You have a new B2B product or service to launch.

You have a clear understanding of your offer – its features, benefits and USP. Now you need to position it in a way that’s compelling to your target audience. And you need that positioning to be watertight from day one.

Here are some methods marketing managers can use to get their service and product positioning bang on the money.

Workshop it.

Rather than trying to settle on a robust positioning statement by themselves, marketing managers should collaborate across the company.

A focused series of workshops, drilling into your audience, will bring together views from different business stakeholders – sales, marketing and product – so you reach a consensus that’s exposed to all the elements and not a product of tunnel vision. The more teams that are involved, the more people they speak to, and the more you can stress-test proposals. A project leader can help marshal diverging views into consensus, grounded in their experience.

A workshop approach to product positioning helps cover all the bases: technical input from product development; sales and marketing knowledge of language that resonates with customers; the C-suite vision so it aligns with business growth. It gives you a solid starting point of what speaks to your product’s capability and service offering, as well as what customers are asking account managers and sales reps for.

The workshop should seek to reach an ownable position, challenging its strength and uniqueness on the basis of what else is out there and what competitors are saying.

Interview them.

Nothing beats going to the source. Interviewing real, past and prospective customers lets you quickly and clearly validate your hypothesis or cut away the fluff to focus a niche even further.

Ask them what they like and dislike about you and your competitors’ messaging, and how they’d describe it themselves. Not only will it guide you in the right direction, but you’ll gain phrases and nuggets that can be transplanted directly into your positioning. Sharing potential product positions with them will reveal any terms that are familiar and understood within your business but don’t resonate externally.

As well as ensuring your positioning is speaking in your customers’ language, you can also use customer interviews to establish your true, primary USP – in the eyes of those you’re selling to. In our experience, that’s not always what clients initially believe it to be.

Test it out in the world. Once you’ve asked the people, put it to the people.

Use A/B tests to compare how positioning holds up across different assets and channels – from a subject line, right down to the CTA. Look at how widely it engages, where it doesn’t, and how that varies by audience. This will help you precisely tailor it to nuances in your personas’ top priorities and pain points, such as ROI benefits for a senior business audience, versus admin benefits for office managers.

If it doesn’t land on a platform that’s crucial to communicating with a certain audience, it’ll need reworking. The same goes if the personas who hold decision-making or buying power aren’t having any of it.

After this, you’ll know whether your product positioning has passed the stress test.

Workshops, insight interviews, A/B testing – it’s a bit of us. Get in touch if it sounds like something you need.