People don’t tend to drive somewhere they’ve never been before without first consulting a map. Yet companies often continue down the road they are on without stopping to think where they want to go.

Writing a brand positioning statement will help define the sort of company you aspire to be and give marketing a consistent voice.

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What is a brand positioning statement?

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about the importance of understanding your customers. Uncovering consumer insights gives you a competitive edge by allowing you to meet the needs of your customers, and better communicate that in your marketing.

However, you also need to understand your own brand. That might sound ridiculous: you understand it better than anyone, right? But a brand is a complex beast, which makes it easy for your marketing to become diffuse.

Is your view of the company reflected in the beliefs of the public? Do you really know how your customers think of your brand?

A brand positioning statement explains what your brand does, who you target, and the benefits of your brand, in a short, concise statement. The statement will generally be an internal document, although it should be used as a guide to ensure all content is consistent.

The brand positioning journey

You can simply write your positioning statement in a brainstorming session, although it may be more useful to develop it as part of a wider journey.

Creating a simple statement will still provide value, but a deeper look at the brand and industry will ensure your statement is placed in context.

To create the statement you need to think about where you have come from, where you are now, and where you want to go. Then you just need to work out how to get there!

Understand the history of your industry

If you know the history of your industry you gain an understanding of its meaning in consumers’ lives. Every industry has its own history, language, context and imagery that your marketing will be framed by.

Having some historical context helps you understand what consumers think of your industry before you look at what they think of your brand.

Understand where you are today

What do your customers currently think of you? Listening to your customers can inform here, whether through surveys, anecdotes or social listening.

Social listening provides the scale of quantitative research, but with the added benefit of collecting the voice of the customer. This makes qualitative analysis possible, allowing you to understand the language people use when discussing your brand.

To create a really thorough brand positioning statement you might want to first perform a brand audit to gain a fuller picture of where you are currently positioned in the mind of the consumer.

Identify where you need to go

Your brand positioning statement will help define the direction of the company and its marketing. As such, it is important to know what you are aiming at.

Think about the ideal product or service that could be provided in your category. However far away it feels, having the perfect product in mind can help map your journey towards it.

Decide how to get there

You need to understand the benefits you can bring to the customer. Evoking an emotional response through these benefits is a powerful marketing tool.

This short Apple video brilliantly explains the tech giant’s approach to design, which begins with an attempt to elicit an emotional response.

How to write a brand positioning statement

The positioning statement is generally used as an internal only document, not a tagline. All the same, it needs to be fairly short to be clear and memorable to staff.

It should only contain four elements.

1. The category in which the brand operates

The category/industry/vertical your brand operates in will often be very obvious, but it can be beneficial to think about this.

Your product may overlap into multiple categories, or your industry might have sub-sections within it. Defining the exact space in which you operate helps focus your direction.

2. The target audience

You might have more than one, but focusing on your main target group gives a clearer message. It can be a good idea to work out who your most valuable customers are before deciding on this.

3. The benefit to the customer

Not the shiny new feature that you are really happy with, but the actual benefit the customer will derive from being a customer of your brand.

4. The reason why the brand will deliver on this promise

A brand might be the most cost effective option available by not having bricks-and-mortar stores. A software company might have the most advanced technology that provides better functionality.

Whatever the reason, there has to be something backing up your claim.

You can then take these elements and fit them into the following brand positioning statement template:

(Brand) is a (1) company that provides (2) with (3) by (4).

For example, Rhino Energy Drink is a canned energy drink company that provides adventurous millennials with the energy they need to live their busy, active lives. It does this with its special formula of high-quality ingredients.

Check the impact

Once you have implemented your statement and have been using it to guide your efforts, you can check that it is having the desired effect of focusing your messaging.

Social intelligence can be particularly useful here, listening to the voice of the customer to understand the language that is being used and the brand associations people have when talking about you.

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If you want to go a bit deeper than Instagram’s own analytics offering, this list is for you.

Instagram has been expanding its marketing options for some time, and accordingly the number of brands marketing on Instagram has grown from 11.5% in 2013 to 32.3% in 2015.

Furthermore, it is one of the best platforms to advertise on – a Forrester report has shown that engagement with brands on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and an astonishing 84 times higher than Twitter.

Luckily, there are several Instagram analytics tools available to help brands understand what resonates with their audience and how they can optimize their content output.

Top 7 Free Instagram Analytics Tools

1. Simply Measured

Simply Measured offer a free Instagram report in exchange for following their Twitter account, and the level of detail on the report makes that a great deal.

It’s available for users with fewer than 25,000 followers, and the data is available in easy to read charts, or raw numbers. You can also download the data into Excel to analyze it further yourself and create custom charts and graphics.

The report shows a wide range of engagement metrics, including most engaging tags, the best day and time to post, most popular location and even top filter, and highest engagement on sites outside Instagram.

Top posts are displayed and sorted by engagement. You can discover your most active commenters and the most common keywords in the comments.

2. Social Bakers

Social Bakers offer a free Instagram analytics tool. Although the offering is fairly basic and doesn’t offer too much insight.

You can see what your top posts are, most used hashtags and tagged accounts, plus general stats on your number of posts, and followers. There isn’t much here overall. It might be worth logging in to have a look around, but it’s unlikely people will regularly use this.

3. Squarelovin

Squarelovin is an admirably in-depth tool for a free analytics platform. It displays metrics on recent posts and growth, a monthly analysis, and a history of your posts broken down into year, month, day, and hour.

There are tabs that show engagement with your photos, both average and top posts, and an optimization tab that shows your best and worst times to post.

You can also manage your Instagram account from within the platform, creating albums, and liking and commenting other posts.

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4. Union Metrics

Union Metrics offers a free account checkup, covering the last month. The report is generated using a few of the algorithms from their paid analytics platform.

While the report isn’t exactly comprehensive, it does a few things well.

The focus is on picking out a few metrics and posts to compare them with your average, helping you to identify any patterns and themes. You can refresh the report every 24 hours, allowing you check how newer posts perform against the average.

The report shows you how many people have interacted with you and your top fans.

The times you have posted over the last month are shown on a graph, and the best day and time to post is displayed, including details of how much more engagement that time receives compared to your average.

Hashtags are given the same treatment, plotted on a scatter graph to compare the most likes and comments per post.

5. Quintly

Quintly is a dashboard tool that covers several social networks. It comes with a standard dashboard that can be customized with widgets to suit your needs and track the metrics that matter to you.

The tool provides Instagram analytics for followers, both of your profile and that of your competitors, with detailed follower statistics. You can analyze your Instagram content, the interactions generated from your photos and videos, plus details on filter usage.

Quintly also covers Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. There is a free tool for Facebook analytics and a 14-day free trial for Instagram and others. Paid plans then start from €129/month.

6. Iconosquare

Iconosquare offers a 14 day free trial of their complete platform. This allows access to the analytics, as well as some other useful and interesting features.

There is an extensive range of analysis on offer, which starts with an overview of activity in the last seven days or the last month.

A tab for content shows distribution, density, tag and filter usage and geolocation. The engagement tab shows growth history, the source of engagement and most popular media.

The optimization tab covers posting times, average media lifespan, tag impact, and a breakdown of filter impact. Finally, for analysis there is a community tab, showing details about your followers and followings.

In addition to the analysis there are ‘snapshots’; shareable images based on your Instagram data. You can view your media, likes, and followers, and manage comments.

There’s also a feature that allows you to create a profile cover from your latest 50 photos, and a widget to showcase your Instagram photos on your own website.

7. Pixlee

Pixlee’s free offering will give you weekly reports on your Instagram accounts.

There’s a decent amount of data available, from your top performing content, influencer information, along with follower growth and hashtag tracking. One of the better options on this list, we recommend giving it a go.

Measuring beyond the basics

This list showcases tools that provide a great starting point for Instagram analytics, and will be suitable for individuals or small businesses.

Having said that, the average internet user has 5.54 social media accounts. Brands have to be active across multiple sites, and indeed 91% of brands use two or more social media channels. Therefore you will either need to find a tool for each social site you use, or find a solution that covers multiple social networks.

Brandwatch features Instagram channels, meaning you can track detailed metrics for your accoutns, and that of your competitors. If you’d like to discover why Brandwatch is rated number one for customer satisfaction, please do get in touch for a free demo.

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Social bookmarking websites are sites on which Internet users share their web pages, articles, blog posts, images, and videos. There are a number of advantages to submitting your content to one (or more) of these sites. For one thing, they help to increase your brand awareness.

The more people who have access to your great content, the more likely that your content will go viral.

These sites also help to get your blog posts indexed more quickly and increase your website traffic. Any SEO company will be familiar with this strategy and use it as part of its marketing strategy.

Popular social bookmarking websites

1. Twitter

Let’s start with the big one (and one people might not associate with social bookmarking too much). Twitter is an excellent tool for this and you can achieve it in a couple of ways.

First, simply posting links, images, and content with your account means you’ll have technically bookmarked them. You could then go back through your account to find things again.

On top of that you can also use the ‘like’ button for certain tweets. Many people use that too bookmark interesting things they find and go back to them in the future.

2. Pinterest

Pinterest goes for the “show, don’t tell” approach to marketing, and with 70 million users, it has been very successful. Most of its users (80 percent) are women and 42 percent of US adult women online have an account.

Over half of daily users consult the site before making a buying decision in a store, and the average order for visitors referred by the site is $58.95.

3. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is one of the bigger social bookmarking sites. Whenever you bookmark something you can add extra details to is, such as what type of content it is and its subject.

It comes with a great toolbar to make this process simple. It also allows users to enter their own interests and be shown relevant content submitted by other people.

4. Dribble

Dribble is an excellent (and beautiful) bookmarking site aimed at designers. Not only is this a great place for inspiration, it’s a great place to get traffic to your site if you’re a designer, or have a design team.

A nice idea for gaining some traction would be to encourage your design team to get involved. If they have some downtime, see if they’ll put something unique and interesting together to go Dribble. It’s a perfect way to showcase your team.

5. Pocket

Pocket is a really nicely designed social bookmarking site. It comes with an app to Pocket stuff as you go, saving you returning to the site all the time. You can also search by interest to find interesting things.

This means adding your own content to the site offers an extra avenue for people to find it. With well over 22m users that’s not to be sniffed at.

6. Digg

Digg has changed a lot over the years. Previously it was more like Reddit where the front page was curated through the users of the site. Now this is done by editors, but it retains its bookmarking function.

Digg can be a great place to find new content and organise it through your profile. Be careful, it can get quite addictive though.

7. Reddit

Reddit is the self-styled ‘front page of the internet’. Users submit links to stories, images or videos that they find interesting and other Reddit users can either upvote or downvote these submissions.

By upvoting, commenting, or downvoting, you can generate a list of bookmarked content. It’s also an excellent way to promote your own content. If you want to do that, check out our piece on subreddit analytics.

8. Slashdot

Slashdot runs user-submitted news stories (with appropriate links) on Linux, computer hardware, devices, games, cloud, mobile, storage, security, management, book reviews, and more. See submission guidelines for details.

9. We Heart It

We Heart It is a bit more specific. It mostly sticks to visuals – including images, GIFs and videos – alone and also acts as a social network too. But it now allows you to submit articles in a similar way to Medium. We Heart It positions themselves as a place to find inspiration.

The site has 45m users, so it’s worth looking into using it. You can submit your own stuff and see some nice levels of traffic come in.

10. scoop.it

Scoop.it caters to professionals, business and non-profits, and corporations. The site has well over 1 million registered users so while not the biggest site on this list, it’s still got a substantial audience. Choose from a free or one of the paid plans, depending on how many topics you want to post about.

If you are going to use social bookmarking sites as part of your marketing strategy, don’t ignore the ‘social’ part.

Do be a good online neighbour and “pin” other users’ content, RT other users’ content that is interesting, and participate in discussions.

The more generous you are, the more you will find that other users will return the favour with your interesting content.

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Life as a marketer can be difficult. You develop a brilliant campaign, design the perfect assets and craft the perfect copy. Then ad blockers reduce your audience. Facebook changes its algorithm.

Suddenly nobody is seeing your work without a promoted post. Running alongside these problems is the explosion of content marketing, the rise of instant gratification, and the death of the attention span.

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Oh look, a man in a field! Sorry, where was I?

Often, you have seconds to connect with someone. This competitive and overcrowded content landscape and lack of attention is forcing marketers to create a better, more personalized experience for the consumer.

We’ve written a lot about the age of the customer, and how bringing consumer insights into your business for segmented marketing is the route to success in this competitive world. The current goal in this evolutionary journey is to reach a single customer view, allowing brands to engage in one-to-one marketing.

The evolution of personalized marketing

There is an argument put forward by people who don’t quite understand the theory of evolution, which states that an eye is of no use until it is fully formed. The argument goes that the eye could therefore not possibly have evolved by natural selection.

Actually, any advantage, however small, means an organism is better placed to pass on its genes. Being able to detect a change in light might just be enough to beat the competition, and eventually lead to the evolution of a fully formed eye.

You could view one-to-one marketing in a similar light. For some, the technological and structural changes needed make it seem so far away as to feel an impossible goal to strive for. I would argue that much like the eye, any small advantage conveyed by an advancement, however small, helps you to beat your competition and continues you along the path of evolution to marketing greatness.

What is one to one marketing?

One-to-one marketing is a strategy that uses data collection and analysis, and digital technologies, to deliver personalized marketing. Advancements in marketing technologies have allowed this field to become increasingly advanced.

HBR reports that personalization can deliver five to eight times the return on investment for marketing spend. The return increases the more mature your personalization is. Analysis of millions of email subject lines shows that including a name only had a marginal impact on engagement, but emails triggered by certain actions got 3 times the open rates and 2 times the click through rates.

Delivering one-to-one marketing

The first step in one-to-one marketing is collecting the data. Combining sales, social and behavioral data will uncover meaningful insights about customers.

This information can then be fed into advanced analytics models, which calculate the probability of a consumer responding to different types of content. The response to the chosen content can then be fed back into the system, tracking consumer reactions to inform future strategy.

Final, content distribution systems will use this information to deliver one-to-one marketing messages in the right place at the right time. This should trigger personalized landing pages, tailored offers, and targeted ads.

For this to work, different technology systems and data silos need to be able to talk to each other, allowing freedom of data movement and real-time, automated decision making.

Beginning to evolve the eye

While that level of data integration and automation might seem daunting to many, the eye was not ‘created’ in one go. Similarly, one-to-one marketing doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing discipline.

There are degrees of personalization, and beginning now can boost immediate results while laying the groundwork for further future development.

The first step is to research your customer and prospect base and segment the market. Social intelligence can deliver detailed information about your customers, going beyond their interactions with you and uncovering more about them as a rounded human individual.

Building buyer personas can help by allowing you to focus on an imagined individual who is representative of the group. These broader, top level groups can allow you to tailor your content and delivery. The Hubspot blog is split into sales and marketing, and while I’m sure Hubspot knows more detailed information, the separation is useful for the end user.

You can start with the top-level segments like this, and continue to add in more information as your capabilities allow. Using names is an early step, and purchase history should be fairly easy too, but before too long you’ll have weather behaviors too.

Immediate action

Taking this research about your customers and beginning to develop personalized marketing is possible for most brands. Some of the early vehicles for this personalization are as follows:

Pay Per Click – Essentially sponsored search engine results. Your market segmentation, in collaboration with keyword research, can reveal that different buyers have different intent, and search with different keywords. This means you can tailor PPC advertising accordingly, making the ad seem more relevant to that user. Real-time events may also provide an opportunity to personalize further.

Retargeting – Display ads can re-engage people who have visited your site but bounced. These ads are displayed on other sites, displayed only to people who have expressed an interest in your brand or a particular product.

Social media – One of simplest current methods of personalization, as social networks do the hard work behind the scenes. A variety of targeting options are available including location, profession, age, gender, interests, or behavior.

Website – You can personalize your website for repeat visits based on an account system (think Amazon tailoring your recommended purchases) or using cookies (think millions of websites everywhere).

Email – Segment your email database to deliver different content to different groups. In B2B that could be by industry, job title, or the stage in the buyer journey.

Beginning the journey towards one-to-one marketing can help to build momentum in the fragmented, multiple-touchpoint modern customer journey. Making sure your messaging is relevant and speaking the right language is an important first step that quickly shows results.

When it’s survival of the fittest, any advantage will give you the edge over your competitors. As your marketing capabilities evolve, bringing more complicated data into the equation will help you stay ahead of the game to become the apex predator in your industry.

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