📂 Use “The Only Test” to craft compelling positioning as an obvious choice for ideal customers

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

The only {product descriptor} for {target market} that {primary outcome or benefit}.

Whether it’s on a landing page, a sales pitch, demo, or even a casual conversation… too often, founders just jump straight into the features, how it works, or listing vague benefits.

“We use machine learning to increase ROI”

“Our next-generation technology blows the competition away!”

“{Insert vague headline that makes your head turn sideways here}”

And it sucks.

Visitors don’t turn into leads. Leads don’t turn into customers. And customers don’t turn into advocates for you.

And that’s a huge problem, because (1) you’ll probably only get one shot with someone visiting your website (2) you’ve only got a lead’s attention for so long and (3) there are probably a hundred other pieces of software like yours fighting for their attention.

You can’t afford to waste these opportunities.

When a channel doesn’t work, leads aren’t converting, and you’re having issues with your marketing funnel, the issue isn’t with your channel, leads, or funnel — it’s with your offer.

Here’s what we want to happen with your messaging and positioning:

• People are immediately hooked when they land on your website
• You make internet strangers feel understood, appreciated, and compelled to keep listening to what you have to say
• You stick in their minds, so that even if they get distracted or decide to leave it for another day, you’ll be in the back of their mind thinking about your product(s)
• People immediately understand what you do, how you can help, and why your product is the best solution for them

To be honest, this is probably the hardest one. It requires the most critical thinking and is the least intuitive of the bunch.

ConvertKit hit a growth plateau until they decided to position themselves for creators. Instead of generalizing and targeting everyone, they focused in on bloggers, podcasters, video creators, and course creators.

Clubhouse, knew that this was the key from the beginning and actually went to market as the project management app for software development teams. And they’re doing very well.

So they only focus on software engineers and product managers at tech companies.

And now instead of just naming off your usual project management features, they can talk super specifically about features built just for software teams and how it helps them specifically.

One more Baremetrics customer, UpLaunch, built a marketing automation platform just for gyms. They’re doing very well, too.

But again, because they’re specifically targeting gym owners, people can self-select. I come to the site and immediately know that it’s not for me.

But a gym owner comes and is like wow, I can see this working. Now I don’t have to go do all this crazy set up and hacks and workarounds.

So make sure you’re really telling a compelling story crafted just for your customers that positions yourself as the best option for them. And be able to back up those claims with evidence by what your product enables them to do.

So make sure you’re really telling a compelling story crafted just for your customers that positions yourself as the best option for them. And be able to back up those claims with evidence by what your product enables them to do.

Positioning is a definitive statement about who your product is for and why customers should choose you over others.

I have to credit basically everything I know about positioning to April Dunford and her book Obviously Awesome, which is recommended reading and will link to.

One of her most classic positioning example is about when she joined a startup early in her career that was founded by a team of database experts. They built an innovative database, one that could quickly analyze massive amounts of data in a fraction of the time that normal databases could do it. But when they tried to sell the solution, most people wouldn’t even take a meeting with them. They would say, “We don’t need a database, we have Oracle”. For them, “database” meant a lot more than just an ability to do a fast query — their unique value was sidelined by everything else they trusted Oracle to do.

They ultimately solved their problem by re-positioning themselves as a Business Intelligence tool. The new positioning put their differentiator — fast data analysis on a large amount of data — at the centre of their positioning and got them away from the “So how are you better than Oracle” trap.

So how do you do positioning?

If you’ve ever seen one of those fill in the blank positioning statements, please do yourself a favor and completely unlearn it. Wipe it from your hard drive. Never think about it again. It’s a complete waste and unproductive.

Just like we talked about earlier with customer research, we can’t just fill in the blanks. Anything fill in the blanks is oversimplified or probably plain wrong.

Instead, there’s a proven method for discovering, iterating, and refining positioning that allows you to take a definitive stance you can use in your messaging.

It’s important now to hit the “reset button” and let go of all pre-conceived notions about your current positioning, market categories, where you think you fit, and biases about how you think it should be positioned.

Weak positioning is usually the result of hanging on to a “default” market position that is rooted in the history of the product idea.

Especially as time goes on and the product evolves, you can still be latching on to something that’s no longer an accurate representation of your product and it’s value.

Letting go of that historical baggage will help you get clear on where you are right now, the value you deliver today, and the best way to put that in the center of your positioning.

The first step in actually forming positioning is to make a short list of your best customers.

List Your True Competitive Alternatives

Again, this should be evident in the customer research you’ve already done.

The key questions or data points you want to draw from are:

• If they didn’t use your product, what would they use instead?
• And what have they tried in the past trying to solve this problem?
• What else could get the job done?

Categorize competitive alternatives by:

• Direct competitors: Solve the same problem in the same way
• Secondary competitors: Solve the same problem in a different way
• Indirect competitors: Solve a different problem with a conflicting outcome

Isolate Your Unique Attributes or Features

These are the things that make you unique and are the reason your product deserves to exist in the first place.

**Use plain english to describe everything that makes your offering unique.

You have features that no other solution has. You might have an activation model or pricing model, a proprietary process or other intellectual property that you and you alone can deliver, expertise or an opinionated way of doing things. This is what you want to capture.

It’s important to note that this includes things outside of just the product too, like customer support, training material, pricing, service, terms, anything that makes you stand out.

In this step you should list everything you have that makes your offering unique. Just list it all, in plain english.

Don’t get too hung up on the value those features deliver — in this step we just want to list things that you have that nobody else has.

Map the Attributes to Value

Now, ultimately customers don’t care about features — they care about what those features can do for them. This is the crux of your positioning.

Your positioning needs to be centered on the value that you alone can deliver for customers.

In this step, you want to translate how each unique feature provides value for your best customers. So each listed unique feature needs to be turned into a statement of how that feature is valuable to the customer.

In fact, each unique feature can be valuable in multiple ways. Your job is to just write out how each unique feature specifically helps the customer. Avoid vague blanket statements. Be as specific as you possibly can.

Also focus on how the value these unique features provides are a better than competing alternatives — direct, secondary, and indirect. Call them out by name. Address them specifically.

Stealing copy

The secret every great copywriter knows is that you actually don’t have to do all the writing yourself.

You can get others to write it for you.

But I don’t mean outsourcing it. I mean using the exact words and phrases your customers and potential customers use in your copy. Quite literally copy and pasting.

Why?

Because while there are many formulas you can use, which I’ll go through, the reason they’re formulas is because its the way our minds work.

And when someone is describing to you what they’re experiencing in an authentic way, they’re already telling you in a way that makes for great copywriting.

So go through your customer interviews, email threads, social media conversations, and online research and start pulling out the best pieces.

Go through your call transcriptions, survey results, and online sleuthing bookmarks to pick out the exact language that customers use to describe their problems, decision-making processes, and what brings them value.

Find a Market Frame of Reference that Puts Your Strengths at the Center and where you win

This is the final production step that helps customers understand who to compare you with (and that makes you look good next to them)

The goal here is to find a place where you win.

• Start with broad market categories: Do you win against others in this category? If not, move on to the next step.
• Go to market subcategories — segments of a category (industry, function, business size, etc): Do you win against others in a subcategory? If not, move on to the next step.
• Create your own category — a blend, invention, or hybrid of other categories or subcategories: Do you win against others who could potentially jump into this new category?

This whole part of the exercise can be expedited by knowing what customers switched from when they switched to you. Or asking them who else they considered when they were evaluating you and then why they ultimately decided to go with you.

Let’s take website builders for example:

• WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace all battle it out as general website builders that could be blogs, e-commerce sites, or standalone landing pages.
• Unbounce, Leadpages, and Instapage all battle it out as landing page builders specifically for static pages and usually for paid acquisition campaigns.
• Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Big Cartel, WooCommerce all battle it out as e-commerce website builders for selling physical products online.
• Webflow and Carrd are creating their own categories as no-code website builders or designer-centric website builders.

In other words, find a category or subcategory where you win.

—Corey

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