Spending the time to craft a position statement can truly guide your business to new heights. The problem is that many businesses spend most of their time on their tactics to attract and retain customers rather than the position that they have taken a stance on. Your stance tells your audience, your perfect prospective customer what you can do for them. What is it that you help people do? Why do you do that? What is it that fuels your passion for what you do? Tell your audience, take a stand, state your position and let it be known without subtleties why you do what you do.
Warning, you might upset someone in your audience by taking a strong position of why you do what you do, and that's a good thing. Why is it a good thing? Because you want to weed out the detractors from the future ambassadors. Let's talk about the fuel for your position statement, which will feed your strategy. Again, your strategy will tell you what your tactics will be to attract new business. Strategy feeds tactics. Strategy tells you where to find your audience. Now, identify your strategy that gets customers and take a position based on that strategy.
Here are the steps you should take before you start to find new ways of attracting and retaining customers:
- Define why you do what you do. People follow ideas, concepts and beliefs of those they can easily relate to and connect with. People do business with people. Your perfect prospective customer buys your why and not your what. Your why is your passion, your beliefs and the reason you're confident you can solve their problem in a sustainable manner.
- Define what you do best. Every company has several greatest strengths that they can bank on. Are you great with customer service? Do you have a particular niche to which you cater your products or services? Do you solve a specific problem better than anyone else? Analyze what you do best and let that influence the strategies you take. The key here is to make these points with bold statements.
- Define who needs what you do. This is where the idea of a niche becomes truly important. The best way for a new business to find success is to bust into a niche market that does not have nearly as much competition. If you can fulfill the needs of that niche better than anyone else, you'll be well on your way to success. The narrower the niche, the better off you are.
- Define how you differ from the competition. Why should people choose your company over a different, more well-known organization? You need to be extremely clear about the problems that you can help your customer overcome, and how you can fulfill their needs better than your competitors. Your differentiating factors likely have to do with what you do best and who needs what you do.
Once you have taken all four of these steps, you are significantly closer to organizing your growth strategy. Then you can finally go into more detail when it comes to finding the correct tactics to reach out to new customers and hang on to your existing ones. The answers to the above will tell you what tactics to use, because you'll know where they tend to hangout.
For more assistance, feel free to reach out to us today at Viral Solutions!
Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer | Viral Solutions LLC
