Customer-Centric Positioning Answers Unspoken Customer Desires

How competitive positioning makes your website findable, desirable to the best users, & offers attractive options that appeal to your ideal customer action profile.

How to make your website content positioning create a unique perspective about your ideal customer's wants and needs that attracts more traffic and users.

Your most important business asset is your customer. It makes sense then to design your business around the problems and wants of a group of ideal customers. When you do this with originality that has appeal, you can consider that your business is competitively positioned and differentiated within your category.

Very few businesses have a unique position.

Positioning is a business strategy that seeks to create a unique solution to problems, and serve that problem solving in such a way that competitors are unable to copy your positioning efficiently or cost-effectively.

If you still think that positioning is about creating a unique tagline, you're missing the point of competitive positioning that creates competitive advantage. It affects and is the DNA of your business. It allows you to become a category of one protected by either your activities and processes (how you do what you do); your decision about your specific target group of customers and needs (who you do it for); and recognition of the value of doing something differently than competitors.

What I want to focus on is the concept of a customer 1st positioning which is customer-centric by design - and how content marketing can spread and explain your uniqueness and create difference and perspective as well.

One problem with content marketing is that many businesses and individuals approach content marketing from a tactical perspective. Their one and over-riding concern is all about how to create content, and how to get enough of it for their needs.

A symptom of this type of approach is content that misses the customer mark - lacklustre content that none of your customers, leads or prospects cares about. Stuff that's the opposite of engaging.

Unfortunately many businesses lack the vision, time, and resources to create a unique position as they are focused on operational concerns and short-term fixes. A rigorous content marketing strategy can help a business create and adopt a competitive position over time, as internal processes and strategic decisions are made and acted upon to create differentiation.

Premium brand content supports your business positioning by always having a unique perspective on market trends, customer wants and needs, and other related issues that affect your customers, leads and prospects. The idea is simply to use your positioning as the basis for a one-on-one conversation with your targets.

If you were selling rose-colored glasses, then your perspective would arise from looking through rose-colored glasses. That perspective would inform your discussion of vision, glasses, fashionable glasses, and whatever else might be important in solving your target's problem. (presumably wanting to see a more optimistic world, and needing vision correction)

An example: if your positioning is about doing 1 thing only, for a wide market of customers, then you might base every content element on the depth of experience and understanding your business has with regard to that 1 thing. Unclear?

By making positioning an integral component of your content marketing, you ensure relevancy and focus for your target audience. And when you understand the wants of your targets, creating discussion around those wants, from the unique position and perspective you have on your difference becomes relatively straightforward.

The result is more content elements that solve your target's problems. That alone aids the target's search and discovery process. It's the kind of content that people want to read, because it's important to them and it's different from all the other content that either repeats or isn't useful. And it makes your

I suggest that customer 1st positioning helps your business connect with customers, leads and prospects faster, and on a more personal level than generic content. And the goal of all this content is to pre-sell the targets on why they should choose your "wants solution" over what the competition offers. So doesn't it make sense to produce and publish content that starts with the premise of your difference and builds from there?

I suggest you critically review the content being published in your category, including your own. If you were to hide the business name and author, could the content be applied to a specific business? If not, that content sounds and looks like generic, interchangeable content that isn't aimed at solving your target's problems in a unique way.

I agree it isn't always possible to brainstorm and create content that fully supports the businesses positioning. There are tools you can use, such as a creative strategy that can help you manage and streamline the process.

With careful planning and attention to detail, I believe every business is able to incorporate their positioning in the content they produce. The result is a richer viewer/user experience that helps to build relationships faster. And as your relationship with the viewer/user deepens to that of lead nurturing, the opportunity to shorten the buy cycle presents itself.