Good positioning doesn’t begin with what a business wants to say. It begins with understanding what the audience already cares about.
There is a tendency to make marketing positioning sound more complicated than it really is.
Businesses spend time developing mission statements, brand values, taglines and lists of things that supposedly make them different, and while all of those things can have a place, I think there is a much more useful question to ask first:
Why would this particular audience care?
That question has become increasingly important to me as I have moved beyond learning the individual components of digital marketing and started thinking more about how those components connect.
When I first started learning SEO, I was naturally focused on things like keywords, rankings and traffic. Then CRO introduced another question: what happens when somebody actually arrives? Learning analytics added another layer: what are people actually doing?
More recently, I have become much more interested in the question that comes before all of those things.
Who are we actually trying to reach, what do they care about and why would they choose this particular solution?
That is where marketing positioning starts.
Marketing Positioning Isn’t Just A Tagline
One of the easiest mistakes to make is to confuse positioning with messaging.
A business might describe itself as innovative, customer-focused, premium, trustworthy or different. It might have a beautifully designed website and an impressive tagline sitting underneath the logo.
None of that necessarily tells me why I should care.
Marketing positioning is not simply what the organisation wants to say about itself. It is the place the organisation is trying to occupy in the mind of a particular audience.
That distinction matters.
If a company says it provides “innovative marketing solutions”, I might understand what the company wants me to believe about it, but I still don’t know whether it is relevant to me.
What problem does it solve?
Who is it solving that problem for?
What makes its approach different from the alternatives?
Why should I believe that it can actually deliver the outcome I want?
Those are positioning questions.
And they are much more useful than simply asking, “What should our tagline be?”
Start With A Real Audience
Good marketing positioning becomes difficult when the audience is vague.
“Small businesses” isn’t really an audience.
“People interested in health” isn’t particularly useful either.
Even “men aged 40–55” doesn’t tell you very much.
A useful audience description needs to go beyond demographics and start thinking about behaviour, problems, motivations and circumstances.
What are they trying to achieve?
What frustrates them?
What have they already tried?
What are they worried about?
What alternatives are they considering?
What might prevent them from taking action?
These are the questions that start making an audience real.
This is something I have been thinking about through The Frictionless Man as well. I created “Mark” as a working audience rather than simply deciding that I wanted to write about midlife men.
Mark is a professional in midlife who is reasonably successful but increasingly aware that work, family, health, decisions and the general demands of life are consuming more mental energy than they used to.
That gives me something to work with.
It doesn’t mean every man in his forties will behave like Mark and it certainly doesn’t mean I have statistically proven that Mark exists in exactly this form.
It is a hypothesis, and that distinction is important.
Good marketing doesn’t require you to pretend that you know everything about your audience. It requires you to develop a useful understanding of them and then remain willing to test whether that understanding is correct.
Understand The Problem Behind The Problem
I think this is where marketing positioning becomes particularly interesting.
People don’t always buy a solution because of the obvious problem.
They buy because of what that problem means to them.
Imagine someone saying:
“I don’t have enough time.”
The obvious problem is lack of time.
But perhaps the deeper problem is that they feel constantly behind.
Perhaps the emotional consequence is that they never feel properly switched off.
Perhaps what they actually want isn’t another productivity system, they want to feel more in control of their day.
That changes the positioning.
The product hasn’t necessarily changed, but the audience’s understanding of the problem has.
This is one reason I have become increasingly interested in mental load as a concept. The person experiencing mental overload may not describe their problem using those words at all.
They might say:
“I can’t switch off.”
“I’ve got too much going on.”
“My brain never stops.”
“I’m tired even when I haven’t done that much.”
Those statements are much more useful from a marketing perspective because they reveal the language and underlying problem the audience is actually experiencing.
This is also where keyword research becomes more interesting than simply looking for high-volume search terms. As I explored in Keyword Research: Understanding Search Intent, Not Just Search Volume, the words people use can provide clues about what they are actually trying to accomplish.
Search behaviour can help you understand the problem.
Positioning then asks:
Given what we now understand about that problem, where should our organisation sit in relation to it?
What Are You Actually Competing Against?
When businesses think about marketing positioning, I think they often make the mistake of looking only at competitors.
Who else sells the same product?
Who has the highest market share?
Who ranks above us?
Who has the biggest social following?
Those questions can be useful, but competition is often much broader than another company selling something similar.
You might actually be competing against doing nothing.
Or continuing with the existing solution, or solving the problem internally, or using a cheaper alternative or maybe simply deciding that the problem isn’t important enough to deal with yet.
This is particularly important because customers don’t always compare five competing products and select the best one.
Sometimes they don’t buy anything.
Understanding that changes how you think about positioning.
If the biggest barrier isn’t another competitor but the audience believing that their existing solution is “good enough”, then positioning needs to address that belief.
If the audience doesn’t understand that a problem exists in the first place, your marketing needs to create awareness before it can create preference.
If the audience understands the problem but doesn’t trust the available solutions, credibility becomes much more important.
The positioning problem is therefore different depending on what the audience already believes.
Find The Intersection
At this point, I think a useful way to approach positioning is to look for an intersection between four things.
What the audience needs.
What the audience already believes and values.
What alternatives already offer.
What the organisation can credibly deliver.
The sweet spot is where those four things meet.
If an organisation is brilliant at something nobody particularly cares about, it has a problem.
If the audience wants something the organisation cannot credibly deliver, it has another problem.
If competitors already own the territory you’re trying to occupy, simply claiming that you’re different isn’t enough.
And if the organisation is trying to appeal to everybody, there may not be enough specificity for anybody to feel that the proposition is particularly relevant to them.
This is why I don’t think good positioning necessarily makes a business sound bigger.
Sometimes it makes the business sound more specific.
And that can be much more powerful.
A Simple Marketing Positioning Framework
Once the audience, problem and alternatives are clearer, you can start articulating the positioning.
I like reducing this to four questions:
Who is this for?
What problem are we solving?
Why is our solution relevant or different?
Why should the audience believe us?
You can turn those questions into a simple positioning statement:
For [audience] who [problem or need], [organisation] provides [solution/category] that [meaningful difference], because [reason to believe].
The template itself isn’t particularly sophisticated.
That’s the point.
The difficult work isn’t filling in the blanks.
The difficult work happens beforehand when you decide whether you’ve actually understood the audience, whether the problem matters, whether the difference is meaningful and whether the organisation has evidence to support the claim.
A positioning statement shouldn’t create a strategy out of thin air.
It should capture the strategy you’ve already thought through.
Positioning Comes Before Messaging
This is another distinction I think is easy to miss.
Marketing positioning and messaging aren’t the same thing.
Positioning answers:
What should this audience understand about us?
Messaging asks:
How do we communicate that idea?
Content then asks:
What do we consistently talk about?
Channels ask:
Where should we communicate it?
Measurement asks:
How will we know whether any of this is working?
When you look at marketing this way, the individual activities begin to make much more sense.
You don’t choose Instagram because somebody told you that Instagram is important.
You don’t write a blog because every business should have a blog.
You don’t run an SEO campaign because traffic sounds good.
You start with the organisation’s objective, understand the audience, establish the positioning and then decide what channels and activities can help communicate that position and move the audience towards the desired behaviour.
That is much closer to how I now think about marketing strategy.
Marketing Positioning Can Change The Customer Journey
Good positioning also affects what happens after someone discovers you.
Imagine two websites selling essentially the same type of product.
The first says:
“High-quality solutions for modern businesses.”
The second says:
“For small professional services firms that have outgrown spreadsheets but aren’t ready for an expensive enterprise system.”
The second statement immediately gives me something to identify with.
If I am that person, I understand that this might be for me.
If I’m not, I can move on.
That might sound like a disadvantage, but I don’t think it is.
Effective marketing positioning isn’t necessarily about attracting everyone.
It is about making the right audience recognise relevance quickly.
That is particularly important when you think about conversion.
Getting more people onto a website isn’t automatically useful if the people arriving don’t understand why the product is relevant to them.
This is one of the lessons I have taken from my own experiments with The Frictionless Man.
I have seen how easy it is to become interested in clicks and traffic because those numbers are visible and satisfying.
But more visitors don’t necessarily mean better engagement.
And more clicks don’t necessarily mean better audience alignment.
At some point, you have to ask a more uncomfortable question:
Did we attract the people we actually wanted to attract, and did they understand what we were offering them?
That is a positioning question as much as it is a traffic question.
Positioning Should Be Testable
I also don’t think positioning should be treated as something that gets written in a strategy document and then forgotten.
It is a hypothesis.
You believe that a particular audience has a particular problem, that your solution is relevant to them and that a particular message will make that relevance clear.
Then you test it.
You might test different headlines, compare different landing pages, analyse search behaviour, look at which content attracts the right visitors or examine conversion rates, engagement or qualitative feedback.
The data won’t necessarily tell you exactly what the marketing positioning should be, but it can tell you whether your assumptions appear to be working.
This is where I think SEO, CRO, analytics and strategy begin to come together.
SEO can help you understand what people are searching for.
Analytics can help you understand what they do once they arrive.
CRO can help you understand where friction exists between interest and action.
Positioning helps determine whether you are attracting and communicating with the right people in the first place.
They aren’t separate disciplines, they’re different parts of the same marketing problem.
What I’ve Learned About Positioning
I started my digital marketing journey thinking primarily about the mechanics.
How do I optimise a page?
How do I improve rankings?
How do I increase conversions?
How do I get more traffic?
Those are still useful questions.
But I’ve gradually become more interested in the question sitting underneath them.
What are we actually trying to achieve, who are we trying to achieve it with, and why should that audience care?
That shift has probably been one of the most important parts of my learning.
The Frictionless Man has been useful because it gives me somewhere to test those ideas rather than simply reading about them.
I don’t have enormous traffic numbers or thousands of customers, and I’m not going to pretend that I do.
What I have is a small experimental environment where I can form a hypothesis, create something, put it in front of an audience, observe what happens and then reconsider the assumption.
That process has taught me something I don’t think I fully appreciated when I started.
Marketing isn’t simply about getting more people to see something.
It is about making the right thing meaningful to the right people.
Final Thought
I don’t think marketing positioning needs to be complicated.
But I do think it needs to be honest.
Start with a real audience rather than an imaginary mass market. Understand the problem they’re actually experiencing rather than the problem you want to sell them. Look at the alternatives, including doing nothing, and identify what your organisation can credibly offer that is genuinely relevant.
Only then start thinking about the message.
Because the strongest positioning isn’t the cleverest sentence in the strategy document.
It is the moment when the right person sees what you’ve said and thinks:
“That’s for someone like me.”
And perhaps that is the simplest way I’ve found to think about positioning.
Don’t start by asking what you want your audience to hear.
Start by understanding what they need to recognise.
Here’s to success (and fewer 404s)
Chris
