How to Hack the Perfect Positioning in Your Niche

The biggest thing that most brands do not consider is positioning. What positioning is your brand taking? There’s a few ways to to look at this: who are you being positioned with or who are you being positioned against.

Before I explain this concept, let’s define Positioning:

In marketing and business strategy, market position refers to the consumer’s perception of a brand or product in relation to competing brands or products. Market positioning refers to the process of establishing the image or identity of a brand or product so that consumers perceive it in a certain way. — Strategic CFO

So why do you do this? Well, because you have to explain your concept by something that people already know. Something like: it’s just like Crest Toothpaste or its the exact opposite of Crest Toothpaste.

It’s why every entrepreneur is currently using “It’s the Uber of (Insert Bland Vertical Market Here).” Positioning is taking a space already understood to build you credibility or differentiating characteristic.

Positioning is something everyone should know, but interestingly enough, its become a hack because most people have no clue what it is.

Where to Start Building a Positioning Plan

When considering positioning, the important point is where to start. I like to tell people to start by locating the opinion leaders in their niche. I use Amazon books for this, because if they have a book, it may be self published, but they are probably someone that promotes.

Search for your topic in Amazon books, and take a look at who shows up, these are the perfect people to do joint content with.

Finding a way to do joint content with the OL’s is the best thing to consider when starting in positioning. I like a podcast for this reason because it allows for you to create multiple types of content at the same time: a blog post, an interview and also pieces of content that you can break up.

Creating expert interviews in this way, allows for two things: expert positioning and expanding your reach.

The Other Way to Hack Positioning

Are you very opinionated? Are you ok with being polarizing? Well, positioning could be a bit easier for you, but you have to be alright about the fallout. However, if you are ok with negativity, then you can hack positioning even faster.

Who’s the most important an influential person in your space? What do you disagree with them on? Obviously, you want to do this in a nice way, but use this to create high visibility content and possibly to get that person to engage with you.

Who knows? You could even create media opportunities; in which  your positioned against the opinion leader in your space.

 

Hacking the Brain of Your Followers

Building your fan page, though Facebook would like to make it difficult for you, its pay-to-play game; there’s no way around it. So, you want to do this the smart way and use it to your advantage. Your website will always be your content hub, because if you’re an expert, then you have something to say. Thats why podcasts and written content help to create that persona.

Facebook has a piece of tracking code called a “Pixel” that you or your web developer can embed in your website. I can’t take credit for this next part, as I learned it from Dennis Yu of Blitzmetrics, but you can use that pixel code to create different audiences for certain numbers of days: 30, 60 and 180 days. [Dennis called this setup “digital plumbing”, you can learn more about it HERE.]

Anyway, you can then use Dennis’ “$1 a day ad strategy” to that audience of the positioning content you have created, to be omnipresent in front of people that have checked out your content.

Applying this strategy, you can never leave the consciousness of the correct audience and very quickly hack their brain because you are everywhere; except when they’re sleeping, but I’m sure there will be a targeting for that very soon.

Jeremy Ryan Slate

CEO, Co-Founder, Command Your Brand Media