It’s Your Positioning Strategy, Stupid – Part 3

In the 1st part of the series “It’s Your Positioning Strategy, Stupid – Part 1”, I covered why positioning is extremely important for gaining mind share amongst your clients.

While in the previous article “It’s Your Positioning Strategy, Stupid – Part 2”, I covered why personal branding is important and how you should go about building your personal brand.

Now in this 3rd series of “It’s Your Positioning Strategy, Stupid”, I will be covering the aspect of positioning your commercial websites and products. The material covered will be applicable to both information products and physical products sold online.

Why is Positioning Your Website And Product Important?

If you are a new entrant in the e-commerce community, you will definitely find many strong competitors already anchored in the different niches. And despite the 1,173,109,925 (source: www.internetworldstats.com June 2007) internet users world wide, you can be sure that majority of online purchasers already have their favorite websites to purchase from. Furthermore, new websites numbering the tens of thousands pop up everyday, eager to be the next Amazon or eBay.

With the intensive competition merely for eyeball attention, you would need to position your website to stand out from the masses. So how do you go about doing it?

1. Select a Niche

Despite being one of the most common advice given to online marketers, a huge percentage of websites still fail prey to the “I want to appeal to everyone” trap. I did a search for “online mall” on google and it returned 45 million websites. The first one being www.super-shopping-mall.com which was registered in 2002. From what I gather, its basically a portal with a list to a vast variety of products of which it is probably an affiliate of.

Its traffic? Alexa shows a ranking of 1,668,834. It’s a ghost town and no wonder. It did not have a specialized niche which it was strong for. Same goes for the other websites returned in the search results.

Is starting up a shopping portal in today’s age possible? Yeah sure, if you have the big marketing dollars numbering in the millions to start with, then maybe, yes maybe you might have a shot.

Amazon started out selling books, and further expanded their category offerings in the later years, offering beauty products to even Pampers. (Check out the Pampers link here) through different merchants. This is still a hotly debated topic of between marketing experts, of whether Amazon is sacrificing short-term profits through this form of brand dilution for long term value and sustainability. Sure some people will still buy these products from Amazon because of its brand name, but for me, I think I will stick to just buying books.

Zappos started out selling a vast selection in shoes in terms of brands, styles, colors, sizes, and widths shoes in 1999 but eventually ventured into bags, accessories and apparels. With sales of $597 Million in 2006 and projected sales of $800 in 2007, guess they aren’t complaining.

But the main crux of the issue is that even the big boys started off in niches, being specialists of their field before expanding their product offerings after amassing a huge clientele base.

Information internet marketers are also specialists do the same thing with their 1 page sales letters. They have 1 product to sell, and probably have an upsell through a special one time offer. John Reese is probably setting up a mega membership/mart at income.com for IMers soon too. But these aren’t the ones with the problems, it’s the affiliate marketers who are spoilt for choice through the myriad affiliate programs available and just bombard their prospects with different sorts of product offerings at their websites.

If you are an advanced marketer, you would probably not have this problem. But this is a common problem for newbies.

2. Differentiate or Die

Stealing the title from Jack Trout’s book, you have to differentiate or watch your business crumble, earn mediocre returns at best. The internet has given your website access to the millions of prospects worldwide, but it has also taken down the barriers to entry. A manufacturer in China, Vietnam or Cambodia with savvy enough internet marketing skills will be able to beat your pants off in price. Product designs can be copied the very day itself and sold the next day. They might be the very same supplier where you are getting your goods from.

How do you differentiate? Have a brand story…

Don’t you just love a good story? Well everyone does. And similarly for your website and business, it is essential that you have a brand story. The story and meaning of a brand is its most valuable and irreplaceable asset. Stories capture our imaginations, intrigue and engage us. And more importantly, having a brand story greatly helps customers in remembering your brand.

We are hard-wired, as a species, to connect to stories. That is why some of the most effective teachers throughout history were master storytellers. We’ll quickly forget carefully-crafted statements, and even the most profound principles, but we’ll remember a compelling story, sometimes for decades. And even pass it down for generations.

Let us take the popular cosmetic brand SK II as an example, they talk about how a scientist visited a sake brewery and noticed how an old lady’s hands were soft and youthful. He held multiple tests and eventually discovered that the secret lay in an all-natural yeast derivative, which they call Pitera®. Positioning Pitera as the secret ingredient that is present in all SK II products, the brand has emerged as market leaders in many countries worldwide.

For info-products, most of the better selling products usually tell a story behind the product creation and hence the eventual creation of the product. Make the story stick, like I said before. People just love stories. Even master copywriters talk about how weaving a story into the sales copy attains higher sales conversions.

Don’t have a story? Well create one…if you brainstorm the benefits of your product long enough. You should be able to come out with one. I’m not telling you to lie outright, but to squeeze out one.

How did I get started in internet marketing? A few years back, my ex-girlfriend was down with a terrible fever and had to take medicine at stipulated timings. So I stayed up all night long to feed her the medicine. And whist staying up, I surfed and came upon the Story of the Singaporean Joe Kumar (Read about Joe Kumar Here) and how he managed to earn tens of thousands of dollars quickly online and also destroyed his reputation. His story (the positive side) inspired me to learn more about internet marketing and I never looked back then. Back then, Ewen Chia was a small fry, not the affiliate master revered now, Michael Filsaime was just starting out and Michael Fortin still had hair. My only regret back then was not going into it full steam but merely dabbling here and there.

Anyhow that was my story. Ain’t really a good one but heck it can potentially be tweaked to work for sales copy. So just think up a brand story for your info-products or physical products.

How do you differentiate? Focus on your Unique Selling Proposition

Yes this has been drilled time and time over and over again by marketers. But bear with me for a minute. Or rather bear with Marketing Whiz Jay Abraham for a minute and read this.

A USP is that distinct and appealing idea that sets you and your business, or practice, favorably apart from every other generic competitor. The long-term marketing and operational successes I help you achieve will, ultimately, be helped or hurt by the USP you decide upon.

The possibilities for building a USP are unlimited. It’s best, however, to adopt a USP that dynamically addresses an obvious void in the marketplace that you can honestly fill. Beware: It’s actually counter-productive to adopt a USP if you cannot fulfill the promise.

Most business owners don’t have a USP, only a “me too,” rudderless, nondescript, unappealing business that feeds solely upon the sheer momentum of the marketplace. There’s nothing unique; there’s nothing distinct. They promise no great value, benefit, or service — just “buy from us” for no justifiable, rational reason.

Try it. With paper and pen, prepare a one-paragraph statement of your new USP. At first, you will have trouble expressing it tightly and specifically. It may take two or three paragraphs or more. That’s okay. Ruthlessly edit away the generalities, and tenaciously focus on the crispest, clearest, most specific promise you could possibly hold out. Then, rework it and hack away the excess verbiage or hazy statements until you have a clearly defined, clearly apparent Unique Selling Proposition a customer can immediately seize upon. And then, integrate your USP into every marketing aspect of your business, such as display advertising, direct mail and field selling.

Full article available here

Read this on Effective USP Components by Larry Lim, MarketingSphere.com

When formulating and implementing your USP, it’s crucial that you bear in mind the following components:
1. Your USP must be truly unique
2. It must be strong enough to excite your target market and get them talking about it
3. It mustn’t be easily imitated or copied

Look, anybody can claim that they provide the best service in town - “We’re The Number One Service Provider In America”. Do you think this is credible? Of course not. It’s lukewarm and is an empty promise because you can’t measure it and you can’t hold them accountable and people can easily see through it. USP such as this can in fact harm your business instead of helping it.

Your USP really needs to pack a punch.
Now, let’s take a look at a good example:
“Your Parcel Delivered To You The Very Next Day, or It Costs You Nothing!”

The above is a powerful USP. As you can see, you can actually measure it and hold the Company accountable; the Company actually guarantees the delivery of your parcle the very next day or it doesn’t cost you a cent.
Can you imagine what this will do to the Company? It’ll put it head and shoulders above its competition.

Full article available here

Pepper up and strengthen your product(s) with endorsements. Zappos.com offers free overnight shipping, a 1 year return Policy and 110% Price Protection Policy (Read here for details)

Now try beating that!!

Or the more important question is…what are you doing to differentiate your website, business and products?

In the meantime…if you haven’t signed up yet, you should…

Click here to Download The Strategic Domination White Paper for FREE

It reveals the strategy that any business owner, online or offline should be adopting to maximize profits in the shortest time possible. All of us have limited resources, and we owe it to ourselves to only concentrate on the areas which yield the highest profit.

Lastly, the beauty of it all is that the concept is universal and applicable to every business owner. You have to face the million dollar question now, “Do you have a strategy or are you just waiting for that lucky break?”

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