Positioning Strategy: How to Ensure Your Message Connects  ## Metadata - Author: [[Social Media Marketing Podcast]] - Full Title: Positioning Strategy: How to Ensure Your Message Connects - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/76badbc1-f3e9-47b8-a8cd-44a46931d830 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Positioning Is Foundation Not Feature List** - Positioning is the foundation of effective sales and marketing and must start with audience understanding, not features. - Good positioning educates, builds trust, and differentiates you from noisy competitors. Transcript: Michael Stelzner Love it. Okay. So we're here today to talk about really positioning. And there's a lot of businesses that are listening, a lot of marketers, entrepreneurs. And why is positioning of their message in their content so important? Said another way, when this is done well, if they pay really close attention to what we're going to talk about today, what's the upside? Jackie Hermes When we're talking about the positioning of a company, it's not the features of what you do, of your product or your service. It's a lot higher level than that. And it's really the foundation of effective sales and marketing. You don't know who you're talking to and how you're different and a lot about your competitors, you're really just adding to the noise. And there's so much noise right now. It's getting worse and worse, really, right? Like everyone has a social presence. Your inbox is flooded with emails. And I think that a lot of companies don't get this. They just start going out there talking about themselves and who they are. And they don't start with their why and understanding their audience and what their audience really cares about and then educating their audience and helping their audience care About them as a company before actually asking them for anything and giving to their audience, which a lot of companies just want to take, right? And ask for that demo or that consultation or that sale, which is natural. Of course, you want results, but you can't get them before you do the other work up front. Michael Stelzner So when they do it well, what happens? Jackie Hermes Yeah. I mean, you set the foundation for trust, right? So when you do it well, you are educating your audience, you are growing a following, you're increasing your web traffic and people are trusting you. For example, like I run my personal brand on LinkedIn, which I know is something that we've talked about previously. And I run that alongside my company brand. And we're not out there talking about us and just promoting our message and what we do. We're talking a lot more about education and our why and talking to people about the secrets of what they should be doing. I mean, a lot of what we're going to talk about today, right? And giving away all of those things and educating people in order to help people trust us and allow them to understand that we know what we're doing. And that's what every company needs to do. ([Time 0:08:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eca6a1ab-c3a7-476c-a603-9e387bebcd92)) - **Form And Test Clear Hypotheses** - Test hypotheses about market beliefs using research before committing to messaging changes. - Start with two or three hypotheses and refine them as research reveals new insights. Transcript: Jackie Hermes Would be what you think that your market believes about a category, the category that you're in about you as a company, about your competitors, right? So if we're thinking about like that Airbnb example, it might be that they're creating a hypothesis that people feel at home when they're with the people that they love. And that can be anywhere. And they're looking to prove or disprove that hypothesis. And usually we go into research and we have a bunch of hypotheses. And you find these hypotheses by talking to the company that we're working with, because from being in business, they have a bunch of hypotheses. We just went through an exercise with a client and they had a hypothesis that part of their offering was seen as old school by the market. They thought it was really valuable, but the market, they thought, didn't get it and saw it as old school. We were able to actually disprove that. And so now we get to go and market about why it's important and kind of reposition it. So if we go in with maybe two or three hypotheses and then you get ([Time 0:14:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/38318bf5-b76d-44ce-bd45-511fcbe86383)) - **Use Three Research Streams** - Use three research streams: public online forums, internal workshops, and stakeholder interviews. - Recruit customers, lost opportunities, and cold prospects for interviews to validate assumptions. Transcript: Jackie Hermes I want to give her a shout out because she's amazing. We look for three kinds of research. So we are doing research online. And that's not just research with like Forbes and any articles you can find. That is looking in Reddit threads. That's looking in Quora. Like where are people having the real conversations that aren't coming up in your Google alerts, right? And where you are usually doing research. Then we are doing interviews with our client that we're doing this work with. And those are usually structured group conversations where we might be talking about, you know, like developing their personas and their buyer's journey and stuff like that. And we kind of have developed these workshops that we're working with them just to understand what they know about the process or what they think they know, right? Because they have their perception. And then we're going out and doing stakeholder interviews as well. And the more you can do, the better, because those stakeholder interviews really can help prove or disprove all of the assumptions that are being made by a company. It's actually really crazy how many assumptions are made by a company that are sometimes not true because you have a company that sometimes was founded by someone that worked in an industry Five, six, seven, ten years ago. They saw a need and they're really deep in building the company. And in the meantime, the industry has changed and they don't really have that same perception that the company believes they did. So when we're doing interviews, we're doing interviews with current customers, lost opportunities, customers that bought from a competitor. Those are great. We do cold outreach. Those are really hard to get people to agree to. And they're super, super valuable. So if I were you trying to evaluate my hypotheses, I would be going on LinkedIn and I'd be reaching out to people. I'd be offering them like a gift card or something in order to get on the phone with me. ([Time 0:17:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5bad4613-d156-4566-9e65-442770ea8da2)) - **Mine Niche Forums For Raw Signals** - Mine Reddit, Quora, and niche communities to hear unfiltered conversations and pain points. - Use targeted searches and AI to surface themes, then fact-check outputs manually. Transcript: Michael Stelzner To get more into this. So when we are gathering information, what I heard is, first of all, there's public forums out there like Reddit, Quora, probably Facebook groups, these kinds of places where you can Go and you can find, presumably, the target audience. We presuppose because we're talking to marketers and we're marketers that we know who that target audience is. What are you looking for when you're out there looking inside of these public forums? Just help people understand what to look for. Are they actually posting things or are they more looking for things while they're out there? Jackie Hermes You can post, but you can't be promotional, right? So if you're going to Reddit and you're posting a question, you're doing it simply to get answers to your, and when you're doing things like doing research or outreach for cold interviews Too, you have to tell people, not a sales conversation. This is purely outreach because people are a little iffy about that. Michael Stelzner Well, it's research. You just tell them you're getting research, right? Jackie Hermes Yeah, right. And when you're a marketer, they're like, ooh, I'm not going to be sold to, right? Because I think people are a little scarred from those years where if they downloaded an e-book, they would be called 40 times, right? Michael Stelzner So what are we looking for when we're inside these forums and stuff? Jackie Hermes Yeah. So we're looking for, I mean, any conversations that apply to our research. Reddit is a really, really good place to do this. For example, we were recently doing research like this for a client that sells to insurance brokers. Who knew that there was an insurance broker community on Reddit that had 26,000 brokers in it? Oh, okay. Michael Stelzner I know. Jackie Hermes They didn't know that. We didn't know that until we found it. And it was a goldmine for people talking about the quoting process and things that were broken with it. And so pulling snippets from that snippets from the interviews, you know, you can kind of start to form this story and positioning. Michael Stelzner So are we looking for kind of certain words and phrases or pain points, like just give people some guidance on what is the goal that they're seeking? Jackie Hermes Yeah, it's more an information gathering exercise. So yes, you are looking for words and phrases that relate to your hypothesis. And it's honestly a little bit wider than that, where we're going and just reading threads that look interesting and that are related to the work that we're doing. You can't really find the new hypotheses. And sometimes it becomes really interesting when you're not exactly researching just the keywords. I'm not sure exactly how many hours our team spends doing the research specifically online, but I know it's a good amount of time and you have to scale it up and down based on the amount Of time that you have. Right. If you have 10 hours to do it, then you're probably researching specific keywords and you can use AI too, right? Like you can be asking ChatGPT to look for different things for you and also always ask if it's true. Yeah, I love that. You got to fact check it. ([Time 0:20:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/01b783ac-f4b6-49a0-8041-016ded2d1fa5)) - **Use AI To Synthesize Transcripts** - Aggregate interview transcripts and prompt AI to pull themes by hypothesis, iterating prompts for clarity. - Avoid feeding ChatGPT raw Google Docs; consolidate transcripts into digestible documents first. Transcript: Jackie Hermes AI can help with this a lot. So we'll stack all of the transcripts up in a document and put it in chat GPT and ask it to pull out themes in relation to each of the hypotheses. Michael Stelzner How would you do that? Like, would you say look for common themes or something like that? Or what are you asking for exactly? Jackie Hermes Often we're doing things like saying, here is one hypothesis and here are all of the interviews. Pull out, you know, commonalities or what's related to this hypothesis. Then you do the next one. Here's a hypothesis. Pull out what's related to this hypothesis. And then I think you have to prompt it in multiple different ways. And I wouldn't be feeding it things like Google Docs. ChatGPT really struggles with Google Docs. And we put all of the interviews in one document to make it easier to read. And you can say things like pull out themes, but it might be pull out themes related to this or pull out themes related to this, you know, like guide it a little bit more. ([Time 0:28:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2278a5b9-7ac7-4b1c-bfca-363fed071623)) - **Interpret Outliers Using Context** - Context matters when interpreting contradictory interview answers; roles and company size can explain outliers. - One dissenter doesn't disprove a hypothesis unless their profile matches your primary buyer persona. Transcript: Michael Stelzner Let's say that we find some stuff. We always will find some stuff where the hypothesis seems to be off a little bit, right? Give people guidance on what to do with the analysis that's coming out of these systems, because it's one thing to do research. It's another thing to interpret the results of the research and know what in the heck you should do with that. So let's talk a little bit about like any guidance you have for people on kind of biases or false positives. I don't know. I'm just using phrases that I'm familiar with that might be little gotchas that you got to watch out for. Jackie Hermes I think it's tempting to say, okay, we interviewed 15, 20 people and a couple of people made a really strong case against this. So it's disproved. And that's not always right. This actually just happened where we had a couple of people that were disproving a hypothesis. And then we went and looked at, okay, what is the size company that they're at? What are their roles specifically? What is their background? And what is the rest of the interview look like? And kind of trying to frame up why might they have answered this way? And does it make them more of an outlier? Michael Stelzner Oh, they might not have been in the target audience of what you're saying. You were talking to a customer potentially, is that what you're saying, or a prospect? Jackie Hermes Yeah, we were talking to someone that was in our decision maker category. And one of the guys, we were really at the end of our research. And so we were in the proving hypotheses. At the end of our research, we have our hypotheses pretty nailed down. And we're even giving them some of our positioning and saying, okay, how do you react to this? Would this resonate with you? And he really didn't like something that we said. And we went and looked at his background. And it was really interesting because he was not only an underwriter, but he was also in marketing. And those are very different roles, right? And he was at a much smaller company than most of the other ones that we interviewed. And so we were thinking through, okay, might we need to change the positioning for this different tier of company? Could he not like this because he came from more of a marketing background than this technical background and he's wearing these multiple hats? Did he answer this question differently because of this, right? So you have to really look at the context to understand, does it really prove or disprove? And yes, sometimes your hypothesis is disproven and then you have to pivot. And sometimes it gives you a new hypothesis, right? ([Time 0:30:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/27cec81a-5a29-4691-bc52-752cca2ccee3)) - **Scheduling Software vs WhatsApp Example** - A scheduling client used WhatsApp groups to manage shifts and wanted to enter long-term care facilities. - Research showed these teams would value a scheduling app more than their current WhatsApp process. Transcript: Jackie Hermes Well, we also just finished a strategy for a client that has scheduling software, so much less technical and they sell into long-term care facilities. And so it essentially helps them with scheduling nursing staff in long-term care facilities. And so we were looking to understand exactly what the value was and how they talk about something like this and whether or not they actually need a software like this. And so our hypotheses were around, what you're doing currently, does it make sense? And is it working for you? Because what they actually do now is they have all of their staff in WhatsApp groups and they just send out a message and then everyone responds. Michael Stelzner You're talking about the nurses are doing this or you're talking about the nursing manager. Jackie Hermes Yeah. Right. And so we created hypotheses around that and ask questions around whether the software would be valuable or whether what they were doing was working and then work to understand. And I can't remember what the specific hypothesis was, but yeah, I mean, you can create a hypothesis around. Michael Stelzner I like this. So in this example, the ideal target customer was using a group app, like WhatsApp. I know like so many different people that have a bunch of employees use these kind of little group apps to just say, Hey, I can't, I think about my daughter who works at this place. And like, she gets notification, Hey, I can't make it. Can somebody switch with me? You know what I mean? It's the same concept, right? They're just using this group broadcast kind of thing. What you were trying to prove out for this client is whether or not using a piece of software that made it effortless and just kind of handled all the backend, whether that would be valuable To this particular client. So you had to go in with the hypothesis that people would rather use an app that made it simple than just be pinged every time there was a scheduling change. Right? And presumably you proved that hypothesis true. Does that sound about right? Yeah. Okay. Jackie Hermes And they were already using this app in healthcare environments in hospitals, but they were looking to enter long-term care. And so that's an important piece of context. There you go. Michael Stelzner Got it. Oh, that's important. So they had a product that already was working in one niche, one industry, and they wanted to move into another industry. They wanted to make sure before they moved that this was, there was a market ready for something like this. ([Time 0:35:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/de15644b-3a1c-4db4-a55b-9a592abcb673)) - **Sell The Process To Get Buy-In** - Build buy-in throughout the research process by watching reactions and addressing objections early. - Run dry runs with internal champions and surface stakeholder quotes to win support before final presentation. Transcript: Jackie Hermes So much. And you know what? We used to struggle more with this too, and not just with these presentations, with marketing strategies, with any presentation, because people don't like surprises in general. I think some people, I guess, might like surprises. But when it comes to your business. Michael Stelzner Good surprises, not bad surprises. Jackie Hermes Right. But when it comes to your business and you've hired a consultant, you kind of want to know what to expect. You want to feel like you're in the know. And I think that this is actually where most like agencies, consultants, even internal marketers fall down because it's a process to get buy-in. And most people are just like, yes, we did the work. We're excited. We're going to go present it. And then it's like crickets. Unless you have a room of people that are really excited and they're really involved in the presentation, it feels so bad to get in there and have everyone just looking at you. Any questions? Michael Stelzner And they're like, nope. Yeah. So what tips do you have? Jackie Hermes One is during the process, whenever we are having conversations with people, and we do a lot of our work in Zoom, when my team is working with people, I blow everyone's faces up huge on Zoom and I watch their reactions extremely closely because I want to see exactly how everyone is reacting to different things that we're saying, the paths that we're going down. And when I see someone like, hmm, like they don't agree, we have that conversation right there because I want people to be bought in during the entire process. And I want to understand who are the people that are really excited about this, who's feeling neutral, and who are the people that are maybe the detractors in the process, weren't really Excited, maybe didn't want to do this in the first place that we're going to have to work a little bit harder to get bought in. Next is making sure that you're doing dry runs with the right people. So do you have someone that's like your champion that's going to shepherd this through the organization? So back to that client, that underwriting client, they have someone that is a very trusted resource in their company. And we do drive runs for everything that we have been presenting to them with him. We get all of his feedback on how they're going to react, what they're going to think. We take all of his feedback. So then by the time that we present, he has already seen it. We've taken his feedback. Then he goes back into their internal conversations and he says, I like this. This is why. And we've already taken some of his ideas. Michael Stelzner I love that. That's so smart. Jackie Hermes Yeah, it makes a big difference. ([Time 0:38:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d129f328-7117-40c7-924e-d11a1b526888)) - **Validate Positioning Through Sales And Metrics** - After buy-in, train sales, update the website, test campaigns, and measure behavioral metrics like time on site. - Continue testing and iterate if metrics or feedback show the positioning needs adjustment. Transcript: Michael Stelzner Because obviously, I mean, I know we're nearing the end of our discussion today, but there's some work that needs to be done once you get the buy-in. So just give us a little bit on what would be the logical next thing once you get the buy-in on something that would likely need to change. Jackie Hermes Buy-in is not like a one-time thing. It's just like when you get hired as an agency, you have to keep selling yourself over and over and over. And even as an employee, you have to keep selling yourself in order to keep your job. So you keep testing, you go out and you get market validation the sales team gets trained on this stuff and they get positive feedback and that goes into the organization you start putting It onto the website and then you report back on how time on site changes how much further people are scrolling on pages how bounce rate decreases you put it into your ads and you report Back on improvement in ad performance. And if things do go the other way, then we have to make changes, right? So it basically goes into your marketing and sales programs and you continue to validate over time. ([Time 0:43:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cb063a33-8d17-4c98-a976-c820012a8ba1))