Use Your Brand Positioning as a Compass for All Aspects of Your Business The statement can help you make strategic decisions, train your team and develop creative messaging.

In this series of articles, we've been building a classic brand-positioning template that has been around in various forms for decades.

Sometimes old school is still the way to go.

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When using this format to develop the positioning for your brand, it forces you to make decisions on who you are targeting, what business you compete in, why customers would select you, and how you will connect emotionally with them.

Once completed, you have the makings of a very compelling brand positioning that you can use to guide your business activities. You can't run a business without one, and you certainly can't market your brand.

But you may be asking yourself, how will it help me do that?

Make strategic decisions.

Your new positioning statement should guide you at every strategic fork in the road, helping you make decisions based on how you've defined your brand and what you know about your customer. Don't make a big decision without referencing how it matches with your newly minted brand positioning.

Looking to launch a new product or service? Does it fit with your brand positioning?

Want to grow your business by targeting a new customer? Will they be attracted to your proposition? How should you alter it?

Train your team.

A brand positioning is only as good as it is used, and only as good as it is communicated. Make your brand positioning available to your entire team, so that they can think through how it affects their work. Hold short training sessions on how to apply it to the various disciplines in your organization. Put your positioning to work by making it a living, breathing document for all those involved in your business.

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Your sales team should conduct themselves in accordance with how you've developed your brand's character. As an active part of the brand, they should be living the brand every day.

Even your receptionist should carry a consistent brand tone to her engagement with customers, particularly as often the first point of contact.

Develop consistent and creative brand messaging.

Your brand positioning should be religiously used to guide all creative development of your branded sales and marketing materials. From the simplest of tweets to the most complicated of web designs, and everything in between, your brand positioning should guide your creative team in their work.

You have to make sure you develop a consistent brand experience across all of the touch points you create, and the only way to do that is to continually use the brand-positioning statement over and over again. When you are reviewing creative work that is meant to represent your brand, hold you brand positioning up as a way to determine if it is strategically correct.

Far too many times, small-business owners rely on their judgment and personal opinions when reviewing creative materials for their business, when in fact all work should be judged against the brand positioning and nothing else.

Rinse and repeat often.

A brand-positioning statement shouldn't be written once and put to rest on a shelf in your office. Take a hard look at it at least once a year and make sure it's still relevant. It should be driving the strategic direction of your business, pushing you to keep growing. Keep it fresh to keep you motivated.

And here you thought brand positioning was only an exercise for us obsessed marketing types.

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