What is Positioning in Marketing?
If you are into marketing, you must be familiar with the term product/service positioning. This is one of the most critical factor to be considered in any marketing strategy, be it traditional marketing or digital marketing. If you are new to this term, firstly let us help you understand what positioning means in the world of marketing.
Product/service positioning in marketing or marketing positioning is a strategy that focuses on exposing your product/service to the potential or target customers. Whenever businesses formulate their marketing plans, they will need to identify their target customers. These are the group of people who will be willing to buy the products/services being marketed. Its main purpose is to establish a clear and advantageous place in the target audience’s collective minds.
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Types of Positioning Marketing
With a proper positioning marketing strategy, you’ll define how your product/service stands out among your competitor’s products. Here are some of the factors that can be used in positioning in marketing:
Pricing
Price is the first thing that the customers look for while looking for products/services. This is especially the case when your target audience is price sensitive. People prefer to get lower price products among the products of similar quality. With a pricing positioning strategy, brands aim to be the cheapest or one of the cheapest in the market, and value becomes their position.
Quality
If your target audience prefers products/services of high quality and do not give much importance to price, then you’ll be positioning your product in the market by emphasizing on the quality of your product/service. Positioning based on quality is very different from quality positioning as target market in this case give importance to quality rather than price of the product/service. Similarly, the target market in this positioning strategy value high price products as it reflects their status.
Differentiation
Another way to position your product/service in the market is by explaining how it is different and provides better value than competing products/services. In other words, differentiation is what sets your product or service apart from the crowd. So, while positioning your product, make sure to identify and explain how your product is different from others and the competitive advantages it provides.
For example, if you are a company providing services related to digital marketing in Nepal, how would you differentiate your company from the rest? One of the factors may be specialized service related to SEO in Nepal. Since SEO is an emerging concept in Nepal, it will definitely make you stand out from the crowd.
Convenience
Convenience is something that people value the most in today’s busy world. It makes the life of customers easy and also saves their time. Convenience can be in various factors such as free delivery, easy EMIs, free returns, etc. Thus, it is very easy to make your customers buying experience as easy as possible. For example, people prefer banks that have lots of ATM points and internet banking facility. Thus, if your bank does not have, say internet banking facility, people will ignore your bank and switch to the ones that provide internet banking facility.
Customer Service
Customer service is the key to success for businesses today. Customer service emphasizes creating helpful and friendly interactions and being available for the customers whenever they need you. This can be especially critical in specific industries, such as restaurants and banking areas. For example, would you go for banks that provide 24*7 customer service or the one that provides customer service from 9am to 5pm? Of course, you’d go for the one with 24*7 customer service.
These are some of the most widely used strategies for positioning marketing. While drafting your market positioning strategy, make sure to identify hat your target customer value and how you can present your competitive strategy to them. It is very important to make sure that your market positioning strategy succeeds in reaching your target customer. However, while drafting market positioning strategy, try to avoid positioning errors such as under-positioning, over-positioning, confused positioning and doubtful positioning.
