One crucial step for startup marketers and founders in their early journey is to decide who their true competition is and hence how to differentiate.
Startups make a big mistake by differentiating too soon.
Calling everybody a competitor and try differentiating from everybody confuses their target buyer.
There’s a basic principle we all operate on.
Principle of association before differentiation.
Buyers need to first understand what they should associate your product with.
What category does your product belong to?
Where will the budget come from?
How do you solve my problems differently?
The 3 stages of competitive positioning:
– Research
– Associate
– Differentiate
A. Research:
Find out existing competitors who are offerings similar products (similar not same). An easier way is to research 10 competitors in your target market, segment them into Big 3 and others based on their popularity and market penetration.
B. Associate:
Make sure your product is positioned among Big 3 products everywhere or atleast in the same category. This way your prospective buyers start finding your product every time they are researching or buying a similar product as yours.
C. Differentiate:
When your buyers start associating your product in the right category and start asking how do you differentiate from existing solutions, explain them unique problems you solve for them or how uniquely you solve them.
Prepare a toolkit that has:
– Unique selling proposition(s)
– Key differentiators
– Customer and technology analyst reviews
– Product and vendor battlecards
Distribute this toolkit to your sales and partner teams. Also put up comparison pages on your website for website visitors to understand your differentiators.
Additionally, you can also start some SEO and SEM campaigns to drive middle of the funnel traffic to these pages and convert them to bottom of the funnel.
I’ll cover this tactic in detail separately.
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