10 Key Elements of Positioning for Service Providers
Positioning is the neglected stepchild in the field of marketing - it doesn’t get as much attention as brand storytelling, social media ad campaigns or building the perfect funnel, but it’s actually the foundation of whether any of your marketing will work or not. You can have a fabulous service, follow tried and tested tactics to promote it, and it will still fall flat if your positioning is wrong.
If you feel like you have to over-explain your services and justify your prices, your sales cycle takes ages, and clients often make out-of-scope requests: you have a positioning problem. We’re going to look at how to fix it.
April Dunford is a positioning consultant who wrote the useful guide Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It and her definition is as follows:
"Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about."
Obviously Awesome, like most other guides to positioning, is aimed more at products and retail businesses than solo service providers. Our challenges and opportunities are a little different to a SAAS start-up that’s looking to scale.
We’re going to consider 10 different lenses you can look through to think about your positioning - and one of the things to bear in mind is that you need them all to be functioning in harmony with one another. Your pricing has to relate to your ideal client, which has to relate to the market category you’re positioning yourself within and so on. If you change one aspect of your positioning in isolation, it’s unlikely to work.
The top ten things to consider about your positioning as a coach, consultant or creative.
Competing Alternatives: Understanding what your ideal client is also considering doing to solve their problem - if you didn’t exist, what would they do instead? It might well not be working with someone offering a similar service to you - instead they might be contemplating buying a book, doing a course, using a free app, using their budget to go on vacation or retreat… If that’s the case, it would be largely pointless to focus on positioning yourself as better than the other service providers in your niche, instead you would benefit more by comparing the value you can provide with the results they are likely to get from using the app/reading the book etc.
Secret Sauce: What makes you different from your competitive alternatives? This might not be about the results you deliver, it might be more about your customer experience or your unique perspective on the topic.
Value: Knowing what the true value of your service is for your clients - what are they really looking for support with and what do they get the most benefit from when working with you? What becomes possible for them as a result of working with you?
Price: The fee you charge is part of your positioning - this isn’t just true for service providers, but for all products too. We have radically different expectations for a £5 haircut vs a £50 haircut vs a £150 haircut.
Perfect-fit clients: Being clear about exactly who benefits most from your service & can afford to pay what you want to charge. Who will immediately see the real value in what you offer? Who cares most already about getting that benefit? If you can find those people, you don’t have to waste energy convincing or persuading them about the value of your service - they’re already sold.
Understanding which market category your offer best sits in - it might not be what you think (e.g. you may have designed what you think of as a coaching program, but it might make more sense to your perfect clients if you position it as a retreat with follow-on support). If you pick the right category, your value will be immediately obvious to your right-fit clients - if you don’t, you may find yourself constantly having to over-explain what you offer or field out of scope enquiries. By putting your offer in the right context, its value is much more obvious.
Ethics & Values: Increasingly people are making buying decisions with an ethical component - obviously they won’t buy something that doesn’t meet their needs, but if two offers are roughly similar in scope and value, but one is explicitly aligned with their ethics, that’s probably the one they’ll choose.
Owning your expertise. Developing your own signature method or process makes it obvious that your service is unique (this works for products too, think of Coca Cola’s secret recipe).
If you have authority in your field (e.g. you speak on your topic on podcasts/at conferences, you’ve guest-posted for reputable publications, you’ve had some press or media coverage etc.) you’ll position yourself as a leader rather than just one of many service providers.
Testimonials and case studies: if your perfect-fit clients see themselves reflected in your testimonials and the success stories you tell about your work, that positions you as the exact right person to help them. By contrast, if your testimonials are from beginners and your new ideal client has much more experience, they’ll assume you’re not the right person to help them. Two testimonials and one case study all demonstrating your work with people who are perfect fit clients is much better than heaps of testimonials and case studies relating to work you no longer want to focus on.
Would you like help with your positioning? That’s something we can work on as part of Unlock Your Message, Unforgettable or my Mentorship.