What are the best ways to use customer research for messaging and positioning?

1 Define your value proposition

Your value proposition is the core statement that summarizes why your product is valuable, unique, and relevant to your target market. To define it, you need to use customer research to identify the target customer segment, their main challenges, frustrations, or desires that your product can address, as well as the benefits and features that deliver value. Additionally, you should consider what makes your product different from your competitors and why customers should choose you. Answering the question: what's in it for them? will help you create a compelling value proposition.

2 Align your messaging with your customer journey

Your messaging should be consistent, clear, and compelling across all your channels and touchpoints in order to effectively communicate your value proposition to your target audience. However, you need to ensure that it is also aligned with your customer journey. This is the path prospects take from becoming aware of your product to buying it and becoming loyal customers. To do this, customer research should be conducted in order to map out the stages of awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. For each stage, you need to ask questions such as what are the initial impressions and questions of prospects when they discover your product? What criteria and objections do they evaluate when considering your product? What are their expectations and fears when making the final purchase decision? What is their satisfaction level when using your product? And what are their motivations and incentives when promoting it to others?

3 Test and optimize your messaging and positioning

Your messaging and positioning should not remain stagnant, but should be dynamic and evolving. You need to assess and refine them based on customer research, feedback, and data. Surveys, interviews, landing pages, A/B testing, and heatmaps are all useful methods and tools for testing and optimizing your messaging and positioning. Surveys can help you understand your customer’s perceptions, preferences, and opinions on your value proposition. Interviews can provide insight into customer needs, pains, goals, and experiences with your product. Landing pages can be used to create different versions of your page with different headlines, copy, images, and calls to action. A/B testing allows you to compare the performance of two or more variants of your messaging and positioning on your website, email, ads or social media. Heatmaps can track and analyze how visitors interact with your website.

4 Avoid common mistakes

Using customer research for messaging and positioning can help you create a powerful and persuasive product story that connects with your audience and drives action. However, it is important to avoid some common mistakes that can weaken your efforts, such as using jargon, buzzwords, or vague terms; focusing on product features rather than customer benefits and outcomes; making claims without evidence, testimonials, or social proof; ignoring competitors and failing to differentiate your product from them; and assuming that your messaging and positioning are perfect without testing or updating them.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?