The Positioning Playbook: How to Create a Guide That Aligns Your Organization
Your marketing team has done the hard work. You know what you want to say and how you want to stand out in your market. Now you just have to make sure that everyone else breathes, speaks, and communicates that message in their respective roles. Easy, right? Actually, not so easy.
Don’t be surprised if getting all of your teams aligned when it comes to new brand positioning isn’t as easy as it seems. The research, the thinking, the workshopping, and the ideating that goes into brand positioning may help the core team reach a unanimous decision, but the rest of the employees didn’t have the benefit of the process to convince them.
How do you correct this? Most of us have a brand identity document to tell your graphic designers, creatives, and agencies how your brand imagery should be treated. It usually outlines the exact hex colors, the fonts, the imagery, the lockups, logos and uses, as well as different formats for using these elements correctly. Brand identity guides are created so that our visual identity is handled in a consistent, cohesive and logical way. This creates a strong, recognizable brand identity that customers can easily remember and associate with your company, resulting in a unified and professional brand experience.
But while branding is largely dependent on visuals, positioning is about wording. Words carry emotion and have meaning. It’s no less important than visuals, and requires its own guide. Just like a brand playbook spells out the key visuals, your positioning playbook spells out the words and emotions to use.
If done well, your guide will:
Establish a clear and consistent message across touchpoints, essential for building trust and credibility with your customers
Convince your stakeholders that the messaging is grounded in reality and validated by your market
Create an emotional connection between your stakeholders and your customers by clearly depicting the customer’s challenges, needs and desires
Drive alignment across all stakeholders within the organization, as well as partners who also need to tell your story or develop content
Assist with easily onboarding PR and advertising agencies, as well as new employees by imparting the necessity for sticking to your position and communicating a simple blueprint for messaging.
Getting on the Same Page
Committing a positioning guide to paper is only the beginning though. Your new positioning has to live in the hearts and minds of the people you want to reach, not in a folder. You want your stance reflected during sales calls, ads, press releases, and conversations in the field. It should be adopted and bought into.
When teams are aligned, it means they're working together to communicate the same stance and position. This consistency helps the organization reach its destination faster. It's like a group of rowers all pulling in the same direction, instead of each paddling individually. The best way to align is to convince team members of the veracity of the message, to showcase how it will show up in their daily interactions with stakeholders, and share insights about key personas that the positioning will resonate with. Here’s how:
1. Provide data backing up why you’ve landed on each message
Imagine your audience is skeptical about whatever message you present because they bring their own experiences and biases. The key to bringing them along is showing the depth of data that drove the new positioning.
Imagine being able to say that 70% or more of your target audience liked a marketing message and what it meant to them, compared to only 50% for your current message. That would make your sales team stop and take notice. They may even consider trying it on their next call to find that it actually works!
One of our clients, Nutanix, was ready to take on the growth opportunities of a new market category, but they were known for working in a more narrow environment. Because there was a gap between what they offered and how people saw them, we had to find a new category that brought it all together, changed the market, and convinced their 6,000+ employees to tell a different story.
We tested a number of market categories and were able to show that 79% of their target prospects really liked or liked “Hybrid Multicloud Platform,” compared to 41% for “Hyperconverged Multicloud Platform.” Further, we could support that the winner fit their audience because 61% said they have a hybrid multicloud environment. We brought home the winner with quotes that it was the simplest way to explain Nutanix, whereas the latter that included “hyperconverged” was too technical for their expanding C-level audience.
2. Knowing your tone of voice is the key to your identity
Knowing your tone of voice is as important as knowing your color hex codes in delivering your brand positioning. Take our client, accounting workflow automation leader FloQast as an example. While their competitors are perceived as an accounting company “built by engineers,” FloQast positions themselves as a company "created by accountants for accountants.”
The concept immediately resonated with their client base. “I think some subject matter expert that has lived and breathed in an accountant’s chair for years, and felt the pain and trials and tribulations, said let’s do this better. ‘Let’s create something that accountants want to use.’ That’s what that says to me,” said one prospect.
They drove their positioning home with simple, authentic and direct messaging, using a tone of voice that speaks directly to accountants. This includes knowing their unique sense of humor and the feeling of being underappreciated.
As an example, the company created FloQast Studios, publishing entertaining content specific to the unique lives of accountants. When FloQast released their online comedy series, "PBC," it went viral. In response, one commenter on an accounting subreddit said, "Oh my god, this is a gem. I can finally have my girlfriend get a glimpse of my time in public [accounting]. Thank you for sharing!"
The company not only de-positioned their biggest rival, but by continuing to connect with accountants, FloQast achieved unicorn status within a year, reaching a valuation of $1.2 billion.
What’s your authentic tone of voice? Knowing the answer is the key to driving your positioning home, from your boilerplate to your sales calls, emails and content.
3. Add unique insight about your target personas
The best way to find out what success looks like to your customers is to listen to them. Is it making their jobs easier? Advancing a promotion? Solving a problem that frustrates them? What are the words they use to express their emotion about your company, product or service?
You also have to bear in mind the nuances for different personas. What do you say to a CEO vs. a database administrator? How do you address their pain from their unique challenges and goals? If you sell to multiple personas or a variety of customer segments--across demographics, industries or company size, what unique problem, in their words, do you solve for each? How do they experience the problem, what are their workarounds and how can you alleviate their pain or build upon their success?
When interviewing customers and prospects be sure to tune into their energy when they talk about their frustrations or successes. Ask probing questions about how their good and bad experiences make them feel, how it promotes or impairs their ability to accomplish their goals and how it impacts their customers, jobs and teams.
For FloQast, we took it a step further to better understand the variety of frustrations their customers experienced before FloQast and the positive emotions they felt once it was deployed. With this data, we could clearly and succinctly outline the “before and after” feelings for each of their personas specific job function--accountants, controllers and CFOs. This provided confidence to the FloQast team about how to connect with and motivate prospective buyers.
Getting Started
Data around positioning helps your team understand what it really means to customers, prospects and the bottomline. It helps them incorporate it into their work. It not only achieves buy-in, but sets your entire team up for success.
Be sure not only to document your story, provide evidence that it works with your audience and why, define your tone of voice, and provide extra valuable insight on your personas.