Ep 65: Successful marketing starts with messaging, targeting and positioning
Welcome to the new season of The Built Environment Marketing Show.
This year I've been working with small businesses and solo founders and the discussions centre on overcoming a particular challenge or problem. I'm a firm believer that most marketing challenges can be solved by looking at your messaging, targeting and positioning. So this short solo episode is dedicated to that.
Enjoy.
About the show
The Built Environment Marketing Show is hosted by marketing consultant and content creator Ayo Abbas. It is unashamedly about marketing for architects and engineers as well as bringing forward voices that we don't ordinarily get to hear. This show is independent and if you're a regular listener you can show your support by:
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Transcript
Ayo Abbas 00:05
Hello, and welcome to The Built Environment Marketing Show. I'm your host Ayo Abbas, a marketing consultant, speaker and trainer. And I worked specifically with architects and engineers. It's something I've done for over 23 years. And I like to think I'm pretty good at it. So today, I have a very special episode for you. In the past quarter, I've spotted a trend, when I've been working with small businesses and solo founders as an advisor. The discussions have really focused around overcoming a particular challenge or problem. And it's been a great way for me to exercise my old brain muscles, by having different conversations with people and just having to work through what it is that they need and solutions that they might want to make. A lot of what I've come up with, has boiled down to three main things, M. T. P. and that's about messaging, targeting, and positioning. To me, these three areas are interwoven, they overlap and if you think of a Venn diagram, with value in the centre, I'll put a link in the show notes to a diagram I've created so you can see what I mean. So what do they mean? So messaging, targeting and positioning, your messaging is about finding the reasons why. And what you want to say, and what your offer is. Targeting is very much about figuring out who you are talking to, why you're talking to them, and also how your solution addresses their problems. Finally, your positioning is about where are you in relation to the market and your competition. So those three circles sit in a circle in the middle in a Venn diagram. And then what I like to think is that you actually then put them into two wider concentric circles, one, which is context, and the other, which is relevance. In terms of context, what I mean, is the market that you're operate in, what do you need to understand? How does that impact the solution and messaging that you're looking at setting up? And for relevance is about what relevance is there to what you're doing to the market that you're operating in? Okay, so let's go a little deeper in terms of messaging, some of the key issues that I think you need to address, and are really about what customers say about you, and also what you think about you. So how do you describe your services to customers? How do you describe what you do? How would your customers describe your services, what's different in terms of what you do and what the competition do. And it's really just digging into those questions and finding those answers. And also understanding what your offers are, and how those offers help your customers. Once I have the answers to this, I then tend to put it into a message house. Now for me a message house is basically you've got the roof part, which is basically where you have your main kind of statement, your main kind of umbrella statement that covers your messaging. And then underneath, you have three core pillars, which are, there's three kind of sub-messages, that kind of give the reasoning behind the main statement. And then under that was your final layer, which is your breaks your supporting evidence, your supporting bricks, the supporting columns in a way. And that's where you give your evidence and your proof points. And those things that reinforce the messages from above. I'll also put a diagram of that in the show notes as well. So you can see that, now on to targeting. Targeting is that thing of understanding, Who are your target audience? What do they want now? Where do they hang out? What may they want from you in the future? How can you find them? What are their pain points? or their stay awake issues? And how do you as a firm or a service help them to address those issues? And also, what outcomes do you help them to achieve? Once you kind of understand that, and a bonus one I also like to use especially in B2B is what are their job titles? I think job titles are a really good way to segment a market to understand the types of people you're really looking for and in what sort of organisations as well. So you get a really good rich picture of that organisation. And now on to positioning. Positioning for me is about understanding the market competition. So what's their approach? What's their USP? And then looking at yourself and being quite critical and analytical and saying, Why am I different? Why am I better? Why would people come to me rather than them? I'm really drilling down into that finding those points of differentiation, those areas where you can grab that open space and market share. It's another great exercise to do, then once you've got your Venn diagram sorted in looking at the context of what's the situation that's happening right now, like at the moment, we've got an election coming up, there's new legislation about, you know, two staircases having a second staircase, and tall buildings. So they're all things that can, you know, impact the architecture market at the moment and what's being built and what's not being built, and what clients are looking to do. So think about how what you're doing in your messaging and how that resonates with the current market. Is there a big event coming up, for example, like say, MIPIM, or UKREiiF, you know, what's going on in the market, really, really think of the context of your operating. And in terms of relevance, I think relevance is something that we often miss, but we shouldn't. So how relevant are the target the tactics that you're suggesting to that target audience, and also the market, and how they behave. So for example, if you are listening to a social media guru who say, and you should be posting six gazillion times on on YouTube every, every day, is that even relevant for the construction industry. So it's actually think about the relevance of the advice that you're using, or taking or, or, and, you know, and matching that to the nuances of your market and the relevance to your market. So this framework is something that I'm thinking to apply more and more to most marketing challenges. And I find it works really, really well, which is why I'm going to share it today. And in terms of some of the places I've applied it, it's been about tweaking someone's business offer, you know, and so that they, they're in a better position to win the clients and work that they want. It's been looking at, you know, overall messaging for campaigns that they've got, they've got coming up. It's also been looking at how looking at messaging targeting, and positioning can be a way to transform your business over the mid to long term as well. So they're all kind of shifts that you want to make. I can easily see how messaging targeting and positioning can be easily misaligned, or be out of kilter because you want to move at pace. But it's actually something that we should all be reviewing regularly. For me, if you know these three things, your marketing just gets easier. Because once you have them figured out, you know what to say, who to say it to and how it also trickles down in into all of your communications and all aspects of your business. Anyway, that's it for me today. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. And if you have any questions about the frameworks or the diagrams that I've put together, feel free to reach out. My email is always ayo@abbasmarketing.com Take care. Bye Thanks so much for listening to the built environment marketing show. Don't forget to check out the show notes which will have useful links and resources connected to this episode. You can find that on abbasmarketing.com And of course if you liked the show, please do share it with others on social as it helps more people to find us. See you soon.
