Your site positioning is the website equivalent to product positioning in market strategy and product strategy. You need to relate your website to the benefits offered to target users, and locate it in relation to its strategic focus on defined benefits for defined target users. Position your website to play towards strengths and away from weaknesses.
The classic marketing concept of product positioning is closely related to market segment focus. Positioning targets a product for specific market segments, with specific product needs, at specific prices. The same product can be positioned in many different ways. The illustration below shows an example taken from Philip Kotler’s book Marketing Management. The example shows how Kotler looks at the positioning of an instant breakfast drink, relative to the key variables price and speed. We think you can see how you can apply this concept to your website, positioning your website as if it were a product:
Another common framework for classic product positioning is taken from a series of questions. As you apply this idea to the Web, think about the Web version of the classic product positioning statement. You can position a product using a positioning statement that answers the important questions:
- For whom is the product designed?
- What kind of product is it?
- What is the single most important benefit it offers?
- What is its most important competitor?
- How is it different from that competitor?
- What is the customer benefit of that difference?
For example, the following are positioning statements used by Palo Alto Software to focus marketing for two new products:
- For the businessperson who is starting a new company, launching new products, or seeking funding or partners, Business Plan Pro is software that produces professional business plans quickly and easily. Unlike (deleted), Business Plan Pro is a stand-alone product, and requires no other programs to buy or learn.
- For business owners and managers who oversee their company’s marketing programs, Marketing Plan Pro is software that creates and helps manage professional Web plans. Unlike (deleted), Marketing Plan Pro provides a system for scheduling and tracking the entire marketing process from plan to action.
As a specific example of website positioning, consider this positioning statement used by Palo Alto Software to position this site, Bplans.com:
- For the person developing a business plan, Bplans.com offers directly relevant free information including dozens of sample plans, wizards, tools, and content. Unlike more general small business information sites, Bplans.com is focused on business planning and is full of valuable, real information.
Some positioning strategies will work better than others. Here again, strategy is focus. The best positioning plays to your company’s strengths and the product’s strengths, and away from weaknesses. Position your product to reach the buyers whose profiles most closely match needs you serve, in the channels you can reach, and at the prices you set.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I want to set up the tourism website for my respective country. In it, I have the tourism tools called L.O.S.T that stand for Local Overview System Travellers. This tools is useful for traveller to have a plannning and a proper schedul and also can forcast their activity before going for a trip and tour at our country Malaysia.Beside that we prepare the sms contest, online game and many more gadgets to attract many registered member who can win a special gift or holiday package.Kindly advice me how to get croud to our product,as our product will be charge USD10 /anual.How to avoid when some people said, who wants to purchase your product of USD10, are sure people going to subsribe to your website? Kindly brief me the business model for business nature. TQ
The right positioning of the pruducts on the site is important. I do it after the logical consideration where my visitors look and click. The best places are on the top of course. There I locate the most important product for me. The bottom of the page is also a good place for a good product, as the visitor reads the article on the site until the end the the product comes up to him. Making Money on the Web
To position yourself correctly, research is imperial. I did tons of research and noticed visitors to websites were responding well to video. I learned what I could and jumped in. I post to multiple sites, but the site that has increased traffic the most is http://www.Adwido.com because they target keywords and lead traffic back to my site. Plus the account is Free.