What positioning is for
Positioning is the decision about where your business sits in a customer's mind next to the other choices they have. Everything else in marketing, from the website headline to the ad copy to the sales call, is downstream of it. When the sentence is unclear, every piece of copy argues with every other piece.
It is not a tagline. A tagline is what you say in public. Positioning is what you decided before you said it.
The three parts of the sentence
- Who: the customer, described as they would describe themselves.
- What: the outcome you deliver, not the service you sell.
- Why you: the one thing that is true of you and not of the alternative.
Put them together in plain words. For a plumber it might read: for homeowners in Pitt County who need a repair today, we answer the phone and arrive the same day. The reason follows: we keep a van in Greenville every day of the week. Long, but true, and a stranger can repeat the point of it.
How to find the reason to choose you
Ask your last ten customers why they picked you. Their answers will cluster. The cluster is your reason, even if it is not the one you would have chosen. Businesses often want to be known for quality when customers chose them for speed.
The reason has to be something a competitor cannot claim with a straight face. If every alternative can say it, it is not positioning; it is table stakes.
What to cut
Cut adjectives that describe how good you are. Cut the list of every service. Cut anything a customer would not say out loud. What remains should read like a fact, because it is one.
Then test it. Say the sentence to someone outside the business and ask them to tell you what you do. If their version matches, you are done. If not, the part they dropped was the part that was not clear.
Where the sentence goes next
Put it at the top of the home page, in the first line of your Google Business Profile description, and in the opening of every sales conversation. The same sentence in every place is how a market learns what you are.