In today's digital landscape, one truth remains resolute: to succeed, you must stand out and be perceived as "better", as Al Ries and Jack Trout famously asserted in their book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind". This principle transcends time and product types. While originally penned in 1980 with physical products in mind, its wisdom reverberates strongly in today's era dominated by AI and digital solutions.
In 2023 alone, the market witnessed a staggering influx of new digital products, each competing for attention and market share. Amidst this proliferation, the need to differentiate oneself while demonstrating superiority has never been more pressing.
Aside from killer features and great customer service, one way that more and more companies are using to stand out is with unique positioning and messaging, as part of an overall digital brand strategy. It’s an approach that Forbes claims is able to increase revenue by up to 23%!
The question is, how do digital execs and teams achieve this? Let’s dive into the art of digital product positioning and messaging.
The difference between positioning and messaging
Before going any further, let’s define the key differences between positioning and messaging.
Positioning involves identifying your unique value proposition, whereas messaging is communicating that value proposition to your audience. While positioning tends to be more stable and enduring, messaging is more fluid and adaptable and can change with specific campaigns or promotions.
The benefits of clear positioning and messaging
Clear positioning and messaging are vitally important for:
Differentiation – to create a competitive advantage and increase the likelihood of your brand attracting and retaining customers.
Clarity and understanding – to eliminate confusion, reduce cognitive load and shorten the time to purchase.
Consistency – to build brand recognition and trust across multiple channels.
Targeted communications – to help you tailor messages and campaigns in order to increase relevance and effectiveness.
Increased sales and market share – to influence customers at every stage of the journey, leading to better market penetration and higher sales.
This last point is a crucial one – put another way, it essentially means that clear positioning and messaging means a clear sales strategy. This is because it lines up how you talk about a product with whom you’re talking to and where you’re saying it, a connection that Draup claims can actually boost company revenues by 20%.
Why understanding your user is important for digital product positioning and messaging
Everything we’ve covered thus far has pointed towards a common theme – your customer or target audience. In fact, the art of both digital product positioning and messaging is all about understanding your user. This is because a clear positioning and messaging approach improves your:
Relevance and resonance, by creating positioning and messaging that resonates with your user’s needs, desires and pain points.
Competitive advantage, through knowing what your target audience values and how you should position your digital product in a way that sets it apart from the competition.
Communication and connection, from understanding what language and tone your user communicates in, leading to a deeper connection and emotional brand relationship.
Just look at how the global brand, Netflix, achieved this in its early days. They switched positioning from a DVD delivery service to a streaming platform. By doing so, they effectively carved out a new competitive niche within the market.
Software brand, Adobe, did something similar. They transitioned from being a pure software provider to being a customer-centric solution with “Creative Cloud”. It was a positioning shift that allowed them to tackle more of a B2C market, getting them closer to the customer and building a more innovative brand.
To explore more of how you can switch to a customer-focused strategy, check out these handy guides:
Digital product positioning – the ‘how’
Creating a digital product positioning strategy involves several key steps to ensure that your product stands out in the digital landscape and resonates with your target audience. Here's a structured approach that your team should follow.
Step 1: Start with research and analysis
First and foremost, you must understand the digital landscape, so be sure to conduct thorough research to understand the digital environment in which your product will operate. In analysing market trends, dynamics and competitive factors, several popular frameworks provide valuable insights:
PESTEL evaluates external factors: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal, impacting business operations and market trends.
Ansoff Matrix outlines four growth strategies: market penetration, market development, product development and diversification.
SWOT assesses internal strengths and weaknesses, along with external opportunities and threats, providing insights into market dynamics.
Porter's Five Forces examines the threat of new entrants, buyer/supplier power, substitutes and rivalry, guiding evaluations of market attractiveness and profitability.
Next, define your target audience personas. You should develop detailed profiles of your target audience segments based on demographics, psychographics and behaviours.
Step 2: Identify your key features and benefits
Here is where most digital and product teams feel comfortable – in identifying your product’s key features. These are the things you’re working on every day so it shouldn’t be difficult to list them all out! Some great frameworks to use here are customer maps. You can read about the top three and which is best for your product and team over here.
Where your team does need to switch thinking though is in translating these features into benefits for the user. It’s important here that you refer back to your audience personas and connect your customers’ needs with the benefits that your product delivers.
Tip: It's beneficial to combine higher-level frameworks like Porter's Generic Competitive Advantage with a deep dive into detailed features and benefits.
Step 3: Define your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
From Step 2 and having identified all your key features and benefits, you’ll now want to hone in on the unique ones. Here again, you should refer back to your Step 1 research, trying to be as honest as possible in comparing your product against the competition.
Having identified your unique features and benefits, you’ll then need to craft a compelling UVP in a clear and concise statement.
Step 4: Develop your positioning statement
Based on your UVP and target audience insights, your team should then create a positioning statement that succinctly describes where your product fits in the market and how it differs from competitors. Your positioning statement should answer the following questions:
Who is your target audience?
What is the need or problem your product solves?
What makes your product unique and better than alternatives?
Here is a simple template:
For (target audience), (brand) is the (category) that offers (unique selling proposition), empowering them to (physical benefits) and making them feel (emotional benefits).
Alternatively, this template from April Dunford can help simplify and focus this process. Or this template from Aha! can serve as a workbook for your team to move through the process. Once you’ve settled on your positioning statement, you should then take time to test and refine it via customer feedback and even real-life applications of it via your website and digital campaigns.
Finally, an additional tactic to help guide your team through this end-to-end exercise is leveraging other great brand examples. For example, Noom's product positioning is clear to see from their website and product app. Having established that most weight-loss solutions focus on diet, Noom has struck out on a different path altogether. Their unique proposition is all about the psychology of eating as a way to lose weight – an approach that’s refreshing within the market and that helps their brand stand out in a marketplace that’s been extremely crowded for decades!
Digital product messaging – the ‘how’
Having established your digital product positioning, you’ll now want to turn your attention to the messaging part. Crafting effective digital product messaging is crucial for communicating your product's value proposition to your target audience in a compelling and engaging way. Here are the key steps to ensuring your messaging stands out.
We have covered Understanding Your Audience in the positioning work! But it’s worth taking a step back and reframing your target audience's understanding now in relation to your messaging. That means equating those user pain points and needs with specific behaviours, words and language.
What are the digital, written and verbal signs that your customer is frustrated or in need of something relating to your product and positioning?
Step 1: Establish your brand personality and voice
At the same time as understanding your customer’s voice, you’ll also want to make sure that your own brand voice is in place. You should already have this covered in your brand guidelines so it’s worth revisiting this with your team as a reminder of what to do and what not to do in your brand communications and language.
Step 2: Define your key messaging points and prioritise these
Next, you’ll want to determine your product's unique messaging points. The best way to do this is by selecting the most compelling and relevant messaging points that align with your target audience's priorities and pain points, i.e. refer back to your research!
This product messaging framework from Aha! is a great way to help structure your team’s thinking.
Step 3: Craft your messaging
Get the thinking caps on for this one! Here, you’ll need to distill your key messaging points from Step 3 into a concise and compelling statement that communicates the unique benefits of your product to your target audience. Here are some top tips to remember as you do this:
Use persuasive language, i.e. language that resonates with your audience's emotions, aspirations and pain points.
Leverage storytelling techniques to evoke a strong emotional response.
Highlight benefits over features by focusing on the outcomes that your product delivers.
This framework from Notion is a great starting point.
Step 4: Tailor the messaging, but retain consistency
When it comes to getting your messaging out into the market, it’s important that you customise it to fit the format, tone and audience expectations of each digital channel. What works for a Facebook advert won’t necessarily work for a marketing email.
With this approach though, it’s also important that you create consistent messaging – and that’s why all the steps leading up to this point have been so crucial! Developing your framework, and establishing your brand tone of voice – these steps and others that we’ve covered will all ensure that your messaging retains consistency and recognition across different touchpoints.
Step 5: Test and iterate
As with your product positioning, you’ll want to test and iterate on your messaging. You can do this via A/B testing that’s easy to implement across digital channels. Or you can gather feedback directly from customers and users through survey mechanisms.
To help your team get inspired with your product messaging, it’s a good idea to reference examples. For instance, Square, although being a more B2B-focused product, the messaging is clear and differentiated, almost similar to more consumer-focused products that you would come across. In addition, they put a lot of effort into regional customisation of their messaging, even across different website versions. And finally, in keeping with their brand personality, they have a unique and distinct language focus on ‘you’, calling out the customer directly in many of their messaging applications.
A final thought on digital product positioning and messaging
It’s easy to see why product positioning and messaging are often confused – they both occupy a space in our minds that’s closely connected to a brand and how we ensure our brands ‘stand out’. Equally, both positioning and messaging involve crafting communication strategies related to the value proposition of your product.
However, they are very distinct – and it’s often best to think of positioning going before messaging, i.e. you need your product positioning defined before you can tackle your product messaging. To this end, it’s important to establish a clear process for defining both your positioning and your messaging, and to use the right templates and frameworks to guide your team as they build these elements out.
Speak to our team about how this process could be applied to your digital product strategy. And don’t forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter for more advice and top tips on digital product strategy.
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