We ride at dawn

Gentle reader, we meet yet again!

When we last left you, we were coaxing through customer interviews and into the bright sunlight of analysis.

Now how do you use what they said to create your niche in the market?

This: Take what your core customers told you in interviews, find throughlines, and tailor your positioning to who they are and what they’re looking for.

Pay special attention to:

• Why do they love it

• What do they want out of life (end goal)

• Underlying problems

• Product/Feature Descriptions

• Unique words & phrases

Walking through the marketing plan

Quick recap - you are only looking at the core customers thoughts and feedback. Not everybody’s.

Your core customers will be those that:

Wherever your largest grouping of paying users that hit all of those characteristics, THOSE are the core ICP you should be focusing on.

Group by use case or need state, whichever holds constant across users.

We’re at [this spot] in your marketing plan

What it looks like to choose your target audience based on use case (product usage)

In other words, your target audience is (fill in the blank):

Workflow example: “Creatives who use Workflow for stress-free client communication.

They usually find us via Google or a friend/partner referral and are 100% self-serve.

They talk about what they need in Workflow in this way [words and phrases] and they talk about what they want out of their work-life and tools stack like this [words and phrases].

I, Sophia, am thrilled to be building for these Creatives because I understand the struggle of getting clear feedback on projects and having it gum up mental and creative space, and business operations as a fellow agency owner.”

See the distinction of defining by Use Case? Who the clients are, what kinds of creative disciplines are using it, the kinds of things that need to be reviewed, none of that matters to narrowing down core audience. It does for product decisions and marketing strategy, but it’s irrelevant to naming who you’re serving. This is how you stay broad enough without teetering into “we’re for everybody” or being so narrow that you don’t have a large enough market to work with.

With Services it’s hard to define a use case because every person is unique.

What it looks like to choose your target audience based on need state (or outcome):

See the distinction of defining by need state? What kind of industry the professional is coming from doesn’t really matter, and neither does the kind of self-employed that the become. What matters is the reason they’re starting (being over corporate life) and waht they want at the end (successful, sustainable self-employment).

With SaaS it’s hard to define a need state/outcome because everyone has tried a different stack of tools before yours and the outcome they want often varies by use case and company size.

Okay, now that we’re all cozily converged on WHO you should be positioning to, here’s how to write that positioning.

We’re at [this spot] in your marketing plan

Go through your transcripts and pull out the answers to each of these questions, and note who it was from. Copy verbatim. Add to this table (column is target audience)

Yes, you can use chatgpt for this (prompt incoming) but i recommend going through them manually. you will get a much better understanding of your customers when you read them.

ChatGPT prompt (if you must)

Just MAKE SURE that you use first names only and remove identifying information like email addresses. The bots don’t need all that.

It will look like this:

Your positioning sweet spot is to talk with your ICP (that division of your target audience that is your core customers) about how to overcome their pain points and underlying problems to reach their end goals, while addressing their objections and giving them the stats and proof that your product can be their fix in a natural, human way.

For Workflow, that looks like

Being a stress-free home for client work and communication that plays nice with their processes and tools and treats them like a human who would rather be living, not working.

(more or less, can’t be giving everything away 😉)

If you’re getting stuck at this step, do a full-page screenshot of your messaging table, upload it to Chat, and use this prompt to help you get un-stuck:

Yes, this works, even when your target audience is hella crowded. Last I checked, there were 15 competitors for Workflow. None of them are taking this approach. And since Workflow has a 12% MoM growth rate, with 30% of new customers coming from word of mouth…yeah, I’d say it’s working.

If you want to have a brand that stands out completely, then add an opinion in there.

Go back through your founder story (if you don’t have one, now’s the time to wax poetic on why you bothered starting this shindig at all) and why you like working with this core customer in the first place. You probably have strong opinions on what you’re building and why, I know I do.

Not all of them are publishable (insert swear jar money here) but here’s the gist for Workflow (and INM, just tweaked a bit for marketing services):

Small business owners usually get the short end of the stick and are overcharged and treated with contempt by most of the tools they pay for. That’s disgusting.

Workflow will treat business owners with respect in it’s pricing, communication, and feature set, never trying to make a quick buck at their expense or telling them what they “should” do.

That’s the way Workflow was built to begin with, and that’s how I’m carrying it forward.

There’s a spot in your marketing plan for those opinions and how your company clashes with it’s competitors on purpose.

There’s also one for brand archetype, which is very helpful, but is a whole issue to itself (which we wrote a year ago, you can read it here!).

How to turn this positioning (and opinions) into content? That’s what we’re going to cover next week.

We’ll see you and your inbox then.

Cheers!

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia ⚡️🧕 

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