Build memeable positioning - Building Momentum

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build positioning, messaging, and narrative that is memeable.

And I don’t mean putting your positioning statement over an image…

Or coming up with a quirky tagline to fit in a meme like this one…

But I bet that, regardless of whether you’re extremely online or not, you instantly understand these memes.

You know when these are used, how they’re used.

The emotions they’re conveying.

You’ll know the format of the text that should go over the images, even without seeing them before.

And what’s more, you’ll share them and maybe create them yourself. You can share ideas, emotion, logic, and pretty much guarantee a reaction – with just an image of a cat.

You need to do the same for your positioning.

The essence of your positioning needs to transmit all the same things: the idea, the vision, emotion, targeting, and a reaction.

The goal is for those who hear your positioning to understand it, to embody it, and to transmit it onwards.

To grasp the idea, for it to stick.

And, as the definition of positioning says, to ‘occupy a space in the mind of your customer’.

In this post:

But, JDP, how?

I honestly think it’s pretty simple, but it needs dedicated effort – and an understanding that positioning is an evolving journey.

Define a niche group of target customers
Talk to them – understand what their lives are like
Find the patterns that exist in their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers
Connect the dots between the value they want, and how your product helps them
Define a heart-and-brain narrative based on unconventional wisdom
Test it, and see what feedback is like

In my free Customer Value Positioning framework, you’ll see that I focus on defining the heading and paragraph that exists in your website homepage hero section.

This is, without a doubt, where your memeable positioning needs to work the hardest. As soon as someone lands on your site, they’ve gotta ‘get it’. Fully, deeply, instantly without delay.

So experiment with the language you use. It’s so easy to fall back to boring professionalspeak that ultimately says nothing.

You want your customers to understand innately, to feel something, to be motivated, to feel urgency… so your language has to reflect that.

What to avoid

I don’t think you can build memeable positioning that:

Has been crafted internally, without basing on hard evidence from your target customers
Focuses on features and benefits, instead of value
Is broad and untargeted – remember, it’s better to be the thing for someone rather than something for everyone
Doesn’t use the same language your customers use
Isn’t focused on your customers – you need separate messaging for your PR pitching, for investors, for employees
Isn’t connected to a part of their lives that they recognise – it must be connected to an aspiration, a fear, a thought they all have

Meme once, repeat ad infinitum

Really, memeable positioning is just good positioning.

And so long as it starts – and ends – with how your customers are living their lives, you’ll be on the right track.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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