Ecommerce Foundational Principle 3 – Positioning
Positioning is about perception and how you want your ecommerce site and business as a whole to be perceived by your prospects and customers. Remember, prospects are potential customers. So ask yourself, do your target customers feel that this is the website they would like to buy from? Position your ecommerce website to match your prospects’ ideals.
Become Your Customer.
Get inside your customers’ minds and be them. See, think and feel what they do when buying your product. It is about how your website should look based on its theme, colors, design, layout, etc, to make your buyers want to spend time and money there. Essentially, you want something that is contemporary, clean, and inviting to your potential and target customers; often neutral is best with lots of background white space, a clean color, like a light gray and 1 or 2 accent colors to give identity.
As an example, a website aimed at new mothers could use light blues, pinks and images of attractive babies. A website aimed at selling high-end, exclusive furniture might well use blacks, grays and white to demonstrate class, with guarantees and security logos to build trust and show that the website offers customers military strength security and that they are safe to spend here. In either case, use words and language that your target customer understands and uses.
Taking the time to fully understand your target customer will consequently dictate the look and feel of your site, especially relating to the features, layout, design, logo, colors and language used.
Create & Dominate Your Category.
To become a leading ecommerce retailer in your chosen product area, it is critical you are seen as a leader, a voice that people recognize and trust, and are happy to buy from. This links in with branding, but takes it to a higher level in a number of ways. You’ll see this with the big elite companies such as Amazon, Apple, eBay, etc.
So Decide Now if You Are…
1) Entering a small, restricted niche market and selling for example, one trendy brand of women’s T-shirts?
2) Alternatively, are you entering a larger niche and selling many brands of T-shirts within the bigger category of clothing?
3) Alternatively, are you entering the top category and selling a large range of clothing and many brands?
This is just a very simple example to detail the different levels. Option 2 above seems to be the more profitable route for small to medium sized businesses to dominate that space. If you go too ‘niche’ as in option 1) you can restrict your sales potential, as the market may be very small.
To take this one step further, can you create your own category or niche? Let us say you started manufacturing and supplying your own T-shirts made from a new Eco Friendly material and you called these ‘Eco-Tee’ or whatever. This is now a new category—Eco Friendly T-shirts—and you have now just become the expert in this new category.
Control.
As a website owner you will publish lots of information including product descriptions, how-to guides, blogs, videos, newsletters and RSS. Therefore, through your content make it your objective to control your prospects and customers, and only give them access to the information you feel is right for them, in order to get them to buy your products. This is not about crossing ethical and moral boundaries but essentially leading and directing your product category, market or niche.
This control allows you to captivate, educate, inspire and prime your audience, persuading them that you have a product that fits their needs and wants. This is all about positioning and using psychology or ‘mind control marketing’ as Mark Joyner calls it—here is why this is important…
‘Your customers want what you are offering, so do everything you can to give it to them… Before your competitors do!’
Elites & Hierarchies.
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, his idea was to create a space without rules and regulations that would be equal for everyone including ecommerce entrepreneurs. However, the opposite is happening and those with the biggest resources or category dominance are shouting the loudest and consequently making the most money.
Let Me Ask You Three Simple Questions…
1) When you think of a Search Engine, who do you think of? Google!
2) When you think of buying online? It’s Amazon and eBay!
3) When you think of a social media sites? Facebook & Twitter!
However if I ask you about Men’s Dating, who do you think of? How about Anxiety Cure? In addition to the big boys like Amazon and eBay, the internet medium has allowed Double Your Dating and The Linden Method respectively to create and dominate these new information and ecommerce categories. These are just two multi-million dollar and very successful companies from the thousands of new categories being created online. Whether you sell physical products, information products or both, ecommerce is the transaction model used.
So how can you become number one in your category or niche and what will set you apart with your positioning?