No one wants to waste time learning about products or services that aren’t right for them. Business-to-business buyers invest valuable time on their buyer’s journey as they research and vet their options. Sales reps dedicate significant time and effort to connect and communicate on sales calls.
Getting straight to the point of who you are and what you do saves valuable time: yours, your customers’, as well as those prospects who aren’t a great fit and the sales reps trying to close deals. That’s why a positioning statement is fundamental to your B2B marketing strategy.
A clear and concise industrial marketing positioning statement answers the most important questions upfront and serves as a foundation for a marketing strategy that attracts, engages, and delights your target audiences.
Successful messaging, content, and promotion strategies all depend on positioning to:
Helpful content that’s crafted to support a clear positioning statement can help attract high-quality traffic to your site, earn greater credibility with search engines, and deliver better value to prospects who become high-quality sales leads with great potential to grow into long-term customers.
“Positioning” implies a sense of place — where your products or services stand with respect to the market, your competitors, and the customers whose needs you aim to meet. What are your strengths? Are you the most reliable? Most accurate? Most durable?
Think of Bounty paper towels and their “quicker picker-upper” positioning. They’re probably not the cheapest on the shelf, but they don’t market themselves that way. They understand why their target consumers will want to choose their product over other options, and they put their positioning to work in their messaging.
The same concept applies to industrial companies, too. Getting your positioning right is how you and your best prospects get to clarity faster. So take the time and effort to articulate your unique, specific value proposition — and then use your positioning to inform every aspect of your marketing efforts, from strategy to tactical execution.
But keep in mind, a marketing positioning statement isn’t just a catchy slogan or ad copy. An effective positioning statement defines your ideal customer, pinpoints what you will represent or mean to them, and supports that claim with facts.
Any business with a value proposition and a target market can use the following approach, but our marketing positioning statement example will focus on complex B2B industrials and manufacturers — where our team has an exceptionally strong background and experience.
Your first job in the process is to uncover the core truths about your company’s competitive advantage, and just why it’s successful. Why do your prospects choose you over all the alternatives, and why do customers keep you as a partner?
Interview teammates who work most closely with customers: technical sales engineers or other sales staff, customer service representatives, anyone who’s responsible for helping customers have a positive experience with your products or services. Find out why they think customers want to work with them.
You could ask, "What are our strengths as a company?" But our experience tells us that about 80% of the time, you’ll get answers about “our people” or “quality.” Like moms and apple pie, these are clichés for a reason. They’re sort of true, but don’t get you any closer to what makes your value prop unique.
Because the positioning statement is so integral to effective marketing, we help clients work through the process — and this is the approach we take with internal client interviews. If we get generalizations and platitudes, we keep asking questions. We want to know specifically, what leads their key customers to make the decision to spend money on their solutions? Here’s what we work to discover:
Questions like this help everyone think more specifically about the distinct — and distinctive — ingredients of your success. And that’s where the best insights come from.
We often find salespeople are a great source of insights about our clients’ strongest value propositions. To help them uncover these insights, we ask about the specific customer needs they discover (and learn to look for) that instantly tell them a prospect is a perfect fit for their products or services.
Next, we take what we learned from internal people and target a few (usually 6 to 8) of the most important customers for interviews. We custom-craft discussion guides for these interviews to get candid learning and insights from customers’ perspectives across a range of key topics including:
In our experience, one-on-one interviews with customers are the best way to get true voice-of-customer insights.
As an added bonus, around 75% of the interviews result in value-affirming customer testimonials clients can use in their marketing.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more compelling message for prospects than an authentic testimonial from a customer whose story looks and sounds like theirs to establish credibility, relevance, and value.
RELATED: 5 Tips for Building a Better Manufacturing Sales Proposal
The learnings and insights from both sets of interviews serve as your ingredients for the next step in your process: the crafting. As you start this step, think of your positioning statement as a direct message to your prospects that tells them in an instant what you’re all about.
Your positioning statement needs to answer these questions:
Remember the ingredients:
Let’s look at an example of a positioning statement for a hypothetical B2B industrial manufacturer that makes conveyor systems for paper products:
“To tissue manufacturers looking for conveyor equipment that increases throughput and integrates easily with existing equipment, XYZ product will be the conveyor solution that’s most customizable and designed to be the easiest to connect with existing systems; the evidence is our extensive breadth of engineering capabilities and successful integrations with more than [number of] different system types.”
A strong, well-reasoned positioning statement will help you determine the topics you’ll include in marketing content, and the types of messages that should be part of your content marketing strategy. Convening your content team around an intentionally crafted and disciplined positioning statement makes it easier to see where to concentrate your effort.
Understanding your prospects and customers — and showing what you know — is a vital part of aligning your Sales and Marketing efforts to ensure no effort or investment is misdirected toward leads that aren’t really prospects.
Achieving alignment between Sales and Marketing takes trust, and a service level agreement, or SLA, helps set a foundation for building and maintaining the relationship between teams. By clearly defining expectations, roles, responsibilities, and the ways leads are qualified for a sales handoff, an SLA helps align goals and hold departments accountable to one another.
Our guided tour of an SLA explains it all in the depth you need to develop your own. Click the link below to get started today.
Topics: Inbound Marketing
