When was the last time you did a competitor analysis?
Scratch that… have you ever done a competitor analysis?
It’s very common for small businesses to not know who they are competing with. However, if you are serious about scaling your business and want to win more sales in your target market – you need a game plan of how to position your brand as the preferred option among competitors.
When your customers go searching for a solution, don’t you want to stand out from the crowd?
That’s where positioning comes in, and competitor analysis will help you create a strategy that’s sure to turn a few heads.
What is competitor analysis?
Competitor analysis is the investigation of other businesses that offer the same or similar solution for your target market. It’s the process of analysing the strengths and weaknesses of these businesses and comparing them to your own. Competitor analysis allows you to gain important insight to help you position and grow your brand.
Why is competitor landscape analysis important?
Competitor analysis or competitor landscape analysis is important to inform your strategies on how to:
grow your business
make better products and design better services
communicate clearly with your customers
remain the top choice for your customers
build your brand equity
differentiate your brand as unique
stay on top of market shifts
pivot faster when the market and customer needs change
Competitor analysis not only informs you of who else might be serving your customers, it also allows you to understand how your customers search for solutions and make comparable decisions between choosing your product or someone else’s.
By understanding the competitive landscape you’ll identify whether you are dealing with selective or primary demand, which can greatly impact your marketing and brand positioning strategy.
Difference between selective and primary demand
The difference between selective and primary demand can help determine the type of marketing decisions and messaging you place in front of your target market.
Selective demand
Selective demand is where the customer understands they have a problem and they decide to select a product or service to solve their problem. This is the case with highly competitive markets where there are many options for one type of solution. If your solution sits within a selective demand market, you might want to look closely at your competitors to make sure you are differentiating and offering more value to the customers making their selection.
Primary demand
Primary demand is where customers do not recognise they have a problem that can be solved for them. This is often the case with new products or services that do not already exist in the market. Messaging can be focused around educating the market about your new solution. Highlighting the problem they might not know can be solved with your one-of-a-kind solutions on the market.
How to differentiate your brand
Once you have a solid understanding of your competitive landscape and their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to yours. You can begin to start building your differentiation strategy or brand positioning strategy.
Conduct a competitor analysis
Researching your competitors will help you understand where you sit in the minds of your customers. You wil gain an understanding of what you offer your customers that no one else in the market can. Then using this as your unique selling proposition, you can differentiate your solution as bringing more value to your target market. Read more about how to conduct a competitor analysis.
Leverage your unique selling proposition
No one can build the brand you have set out to create, just like people, we are all unique and there are no two alike. If you have a thorough understanding of your customers needs and wants, use your unique-ness to offer them more value. While there may be similarities in your branding, language and pricing, the key here is to position your brand as different and offer something that your competitors simply cannot.
Highlight your competitive advantage
Don’t be shy to shout about your advantages over your competitors, chances are your customers have done their research online and will be comparing your solution against theirs. Make your advantage known, talk about it on your homepage, on your landing pages, on your social media and in your emails. And, like anything – test, measure, and try again.
Remain the top choice for your customers
Competitor analysis can be a daunting task if you’re a small business owner, entrepreneuer or an marketing team of one. However, it’s a key part of your growth strategy and something you need to stay on top of if you want to remain the best choice for your customers. You will need to constantly position your solution as the better choice in the eyes of your customer. Now how can you do that without monitoring what they are finding online so you can position your brand as more desirable? When asking yourself how often you should review your competitors, best practice says quarterly, if not monthly if you have the time. However, it’s wise to not dwell on the competition too much. Focus on what you can control, your brand and meeting your customers needs.
Don’t know where to begin?
This simple 6-step guide to competitor analysis will get you started!
I’ve worked with companies in both start-up and scale-up phases. I love helping new small businesses make sense of marketing fundamentals and empowering them to take their business growth into their own hands. Confidently scaling their businesses. Read more insights here. Subscribe to the Mood Marketing newsletter to receive insights direct to your inbox.
Brand positioning is the strategic steps you take to create a positive perception of your business in the minds of your customers. It’s how you position your solution against competitors in the market and endeavour to make yours more favourable.
Brand positioning is what you want your brand to be known for. It’s the way you connect and communicate your products and services to your customers. With a goal of creating a desire to purchase that leads to advocacy. Successful brand positioning is meeting the needs of your customer better than any other competitor in the market.
In their book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout talk about, “How to make and position an industry leader so that its name and message wheedles its way into the collective subconscious of your market and stays there.”
Sounds easy right? Brand positioning is basically mind control.
Why is brand positioning important?
A brand positioning strategy is a well researched plan to scale your business and achieve your desired market share. The more minds your brand can influence, the more referrals, word of mouth, and brand awareness your business will have. How you position your brand and how you wheedle your way into your customers minds is key to your brand growth strategy.
What is an example of brand positioning?
In New Zealand, this could be as simple as, “where everyone gets a bargain.” We all know that’s The Warehouse, not just because of the catchy jingle, but we honestly feel like we can go to The Warehouse to get a bargain. They know their customers want a bargain, so that’s what they deliver to the market and position their brand accordingly.
Brand positioning is the proof of a company living their values and delivering on their promises. As The Warehouse says on their website page, Here for Good, “…we are committed to making sustainable living easy and affordable for everyone.” Although, it’s not just what they publish on their website, it’s how their brand has been positioned in our minds. Next time you’re in need of an affordable piece of homeware, clothing or halloween costume – where do you instantly think of? The Warehouse!
What is a brand positioning strategy?
A brand positioning strategy aims to increase customer loyalty, brand equity, and the willingness of customers to purchase from your business. The Branding Journal defines a brand positioning strategy as a combination of customer wants, business capabilities, and competitors in the market. These three components of your brand positioning strategy involve quite a bit of thought and require ongoing consideration as the market changes.
Let’s break each of these down further.
Customers
Your brand is what your customers think, not what you say.
If you’re wanting to wheedle your brand into the minds of your customers, you better have a good understanding of what they want. Knowing the needs and desires of your customers is how you develop better solutions to their problems and create messaging that resonates with them. Your first step to building a brand positioning strategy is to gather insights.
Customers won’t pay attention to things that don’t offer them something they need. You want your messaging to be thumb-stopping and not to ‘feel like marketing’ but be something that is useful and of value to your customers. Be the solution they would love to tell all their friends about.
Market research and digital surveys are a great way to understand your customers and build your personas. However, the best form of customer research is to go out and actually speak to them, face-to-face. Hear straight from the horse’s mouth! Take this opportunity to ask questions about their problems. Don’t talk about your solution, you aren’t there to sell them anything, you’re there to listen to them.
Capture the words they use to describe their frustrations and use them in your marketing. Ask them what they know and think of your brand, what they like or dislike about your brand, and how they feel about competitor brands in the market.
This is valuable research and a crucial component of your brand positioning strategy. Don’t just talk about your promises to solve their problems. Prove to them in all your brand behaviour that you are true to your messaging and make sure you can deliver the solution.
Make sure your business has the capability to deliver on your strategy.
It’s one thing to define a brand positioning strategy but if you cannot commit the necessary resources and time to delivering it, you will never reach the position you are aiming for. For example, say you want your brand to be in the top five choices in your product category. You learn how your customers think, you find out what their problems are and you come up with a new product and a marketing plan to go to market. But, then you get swamped by running your business and serving your existing customers. What about those positioning goals? What about the growth forecast you’ve sold to your investors?
With any strategy, it’s not just about the actions of how you are going to achieve your goal, more importantly it’s how you are going to find the resources and funds to deliver the strategy.
Don’t let your hard earned research and strategic ideas go to waste, build a plan and resource it appropriately. This may involve out-sourcing some of the deliverables, which can be a great way to access talent you might not have in-house. Grow your brand equity by ensuring your strategy is resourced appropriately.
Competitors
Differentiate your solution against competitors in the market.
Think about your customers and their decision making journey, how do they research problems and find information? By following their journey you can easily see who else is in the market offering a similar solution to you.
Desktop research is a simple place to begin and can give you an idea of what your customers might see during their research. This involves a little bit of snooping, it’s not cheating to look over your shoulder to see what the other guy wrote for question 3. It’s a necessary part of competitor research and developing your brand positioning strategy.
Compare your offerings, features, and how they describe their solution. What language do they use and what promises do they make? You can learn a lot from a humble laptop and a few hours of googling. Don’t feel disheartened if you find out your competitors are doing the same thing as you. Use this information to fuel your positioning and differentiate your brand from the competition.
Strategically position your brand for the customer, become the preferred option and meet their needs better than any competitor in the market.
Have you thought about your brand positioning strategy?
Confidence is a state of mind. It’s the feeling of power and being in control of a situation. That’s why if you’re doing something new for the first time, like starting your own business, you may feel less confident and less in control.
We’ve all met those people who seem to effortlessly ooze confidence, but when you ask them what makes them so confident all the time, their answer is often a surprise – “It’s a switch, I’m not always like this.”
So, how do you find the ‘confidence switch’ when it comes to managing your new business and making decisions? Doing power poses and optimistic thinking will only get you so far, this article shares some practical exercises you can do to build confidence as a small business owner.
The best way to build confidence as a small business owner is to find your purpose.
It takes a certain amount of gumption to start your own business, it can be incredibly nerve racking and overwhelming. Especially if you have thrown in the towel on your day job and your new business is the basket holding all of your eggs.
From managing finances, staff, brand and growth marketing, product development to customer satisfaction and retention. There’s a lot to think about and a lot of decisions to make, and if you’ve never owned a business before then all these decisions will be new.
Meet with experts to ensure you are doing the right thing (legally and ethically)
Fail fast and learn from your mistakes.
Hire people to fill the gaps in your knowledge.
Get a positive support system in place.
Recognise your stress levels and build resilience.
However, the best tool in your owner’s tool box should be your purpose.
Define the purpose of your business to build confidence
Define the purpose or the reason you created your business. This often stems from a place of passion and drive. Maybe you’ve discovered a niche in the market from your own experience or maybe you just love what you do and want to share it with other people.
Finding your brand Ikigai is a great first step to giving your business a defined purpose, it will encourage you, motivate you, and remind you of the big picture.
What is brand ikigai?
Ikigai is a Japanese framework for finding your purpose and meaning for life. It’s a tool you can use to find that special something that will sustain your motivation. Not only can it be applied to yourself as an individual, think about your businesses Ikigai, your brand purpose. Why does your business exist? What purpose does it serve that can be a sustainable driver?
Finding your brand purpose
Defining your purpose will keep you focused on building a truly authentic brand. Consider each of these questions deeply and reflect on your reasons for starting your business.
What do you love doing?
What are you good at?
What does the world need?
What can you be paid for?
You should start to see a central purpose arising, define it clearly as something you will remember. Carry the thought of it with you as you face the many challenges of owning a small business.
Purpose driven confidence
When you are knee-deep in difficult decisions, look at your brand purpose and remember why all the hard work is worth it. Ask yourself how each decision can be in service to your purpose and meaning in life.
Act with confidence in knowing that the decisions you make today are for the greater purpose of your brand.
Brand marketing is a long-term plan for a business to position itself in the market as the preferred option among buyers. A brand marketing strategy is about how your business connects with your audience emotionally and humanly.
Marketing is, after all – human – it’s about connecting a product or service with those who are in need of or want it. It’s about telling the story of how your solution can provide the change your customer desires. Why people should buy your product and the reason to fall in love with your brand and feel aligned with your purpose.
Your brand is more than just your logo and your advertising, it’s the soul of your company and the north star to every decision you make. For small business owners looking to create love for their brand, this simple framework will help you to develop a brand marketing strategy. We call it a Brand Playbook.
What is a Brand Playbook?
A Brand Playbook is a guiding document that aids consistency, collaboration and clarity across your business. It is a living, breathing document that helps you make strategic decisions about your business, your marketing and your overall vision for the future. It’s a bit like your business bible, you and the people who work for you have to believe in it.
When considering how to build an authentic brand, everyone on your team should be singing from the same song book. Because when you don’t, your customers get confused about who they are doing business with and they second guess their decision to part with their money. Consistent brand building creates trust from your customers which leads to your greater share of the market. Keep reading to learn more about how to build your brand marketing strategy consistently and authentically.
Components of a Brand Playbook
There are four main components of a Brand Playbook that you should consider carefully and define clearly before diving into any marketing or business decision, these are your vision, mission, position and behaviour. Without a Brand Playbook as your north star, how do you make strategic business decisions with confidence? Gut feelings can only get you so far, and not everyone in the business will have access to your gut!
Every small business owner or entrepreneur will tell you – to scale your business, you cannot do it alone. With this brand marketing strategy your team will be empowered to make decisions with confidence.
A brand vision is a statement that describes why your company exists.
Guiding
Your vision will act as your company’s north star. When reviewing the past quarter of activity of your business, you should hold up your vision statement and ask – ‘What progress have we made in achieving our brand vision?’ It should hold your business accountable for what it sets out to do and be a tool at decision-making time. When considering who to hire, who to partner with and what services or product to develop, they should all strongly align with your brand vision.
Inspirational
Your vision should inspire customers to want to do business with you and your staff to want to work for you. It should be something that people can align with and feel something towards. Your brand vision should give your staff a purpose and a reason to jump out of bed in the morning – they should be able to believe in what they are doing and feel like they are making the difference you set out to make.
Lofty
Your vision should be aspirational, almost to the point where you wonder if you’re dreaming. You should aim high and make it something that will change the world in a significant way. It should be something that will sustain your company vision for a long time. Don’t make it something that can be achieved within the next 3 years. Think of a purpose that will be big enough to allow your company to grow long into the future. Once you have created a powerful vision statement you can then shorten it down into a memorable slogan.
Examples of vision statements:
Create your own brand vision
How to create a vision statement
Start by gathering your team, get in a room and invite the founders of the company, learn their story and document the businesses origins. Don’t be a hero and write it yourself, get as many opinions and eyes on it. Simon Sinek’s Start with why is a great read to get you in the right frame of mind.
A brand mission defines who you serve (your market) and what you do (your products and services).
Defining these two things as your mission statement will give your team direction and focus. As part of this focus you should have a solid understanding of the problems your customers face and the value your products and services bring to them. It’ll help make your product and services better and your messaging clearer.
Personas
Define who you serve. Create target personas and think about their demographics, psychographics, and influences. Understand their pain points, desires and challenges. There are often different motivators for a B2C customer than a B2B customer. Consider the buyer journey and the decision making process. At the end of the day you are marketing to humans, you must understand them to be able to serve them.
Market research
Now you have identified who you are targeting, it’s a good idea to validate your efforts by ensuring your target market is large enough. Make sure you gather research from valid sources and go and speak to as many real humans as you possibly can. You may find that this exercise informs and enhances your personas and can help you develop better products and services and target the right people for marketing campaigns.
Define what you do
This may change as you refine your products and services to better serve your market. It’s a crucial step to not only give your team a clear direction on what they work on every day, but to inform your customers on what exactly you can do for them. What are you selling? Sometimes marketing messaging can be so focused about the benefit that they forget to mention what they are actually selling.
Position
To strongly position your brand you need to be aware of market competitors. You should have an understanding of the competitor landscape to not only measure your market share but to understand how your customer might compare your solution to a competitor’s. Learn what other businesses do by conducting competitor research. Use this knowledge to market your offering more effectively than the competition.
Competitor analysis
Most small businesses have never researched their competitors which is an alarming discovery for most. Oftentimes they are too scared to look outside the walls of their company and would rather not know who they are competing with.
“Many businesses find themselves wrong-footed, not because they did something wrong, but because they failed to anticipate changes in the market.” Source: Qualtrics
Simple competitor research can be done by searching online for similar solutions in your market. Be brave, do your research, understand what’s out there and then build a strategy to offer something better to the market.
Perceptual maps
Once you have identified who your biggest competitors are it’s a useful exercise to develop perceptual maps. A perceptual map is a visual representation of where your brand sits in the minds of your customers in comparison to other solutions in the market. The key here is not to use your biassed opinion, but to gather real feedback from customers in the market. Understand what’s most important to them when they are considering your solution. This will help you differentiate your unique selling proposition (USP).
Branding
The biggest confusion out there is making an assumption that ‘brand’ is just the logo and the font of your business. Brand is about the soul and meaning of your business. Your branding on the other hand, is about the visual elements that become the visual identifier for people to associate a certain feeling for your brand when they see your branding. There are a few things to consider when creating your branding and positioning its visual elements in the market.
Make sure your branding is unique to your competitors. Stand out from the crowd.
Think about colour psychology in relation to how you want your customers to feel.
Choose colours and visual elements that are harmonious and not jarring.
Get input from your customers, what aesthetics do they like?
Hire a graphic designer to help develop your branding guidelines.
Stick to your brand guidelines
Brand Managers will tell you that sticking to your guidelines is one of the most important rules for building a brand. Sticking to brand guidelines is not just about using consistent language and messaging, it’s also about creating recognition of your solution through the branding applied. The more people who associate your logo or your brand colours with your solution the more recognition, brand awareness and brand love you can gain.
Behaviour
Brand behaviour or brand values are a set of guiding principles for how you behave with people in the market. It’s how you make them feel, how you talk to them, and how you build relationships with them. This is where your brand can come to life.
Brand values
Brand values are often the boring, corporate list of words that don’t mean anything to anyone. You know the ones, integrity, excellence, innovation, blah, blah, blah. Your values should be meaningful, they should be actionable (verbs), and they should be developed with your team’s input not from the business owner alone.
Authenticity is a key part of building a brand and growing your audience. However, when you have defined a specific set of values to work towards, it can be difficult to come across as authentic, especially if you have had to ‘tell’ your staff how to act.
Actions
There are tactics to make this easier and it starts with clarity, and ensuring you are hiring the right kind of people who align with the values you have defined. You cannot simply tell your staff to be ‘innovative’ and expect them to understand what you mean. Make sure your values are ingrained in the way you do business. For example, if you want to create a culture of innovation, give your staff the creative space and permission to think wildly about a problem.
Software company Atlassian has done an incredible job of building a culture of innovation. Likewise if you want to create a culture of ‘integrity’, make sure you are setting a good example of what that means. Reward your staff for ‘living and breathing’ the brand values to encourage the same behaviour from the rest of your team.
Relationships
Relationships are a key part of business growth, but humans are messy and it can be difficult to create a consistent experience for customers when multiple members of your team are involved in delivering the solution. Think about the customer journey and the experience you want them to have with your brand. How do they feel when they speak to different members of your team? Do they feel like those people are giving them the same experience?
HubSpot does a great job of creating a company we love, by making every touchpoint feel the same. You feel from every sales rep, onboarding specialist and customer support staff that they truly want you to succeed. It should feel like they are on your team and rooting for you. You walk away from an interaction with them having ‘felt’ like you know them and appreciate the culture they have as a company, and it makes you fall a little bit in love with their brand.
Personality and tone
Define your brand language guidelines to describe how you want your brand to sound. Is it cheeky? Is it formal? Do you have a mascot or character that helps bring your brand to life? Make a list of do’s and don’ts with examples of written copy for each. Define the words you use and the meaning they have. Again, think about how you want your customers to feel when reading or hearing your words and tone. What emotions do you want them to associate with your brand?
Defining the personality and tone of your brand is equally as important as the visual branding guideline. Your brand language guidelines will allow your staff members to individually produce consistent work that sounds like your brand. By having these guidelines in place you will be able to build trust with your customers and meet their expectations at every touchpoint.
So there you have it – a guide on how to develop a brand marketing strategy. Next comes the fun part, putting it into practice and using it to grow your business, consistently and authentically.
Use your Brand Playbook when making key strategic decisions about your business. As your north star, it can guide you towards your purpose, allowing you to make business decisions with confidence. Start building your playbook today!
