MARKETING
How to perfect your competitive positioning strategy
![How to perfect your competitive positioning strategy How to perfect your competitive positioning strategy](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/1677848757_How-to-perfect-your-competitive-positioning-strategy.jpg)
Sixty-two percent of customers report that their experiences with one company influence their expectations of others. This statistic highlights the importance of competitive positioning.
What are some of the advantages of competitive positioning? What’s the ideal strategy for achieving it? We’ll answer these questions but first, let’s define competitive positioning.
Key takeaways:
- Competitive positioning is the ability to make your company stand out from its competitors.
- The most significant benefit of competitive positioning is that it gives your branding purpose and can guide your entire business model, not just your marketing strategy.
- Competitive intelligence can help you determine areas of your business to improve and design distinctive marketing campaigns that reach the hearts of your potential customers.
- A perceptual map is a graph that shows you not only where your brand’s current status among consumers but also how it can improve. You can make multiple perceptual maps and use them for mapping the customer journey and identifying gaps in the market.
- You improve your competitive positioning by finding niche customers and running marketing campaigns that describe how your product is superior to others.
What is competitive positioning?
Competitive positioning is the ability to make your company stand out from its competitors.
The company’s competitive position depends on how the value of products and services you provide compares to the value of comparable products and services in the market. A business studies current trends, audience needs and pain points to create a competitive position.
There are numerous ways a company can differentiate itself from the competition. Here are four:
- Operational excellence – You promote the ability to provide a large volume of goods at a low price while upholding an excellent level of quality.
- Product leadership – Here, you market what makes your product unique. Does it address a specific pain point from buyers? Is there a new feature that other brands in the market don’t have?
- Customer relationships – Your company connects with customers through social media and responds to their feedback, creating a loyal customer base.
- Niche positioning – The company targets a particular market section, allowing it to promote itself as the leading brand in that sector.
The benefits of competitive positioning
The most significant benefit of competitive positioning is that it gives your branding purpose and can guide your entire business model, not just your marketing strategy.
For example, if your position is that you’re environmentally conscience, you would make your products from recycled materials, perhaps have EV charging stations at your facility or create programs in the community that support the environment.
Other advantages to competition positioning include:
- It helps build and maintain brand loyalty.
- You may gain more customers quickly.
- You can attract brand partnerships, employee talent and potential investors.
All of the above means increased revenue for your business.
Five steps for a winning competitive positioning strategy
Since you’ll assign a significant amount of resources to achieve your competitive position, these steps will ensure you’re efforts are successful.
1. Identify your goal
List out your short-term and long-term objectives. For example, do you wish to launch a new product? Promote an innovative service? Do you want customers to identify your brand as one that makes goods with better, sustainable materials? Or one that provides more personalized experiences?
Understanding the goals will help the marketing team develop the competitive positioning strategy.
2. Study your competitors
Aside from expertly knowing your company and offerings, identify your competitors and learn what customers think about their products. Are there particular ones that are popular among shoppers? Why? Do their customers provide feedback as to things that are still lacking?
Competitive intelligence can help you determine areas of your business to improve. As a result, you’ll always remain up-to-date and innovative. Your marketing campaigns will be distinctive and reach the hearts of your potential customers.
3. Create a perceptual map
Now that you’ve identified the competition create a perceptual map (also known as a positioning map) to see where you and they stand in customers’ eyes. A perceptual map is a graph that shows you not only where your brand’s current status among consumers but also how it can improve. You can make multiple perceptual maps and use them for mapping the customer journey and identifying gaps in the market.
A standard perceptual positioning map is a two-axis scatter chart where each axis represents an attribute. Place your brand’s status relative to the two attributes. Then, plot your competitors’ position in the chart. Stepping back, you can see how people perceive each brand, individually and in comparison to each other.
What are some attributes you can gauge in a perceptual map? Here are a few examples:
- For all products: Price and Quality
- Food products: Taste and Nutritional value
- Restaurants: Menu selection and Ambience
- Automobiles: Price and Style
The following illustration is a perceptual map for fashion brands.
4. Make a timeline
Creating a timeline as part of your competitive positioning strategy can help:
- You stay on schedule and easily track project progress
- Keep team members motivated and focused
- Improve communication so everyone understands who is responsible for which aspects of the project
- You set clear priorities so that team members handle the most critical tasks first
5. Find your niche
A niche can help you promote unique goods to potential buyers who want something other companies lack. You improve your competitive positioning by finding these niche customers and running marketing campaigns that describe how your product is superior to others.
Partner with Optimizely to gain a competitive advantage
A successful competitive positioning strategy requires the right tools, and Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is the robust offering your company’s been seeking. You can stand apart from the competition with the DXP’s customer data analytics and A/B experimentation. Optimizely’s team of experts is also here to help.
What to find out more? Contact us today to see how Optimizely can help.
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
![YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update] YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/YouTube-Ad-Specs-Sizes-and-Examples.jpg)
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
![Why We Are Always 'Clicking to Buy', According to Psychologists Why We Are Always 'Clicking to Buy', According to Psychologists](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Why-We-Are-Always-Clicking-to-Buy-According-to-Psychologists.pngkeepProtocol.png)
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
![A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/A-deeper-dive-into-data-personalization-and-Copilots.jpg)
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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