ideal one – the best of its kind? It’s a question worth asking yourself – or, worth finding a great group of people who will ask it for you.