A colleague recently mentioned a best-selling book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. It’s a guide for cleaning up and decluttering—getting rid of the items that no longer “bring you joy.” Intrigued, I picked up a copy in hopes of embarking on a successful “tidying up” journey at home.
My personal journey got me thinking about the need to clean up marketing strategies and activities. Even changemakers sometimes like to keep doing certain marketing tasks just because “that’s what we’ve always done.” There can be resistance to trying something new, even when the old way is no longer effective. (We all know what it’s called when you keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results!)
The start of a new year, or a new quarter, or a new season is a good time to reassess the marketing strategies and activities in your marketing plan, starting with your positioning. In this post, I’ll talk about developing a positioning statement (or reassessing the one you have) and how you can use it to determine whether or not the marketing strategies and tasks in your plan still make sense for your organization.
What’s a positioning statement?
Pat wrote in Seven Things a Brand is NOT (and Two It Is):
A positioning statement is used to help crystallize in your mind how you want to be perceived in your customers’ minds in relation to your competitors. (Competitors? But I’m a nonprofit you say! Even non-profits have competitors. After all, you’re competing with every other non-profit for philanthropic support and volunteers, not to mention trying to break through all the marketing noise out there.)
The positioning statement also helps you focus your marketing activities by serving as a touchstone that should guide all marketing efforts (branding, copy, ads, public relations, products, etc.).
How to develop (or freshen) your positioning
In a work session after a marketing audit and SWOT analysis (usually with new clients), we use a positioning worksheet to work through a series of questions: What business are you in? What are the specific needs of your customers? Who are your competitors? What unique benefit do you offer your customers? And so on.
These sound like fairly straightforward questions that any organization should be able to answer. But you’d be surprised at the depth of discussion, questions, and twists and turns that arise as we work through the process with just a few key people in an organization.
Using the positioning statement
The next step is to evaluate all potential (or current) marketing strategies and activities, using this statement as a guide to determine if a particular activity supports—or detracts from—your positioning. It’s amazing how simple it becomes to discard certain activities (and free up valuable resources) when evaluating them against the positioning statement. What seemed to make sense or perhaps was a good idea in the past no longer holds up.
Starting (and staying) “on position”
The start of the year or a new program launch is a great time to reassess your positioning and reexamine the marketing strategies and tactics you have planned. It can be an invigorating–even life-changing–task (just like I’m hoping my personal “tidying up” exercise will be)! With your new positioning statement in hand, ask yourself: Is this activity taking my business where I want it to go? Does it meet the needs of my customers? Is it “on position” for us?
If you can’t answer “yes,” it’s time to ditch the activity and move on.
Taking time each year to reassess your marketing plan and strategies against your positioning statement is time well spent. Keep what’s working well, add some new activities—think, on position—and get rid of those resource-draining tasks that no longer make sense or advance your mission.
image courtesy of StockMonkeys.com
