Positioning + messaging + content strategy
👋 Hey, it’s the Ercule newsletter! This newsletter is designed to help content marketers and writers make sense of content analytics and SEO.
Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here.
Do you know your company’s product positioning statement? A lot of content marketers don’t. (Some companies don’t even have one.)
A positioning statement determines…
- What your product is (ie. Product Category)
- Who it’s for (ie. Target Audience)
- What it delivers (ie. Capabilities)
- Why that matters (ie. Jobs To Be Done)
For example, here’s a positioning statement from Slack’s website:
“Slack is the collaboration hub that brings the right people, information, and tools together to get work done. From Fortune 100 companies to corner markets, millions of people around the world use Slack to connect their teams, unify their systems, and drive their business forward.”
Positioning statements are a single source of truth for marketing strategy. They enable content marketers make smarter decisions at a faster pace.
So let’s look at position statements, how to leverage them for targeted marketing content, and what to do if your startup doesn’t have a positioning statement yet.
🎈 Following your product positioning
When I work with clients on product positioning, I have this simple template that I use:
For ___ our product is a ___ that delivers ___ so they can ___.
So if you ran a seltzer delivery service you could say:
For office managers in charge of 20 to 200 staff, Seltzer Delivery Co is a hydration service that delivers access to high-quality seltzers, so that they can reduce employee burnout due to being totally parched.
(Look, we’re improvising here. But hopefully you get the idea.)
All of this data is essential to content marketing. For example…
- Target audience informs formats, channels, word choice… all of this is going to change based on your audience.
- Product category makes clear who your competitors are. You can look at topics that they’re dealing with, so that’s another place that it can roll up with your content strategy.
- Features make clear what your product actually does. Those are all potential topics for your topic strategy.
- Jobs To Be Done identifies the priorities of your audience, so you can make sure that each page is speaking directly to them.
When your target audience is office managers, you’ll be able to identify specific channels to focus on. LinkedIn might be a good one, for example. Meanwhile, a seltzer company targeting teen consumers has no reason to choose LinkedIn.
Once you have a positioning statement, there are other artifacts that product marketing can create more easily, that you can really use! Things like:
- Message pillars – the main ideas about you, your product, and your category that you want prospects to come away with
- Differentiators – why someone should become your customer instead of your competitor’s (and who you’re the best fit for, too)
You need that information because that’s going to tie up with exactly what you’re going to write about and what makes sense for you to write about.
🏄 What you can do
Get your hands on those product marketing materials. Start with the product marketing team. If there isn’t one at your company, look to senior marketing folks.
Say you’re curious about:
- Which job titles or personas are the most interesting to your sales team
- What product category your brand best fits in
- Who are your primary competitors
- What features are the most important to your buyers
- How those features match up with what those buyers are trying to do
