Marketing Positioning: 6-Step Guide to Win in 2023 + Checklist

What is positioning in marketing (with example)

Positioning is about the perception your customers and prospects have of your brand or product in relation to competing brands or products within a specific category.

But positioning is also the process of influencing the perception your customers and prospects have of your brand and your product. This process is the sum of your marketing messaging, campaigns, and the experience your customers and prospects have with your brand and your product.

It’s what you’re all about.

Many B2B executives make the mistake of thinking of positioning as a catchy statement created at a management offsite or by a clever copywriter.

The positioning statement briefly describes your target market, your category, how you’re different, and how that translates into value for your target customers.

But the positioning statement is not the goal in itself. The goal is to make strategic decisions about your target, category, your differentiation, and the value — and to align your product, marketing, sales, and customer success in line with your choices.

Take for example the two cold emailing products below. Do you perceive any difference and value beyond the absolute minimum you’d expect from a tool like that (automate email cadences)?

The cold emailing tools category is, without a doubt, a bloody red ocean. And to make things worse, the market was decimated by the GDPR regulation back in 2018.

And yet, playing in the same market — and right after GDPR was introduced — lemlist grew from 0 to $3m ARR in 2 years — without external funding.

How? They challenged the status quo in the market with declining response rates to mass cold email outreach. Their positioning statement might have been:

lemlist is a cold email tool [category] powering sales teams, agencies, and B2B businesses [target market] to personalize outreach campaigns [differentiator] so their emails get replies [value].

Their key differentiator was going all-in on unique personalization features (and later other features) to help their users get more replies:

Below you’ll get the chance to hear lemlist’s insider tips, but first, let’s address an important question.

Why marketing positioning is a must-have for B2B businesses

“The mind, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it.”

Guess when this was written?

40 years ago.

In their legendary book “Positioning, a battle for your mind”, Al Ries and Jack Trout described the market conditions in 1980 as a “communication jungle”.

When it was so hard to stand out back then, how will you stand out now, when:

• Your buyers are in a crisis mode and more critical than ever before
• Your competition is growing exponentially (e.g. the marketing technology space grew by 5233% since 2011)
• Your buyer’s attention is under a constant barrage of messages, updates, and, as one B2B exec put it, “desperate marketing attempts by everybody”. And lately even interruptions from their family as they try to focus on their work!

But marketing positioning is about much more than just cutting through the noise of the “communication jungle” out there.

Remember the two cold email tool examples from above:

How would you choose which one to buy?

When your prospects don’t see the difference between you and the competitors, they will focus on the things like:

• Price
• Customer reviews
• Integration

And in our world of virtually infinite supply, this translates into an uphill battle: Your marketing campaigns have low response/conversion rates. Your sales cycles are long. You have to fight hard for every deal — and maybe even give discounts to close deals.

Developing a strong marketing positioning is not nice to have anymore.

Effective positioning helps you:

• Stand out and cut through the noise of the over-marketed environment and attract your clients without being spammy
• Win the client when other serious players are bidding on the project too
• Win the right type of client who will:
  • Value and appreciate your product and gladly refer you to others
  • Partner with you in creating exceptional client results

• Command premium prices
• Make your business easier to sell, or to get an investment
• Feel more confident, congruent with your values, and inspired to think bigger and grow faster
• Attract the right people and partners to join your mission and build something bigger together
• Make better decisions with more ease, and say “no” with more confidence, which in turn allows you to focus on the 20% of actions that generate 80% of results

In addition, it allows service-based companies to simplify their proposals and systematize their delivery. This in turn creates more time to work on business development and allows them to shift from being “bodies for hire” to becoming a go-to expert in their niche.

The difference between marketing positioning and value proposition

Marketing positioning is about a place your brand or product occupies y in a specific market category. It’s a key part of your go-to-market strategy and needs to be implemented through marketing messages, campaigns, and the customer experience in line with that positioning.

The value proposition is a key marketing message communicating why you are different and worth buying. Essentially, it communicates why your positioning matters to your ideal customers.

Instapage’s positioning is a “‘landing page tool with unique post-click optimization and experimentation features for Google and Facebook advertisers”. Their value proposition is “Customers like you get up to 400% more from their digital ad spend with Instapage”.

Note how Instapage’s positioning is both vertical (they focus on Google and Facebook advertisers) and horizontal (unique ad optimization features).

lemlist’s positioning is a cold emailing tool (product category) with unique personalization features. Their value proposition is “Send cold emails that get replies”.

The 6-Step process to define your marketing positioning (w/12 positioning strategies and examples for B2B tech and service companies)

If you want to create or update your positioning, what are the practical steps you need to take?

“The essence of strategy is choosing what NOT to do.” – Michael Porter

The way how you position your company or product is about making a series of strategic choices about what you focus on (and what you say ‘no’ to).

Let’s look at the choices and practical steps you need to take.

1. Choose your focus go-to-market segments

Imagine you’re scaling a SaaS company and searching for a CRM. You’re looking at two options:

• A CRM that gets your sales organized
• A specialized CRM that help to organize your sales, track recurring revenue, and the churn rate

Which one will you choose? The second one seems like a natural choice for a SaaS company.

That is the power of market segmentation.

Most B2B companies skip this step and create a customer avatar that’s essentially the lowest common denominator of their potential customers. This leads to two most common mistakes that rob B2B companies of revenue: one-size-fits-all positioning and broad targeting.

Market segmentation benefits:

• ROI: focus your scarce resources on prospects who are a better fit for your product, more accessible and easier to sell to, stay longer, are more profitable, generate more revenue and give you more referrals
• Better client-message fit: personalize campaigns using segment-specific USPs (e.g. the CRM that helps SaaS companies track recurring revenue and churn rate), segment-specific terminology, case studies, and testimonials
• Virality: word-of-mouth spreads more easily in a well-connected segment and it gives you a chance to partner with industry influencers and network organizations

B2B tech example with insider tips: Choicely succeeded where much larger companies with huge existing customer bases failed. They successfully market a native no-code app builder and even build virality into a complex B2B product.

What did they do differently?

Instead of trying to market a generic app builder, they focused on media, sports & entertainment segments and built features that supported visuality, interactivity, fan engagement, and being social, and community-driven.

The results?

An inherent virality in their product. An easy answer to one of the biggest sales objections. And as a side-effect, they have been called by some investors “the most entertaining tech company”.

For insider tips, check out the interview with Choicely’s CEO Kaius Meskanen.

Note that choosing focus go-to-market segments is about focusing your efforts and stacking the odds in your favor — not about positioning yourself exclusively as the “ for ” (which is one of the 12 marketing positioning strategies presented below).

Step-by-step:

• Export a list of your customers from your CRM / accounting software, including the total amount you invoiced
• Segment them by industry, revenue, team size, products or services they bought from you
• Define what segments have the highest LTV and generated more revenue than other segments
• Pick the most promising segments and potentially brainstorm additional market segments, ending up with 5-10 segments to evaluate
• Make a copy of the market segmentation template below
• Below the standard criteria outlined in the template, outline other criteria: person’s and company’s characteristics that make them really care about your unique approach and features. E.g. amount of purchase orders and invoices in different formats, technology stack, size or growth of a specific department, the background of the decision-maker, ad spend, etc.

• For each segment:
  • Describe the real reason companies in this segment (would) buy your product and what challenges you solve for them
  • Rate every segment on all criteria
  • Pick a segment or two (depending on your resources) to focus on. Note that you’ll need a separate ICP (next step) for each segment you choose

Step 2. Develop an Ideal Customer Profile

Ideal Customer Profile helps you capture the information you need to target and qualify prospects who are more likely to convert, stay longer, generate more revenue, and give you the best referrals, testimonials, and case studies.

An ideal Customer Profile is a list of characteristics that your best customers from a specific market segment have in common.

It describes who they are, their challenges and goals, the value they get from your product, their buying process, objections, and purchase criteria, and why they choose your product instead of competitors.

Common mistake companies make is to produce a generic version for all segments — or base it on their biased interpretation. You need up-to-date (post-COVID) data from in-depth interviews with your best customers from the target segment.

Step-by-step:

Check out our detailed guide on how to develop an ideal customer profile.

Step 3. Analyze your competitors

The essence of positioning is about how your customers perceive your brand or product in relation to competitors they’re comparing you to.

You’re usually compared to two types of alternatives:

• Your direct competitors — global or local market leaders, or products in a similar price and feature range
• Other alternatives, like Excel or ‘hire an intern’

The latter is especially important if you’re operating in an emerging category, of which most of your prospects are not aware of. For example, when Drift was starting, most marketers were not using chatbots on their website, so they had to position against lead generation forms.

Step-by-step:

• List competitors that you’re coming up against in your sales
• In your ICP interviews, include questions like: What have you tried in the past to deal with the challenge you’ve just described? What did you find lacking – and what do you think the right solution should have been? What other solutions did you consider in the past (and why did you choose us)?
• Analyze the competitors’ marketing positioning strategy. Do they have a niche focus? How do they differentiate themselves? What arguments do they highlight on their main web pages? How do they call themselves? Analyze their reviews: what do their customers really like about them and what are their main complaints?
• Make SWOT analysis. Considering what matters to your ICP the most, what are your strengths and weaknesses, where do the competitors fall short (opportunities) and how do they beat you (threats)?

Step 4. Pick your market category (w/12 positioning strategies and examples for B2B tech and service companies)

From the perspective of your client, a market category is what they’ll label your business or your product with.

“Oh, it’s a CRM system”, or “ah ok, they’re a marketing agency”, they may say when they learn about you the first time.

Each category comes with a set of expectations (about features, prices, business models…) and determines which competitors you’ll be compared to.

You cannot avoid being “put in a box”, or labeled with a market category. It’s how your prospects deal with thousands of solutions and products fighting for their peace of mind.

But you can influence how your customers and prospects perceive your brand or product in relation to others in the category. That is what a positioning strategy is all about.

Here are the 12 most common positioning strategies and examples for B2B tech and service companies — with insider tips from their founders and marketers.

Strategy #1: Head to head: winning with superior experiences

This strategy makes sense in large, mature markets where market leaders stay on top despite poor customer experiences. Think banking or telecommunications, where, as Bain puts it “Experience is the new product”.

We all know of examples like Uber or Revolut where the superior experiences were enabled by tech innovations that ended up being new categories in their own right.

But there are also B2B tech and service categories where this strategy makes sense.

B2B Tech Example with Insider Tips

Nextiva is an all-in-one cloud communications platform that supports any channel (virtual phone system, text, video, email, and instant messaging) and any related workflow through a set of customer service, sales, and team collaboration tools.

Since virtually any business needs a communication tool like Nextiva, the market is huge and ripe with competition. The “all in one” positioning is not unique either.

And yet, Nextiva managed to grow from $70M to $200M in revenue over the last 2.5 years without external investments.

How?

The way Nextiva differentiates is by providing a superior customer experience. The company was founded based on the idea of having the best customer service ever.

But Nextiva takes superior experience beyond the Amazon-style customer service, to provide unmatched reliability (they are the only provider in the industry that hasn’t had outages in more than three years) and a frictionless implementation process.

Tune in to listen to insider tips from Nextiva’s director of growth marketing Gaetano Di Nardi.

Strategy #2: Change the battlefield: pivot to an adjacent category

What we often don’t realize is that the choices we made early about our product category can box us in unfavorable ways.

The good news is, categories today are much more “fluid”, the borders between different categories are not always clear, and categories and are evolving faster than ever before.

So you might still choose an adjacent category.

B2B Tech Example

In “Obviously awesome”, Dunford gives an example of her own startup that started as a “database”. But by being positioned in the database category, their prospects expected their product to have everything that Oracle’s database had, but better. They could never win head to head against Oracle.

By focusing on their main differentiator (fast analytics of large amounts of data), they discovered a market category without a clear leader at the time: the data warehouse market.

This shift in positioning got them out of competing with Oracle and is aligned with their strengths. It also allowed them to raise prices because they shifted away from the database (a commodity) to a data warehouse, which commanded premium pricing due to a smaller amount of offerings on the market.

Strategy #3: Vertical positioning: “Big fish, small pond”.

Your goal is to win in a well-defined segment of the market.

You do this by targeting buyers in a subsegment of the broader market who have different requirements that are not being met by the current overall market leader.

2 B2B tech examples

Cumul.io’s founders decided to build a solution in a bloody red ocean of analytics tools, dominated by incumbents like Tableau and Microsoft (Power BI).

Their strategy?

Focus on SaaS companies looking to add analytics and dashboards to their own applications or platforms.

While Tableau and Power BI deliver powerful business analytics tools and dashboards, they miss key puzzle pieces necessary to integrate stunning, interactive dashboards right in their application with just a few lines of code.

The results? With pricing starting at four figures, they managed to acquire 200+ customers in 30 countries — without any outbound sales or marketing. For insider tips, check out the interview with Cumul.io’s CEO Karel Callens.

In another example, our client leveraged this strategy to grow their average deal size by a factor of 10, while their competition was a fraction of what they faced before.

Their survey technology was innovative, provide better response rates, and had a few corporate clients. But it remained a struggle to build traction in the ‘usual suspect’ markets like employee engagement.

After a veteran CEO joined their team, they decided to take a step back and review their existing customers. The most promising use-cases seemed to be in the healthcare market.

The team embarked on a difficult journey that resulted in a unique competitive advantage:

The first step was to find an early adopter. After speaking to many healthcare providers, they managed to sign a pilot project with an innovative hospital.

The startup then parlayed that first success into a few more projects with other hospitals.

Finally, they were ready to go after their real target: pharmaceutical companies. Again, through a pilot with an ‘innovator’, they slowly started signing bigger deals.

They still had to overcome all other barriers to entry, like getting required certifications and corporate approvals.

In addition, they had to invest even more in building specific features to increase the value of their offering and transform “an app” into a solution.

But once they were in, the rewards were great too. Like I mentioned above, their average deal size grew by a factor of 10, while their competition was a fraction of what they faced before.

Strategy #4: Niche down

This strategy is for B2B business in a highly competitive category with hundreds or thousands of competitors and developed subcategories.

You are choosing both a target segment (e.g. one or two verticals you want to focus on) and your specialty or unique features (or expertise area for professional services).

For most service-based businesses — this strategy is a must. We’ll dive into more details about marketing positioning for service-based companies below.

But this strategy can help B2B tech companies too, especially if they’re active in categories with hundreds of competitors.

B2B Tech Example

That’s why Salesflare, competing against 600+ companies in the CRM space, is so clear about both their best fit market segments (marketing agencies and tech startups), and their product differentiation (quick to deploy & easy to use, thanks to their unique automation features).

Learn more about their strategy in an interview with SalesFlare’s CEO Jeroen Corthout:

Strategy #5: Positioning for B2B services.

Most service providers — especially professional service providers — tend to jump on most requests from potential clients, and sometimes take on projects they have no deep expertise in.

This is often driven by the fear of missing out. If I say no, I’ll miss out on this project, the thinking goes.

Unfortunately, this is a road to mediocrity.

Why?

Because such a mindset leads them to become a “jack of all trades, but master of none.” Which is the exact opposite of carefully selecting an expertise area and becoming a go-to expert in your niche.

B2B service example #1 with insider tips.

Sweet Fish Media is a great example of a very tight positioning, both vertical (focused on B2B SaaS companies with 50-5000 employees) and horizontal (they’re a podcast agency for B2B brands).

Tune in to the interview with the founder, James Carbary to learn how they pivoted into this narrow positioning, and how it helped them achieve 50-100% growth, year over year.

James is a big inspiration for us in running our own podcast, and the author of a best-selling book Content-Based Networking: How to Instantly Connect With Anyone You Want to Know

B2B service example #2 with insider tips.

FullFunnel.io’s marketing positioning is full-funnel marketing (horizontal) for B2B tech and service businesses with complex and long sales cycles (vertical). While we could also help other types of B2B businesses, we focus solely on this niche.

Results?

In one of the most competitive markets out there — marketing consulting — FullFunnel.io doubled their revenue during the “lockdown quarter” compared with the same quarter the year before.

We also rarely have to compete when submitting proposals, and this unique positioning allowed us to build considerable IP, and launch a unique Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Academy.

For insider tips, tune in to this short interview with the founder, Andrei Zinkevich.

B2B service example #3 with insider tips.

iNostix won bids for enterprise projects against the big 4 consulting companies on a regular basis — and got acquisition inquiries from 3 out of 4 of these companies (iNostix was acquired by Deloitte in 2016).

Their positioning was sharp, and they invested heavily in communicating their positioning with their market. Their founder and CEO Luk Smeyers published 200+ articles, and spoke on 100+ conferences — and all of it around their narrow specialization.

Tune in below to listen to Luk’s insider tips, who went on to start The Visible Authority — where he now teaches other consultants strategies to grow their revenue by transforming them into visible authorities:

Strategy #6: Challenge the status quo by going all-in on unique features.

It’s important to realize that this strategy is NOT about adding more features than your competitors.

It is about:

Understanding what matters to your best customers that is not well-supported in the market

Going further than anyone in the market to develop specific, often unique features or combination of features

Communicating about it

B2B tech examples with insider tips

These are the two examples I used in the intro — but now I want you to draw your attention to specific steps they took to make this strategy work (and share insider tips from one of them).

The first example was Instapage, positioned as a landing page tool with unique post-click optimization and experimentation features for Google and Facebook advertisers.

Note the latter part of the sentence.

Instapage focused on their best customers — first Google advertisers — to provide them something no other landing page tool provides. When running Google Ads, it’s extremely important to align the landing page with the search term and the ad copy used to send the traffic to this landing page. Previously, no other tool had support for this.

The second example was lemlist, which went beyond any other cold emailing tool in helping their customers better response rates. Note all the actions they took to implement their positioning strategy:

Implemented a unique set of personalization features such as personalized images, video thumbnails, and landing pages

Implemented unique deliverability features such as lemwarm (automatic warm-up of email accounts)

Went way beyond other providers in educating their market on how to get higher response rates (e.g. lemlister of the week, their community, etc)

Check out the interview with Vuk Vukasinovic, lemlist’s head of growth where he shares other insider tips:

Strategy #7: Challenge the status quo by addressing a common objection.

This strategy also relies on a deep understanding of your best customers. What are their most common objections and how can you address them?

The best-known examples of a company that made it big by addressing common objections are in B2C (but I will provide a B2B example below):

CarMax became America’s largest used-car retailer by understanding that customers don’t want to haggle over price or risk buying a lemon.

The price on the car is the price you’ll pay, their salespeople aren’t compensated on commission and have a strict quality certification and inspection process that ensures every car they sell is reliable

Domino’s pizza understood that people don’t like waiting too long for their food to be delivered. So they pioneered a guarantee: you’ll get a hot, fresh pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes — or it’s free.

B2B tech example with insider tips.

If you listen to Expandi’s story below, you’ll notice how much effort their co-founder and CEO Stefan Smulders spent understanding the common problems and objections of their ideal customers in the market of LinkedIn automation tools — and how he used this knowledge to carefully develop a unique positioning for his product.

LinkedIn was cracking down on automation tools, and many customers were concerned about their LinkedIn accounts being suspended. Expandi offers the safest tool for LinkedIn automation.

Lead generation agencies struggle to manage multiple clients in a single tool. Expandi offers a unique set of agency features that make it easy to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts

Acceptance and response rates on LinkedIn are going down – and LinkedIn penalizes people who do many connection requests that people refuse.

Expandi offers advanced personalization and list building features that allow you to implement personalized, trigger-based outreach campaigns.

Note also how well Expandi executes their positioning strategy in both product and all customer-facing activities: from a unique brand voice, through a content strategy unique in their category, to their approach to serving their customers that none of their competitors have.

Strategy #8: All-in-one or one-stop-shop

This strategy can be applied when a specific segment of your market needs various, often fragmented, and poorly integrated tools or services to manage (an aspect of) their business.

The first two examples below illustrate the importance of focusing on a specific segment of the market to succeed at this strategy.

3 B2B tech examples with insider tips.

As small businesses use more and more of digital tools, they struggle with disconnected systems, information, logins – while the monthly subscription bills keep piling up.

The Zoho Corporation recognized this problem in 2017, when they launched Zoho One, with 40+ integrated apps on one account, with all-in unbeatable pricing.

Now, it took Zoho a bit more than 20 years of building different products to be in a position to launch such a unique offering.

But this is not to say that the all-in-one strategy is not accessible to companies without such a legacy.

As part of a positioning exercise, one of our clients, IDRONECT, decided to focus on their most profitable segment of drone-based service companies. After completing a set of interviews, they realized that with a small modification of their product, IDRONECT could replace more than 10 different apps their clients use to manage their business.

The result?

Within 2 months it took them to complete the exercise and release the product update, they grew the deal-close rate, shortened the sales cycle and 5X the deal size, and closed a new investment round.

One more example of an all-in-one positioning strategy taken from the start is Zaplify, which is an all-in-one sales outreach tool. In an interview with their founder and CEO Oscar Collins, I learned that while all-in-one positioning can be a powerful differentiation strategy — it can be challenging to communicate.

Being used to individual tools and their categories, prospects may try to box you in into one of those categories: “so, are you now a prospecting tool, or an outreach tool?”.

Tune in to listen to the full interview below:

Strategy #9: Head to head: redefine an emerging category

Operating in an emerging category (a category that your prospects may not be fully aware of) is both a blessing and a curse: it requires you to invest in awareness creation and demand generation — but it’s also an opportunity to influence your prospect’s purchase criteria.

And the best way to do it is using what Andy Raskin calls “name the new game”. Instead of merely attacking the problem (as most B2B brands do) — Raskin says — you attack the status quo, the “old game”. You are effectively naming the reason your competitors are becoming obsolete AND introducing a sense of urgency. “

To survive in the newly emerging world”, you say, “what you’re doing today (and what the competitors offer) is not enough. The winning company plays a new game, here is what that is. And our solution is designed ground-up to help you win the new game.”

B2B tech examples

When Hubspot set out to win in the competitive market of marketing and software tools back in 2006, they did something different from most of the other tech companies.

They’ve invested most of their marketing efforts in promoting their methodology (Inbound Marketing) instead of promoting their product directly.

Hubspot did not create the marketing automation category. They just found a new way of talking about it, that helped them create much wider awareness of the need for marketing automation (and their product).

Drift did something similar. Drift wasn’t the first chatbot on the market, but they did a far better job than anyone else in creating a compelling story around chatbots. Instead of talking about chatbots, they attacked a solution marketers were aware of: lead generation forms. Leadgen forms were their “old game”.

In a world of texting and Slack, they said, your customers are not willing to submit long forms and wait for a rep to contact them a day later — they want instant response.

They called their “new game” Conversational Marketing.

Strategy #10. Create a new category

This is the hardest and the most expensive choice you can make, but the rewards can be huge.

This strategy is usually made possible by a perfect storm of an enabling new technology emerging together with a shift in consumer preferences and a supporting ecosystem.

The work in creating a new category requires a lot of teaching because unlike with other positioning strategies, you cannot rely on what people already know about the category.

You need time, patience, and often, deep pockets.

2 B2B tech examples with insider tips

Eloqua grew from around $12 million in revenue in 2006 when they created the “marketing automation” category, to $96 million in 2012 when they went public and were shortly after acquired by Oracle for $870 million.

The second example is Esoptra, disrupting the world of high-value goods & services by creating a category they call “Product-Led Communication” (adding a branded digital experience to your physical product to turn it into your best customer communication channel).

In an interview for our podcast, the CEO shared:

• How do you come up with a new category?
• The problem with a new category is that your prospects are not aware of it. How to educate your market about the new category and create demand for your product?
• Educating your customers takes time. How do you shorten your sales cycle?
• How do you find early adopters?

Strategy #11. The power-up add-on

With this strategy, you position your product as an add-on to other products — or you use the add-on strategy as a part of your go-to-market mix.

Clearbit offers lead enrichment as a power-up to your CRM or marketing automation tools. Popular platforms such as WordPress, Microsoft Office, or JIRA all have marketplaces full of add-on applications. However, many of the add-on categories have become market categories in their own right (think popup add-ons for websites like sumo.com) and require you to position your solution with respect to the other add-ons in the category.

Integration companies (service companies specialized in specific platform implementations and customizations) can create add-ons as a part of their go-to-market mix (a way to come in contact with qualified prospects when they download their add-on).

Sometimes, however, the add-on could be a viable positioning strategy.

B2B Tech Example

When image personalization became popular through providers such as lemlist using it as differentiation features, some companies spotted an opportunity to offer similar personalization as an add-on to other marketing tools and channels.

One such example is Hyperise, enabling you to use personalized images in email, website, video, ads, chatbots, direct mail and social outreach and offer integrations with numerous marketing tools.