In business, where you are matters, even now that businesses are leaving physical locations to embrace online presence. Positioning your business still matters a lot despite the clamor for online presence which has not and will never do away the fact that brand positioning is key. Even in your online strategies, where you are online matters too. Not all businesses online succeed, your online positioning matters! What search keywords are you dominating? Where is your website hosted? what amount of hosting space are you occupying? All these affect your search engine optimization and determines what position you find yourself online.
In positioning your business the following are to be considered whether your business is offline or online.
1. Market size:
Market size is the number of people who consume that very type of value you want to offer. The market size in a particular area matters if you’re thinking of physical locations. E.g bakeries consider what market size in their areas and see if they have enough people that can consume their break-even volume.
Another way to look at this is to understand that your market size isn’t everyone that eats bread when opening a bakery but the number of people who eat the very type of bread you intend to produce who are willing to buy at that amount you are willing to sell. That will bring me to talk about the next point.
2. The purchasing power of your market segment:
Yes, you’ve got the data on the number of people who eat your type of bread and how often they consume it. Don’t get excited yet, what is their purchasing power? This will help you determine if they can pay for your product value. Your competitors might have a cheaper product or premium product. If you decided to make premium products when positioning your business, can they afford the high price you will tag on it? The knowledge of this would help you ascertain what price tag to put on your product after you’ve determined your market size.
3. Positioning your business for online traffic:
You decide to bring your business online, you don’t take it to an “online village” where no one visits. By online village, I mean web platforms that have low traffic. Or even web platforms that have a high traffic of visitors who don’t consume your products. Do you see how where you are online matters when positioning your business? Instagram has high traffic but are your potential customers there or do they spend more time on Facebook or WhatsApp or Tweeter? If you decide to launch your own online platform, what plan do you have to attract the huge traffic you need for sales? Traffic is the blood of every online business.
4. Search volume for relevant keyword:
Keywords or keyphrases are those words or phrases people type on search engines when looking for some products to buy or piece of information. How many people are looking for your services or products online and what do they type on search engines when looking for it? If you don’t position your business to appear at the top of those search results, you’ll never be found.
People who appear on the top pages of those searches aren’t lucky, they put in a lot of work in their search engine optimization (SEO) practices. There are web practices that position your business, this is why every online business should have an SEO manager. To know what people are searching for online, google trend and google keyword planner can be of help
5. Branding strategies:
Branding in simple terms is to sell a promise and live up to it consistently. In positioning your business, you ask yourself what promises are other businesses selling and what different things can you promise. More reasons why apple has this caption of “Think different” as its slogan. The secret behind Apple’s brand success isn’t far this.
When others promise cheaper price, don’t be tempted to give even much cheaper price, this will lead to a price war, see how you can avoid and win the price war. can you promise more qualitative products or portable or beautiful or even stronger products? Just be different. This is called product differentiation. It’s one strategy that helps you position your business far from competition.
READ ALSO: How to win price way
6.Mvp and Mcs:
Minimum viable product/proposition and Minimum customer segment. Your product might not be the best in the market but can be made to be the best just for a particular set of people in your market and from there you can expand.
Let’s say you start making clothes but don’t have enough resources to compete in the market, you can choose to submit a proposal to schools to supply them with school uniforms when needed. With this, you’re focused on the least possible customer segment which is schools and from there expand to produce designers wears that can stand a chance to compete.
For your minimum viable products, don’t wait till your product is wowing before coming to the market. Apps come in version and they keep upgrading. Have a product that is usable and can at least give satisfaction to the users compared to what’s in the market. But then, offer it to only a small market segment, not all the market. Test drive it with that minimum customer segment, get users feedback, and from there make corrections, upgrade and expand. Launching and advertising without this customer segment can kill your business.
READ ALSO: When to avoid advertising and why it kills your business
In conclusion, no business can succeed without a good positioning. Positioning your business is a winning factor in business operations. Winning starts with knowing how to position your business for success.
