CONSIDERATIONS FOR REFRESHING YOUR POSITIONING

Often customers come to us wanting a new website but can’t articulate their positioning or a single-minded offering. Usually, it’s because it’s just got lost in translation as the company has grown. This is the point that the brand positioning probably needs a little tune-up to get clarity around what you do, how you do it, who you do it for, and why you do it. Your positioning is the intention behind everything you do.

This is the case in most organisations, it could be a person within the marketing team, the CEO, or a whole team in a different country. We know that it can be a can of worms and most definitely one you need to manage with care.

Firstly you need to be up to speed with the latest brand guidelines and thinking. Push beyond the design dictates and make sure you understand exactly where your brand is positioned in the market and why. Think about target audiences and specific messages that they need to hear. Get close to product marketing and understand at a product level all of the above.

The last thing you want to do is focus on the wrong thing or alienate a section of the business. Great websites are not about appeasing the needs or desires of every part of the business – but delivering something that is relevant to your audiences that ultimately supports their need for content and information and helps them to make an informed decision.

Like any company that’s enjoyed significant growth, the number of customers and employees will have grown too. What your brand means to them may be different, especially within different cultures and markets where levels of brand maturity are different.

A clearly defined positioning gives your brand meaning, sets you apart from your competitors, and helps attract the prospects you value.

A positioning well-articulated will help to galvanise your team and provide a platform and a focus for all your internal and external comms from advertising to digital content creation, sales collateral, sales and support activities. It will also help to keep and attract new talent to keep your successful momentum going.

That’s great. Clarity is essential to creating a compelling brand experience. If your project brief is to design and build a new website, we will need to understand your positioning, understand who you are, your customers, who you’re targeting and why?
This information will enable us to create a strategic approach for your brand website, inform the User Experience direction, overall UI design and style, and copy tone of voice, all to harness the value it brings to the visitor.

Your brand, mission, vision and values should influence all of your communications. You can take the essence of these and build them into the overall user experience, the call to action and the depth of content that you provide.

For example, if your brand archetype is a ‘caregiver’ then your website could support this in how the user experience plays out, and the types of call to action you use.  Perhaps less ‘call sales now’ more ‘how can we help you?’.  You might focus on making site accessibility a core factor to underpin your archetype.   All this build brand integrity and helps to anchor your brand values.