DEVELOP YOUR POSITIONING ACTION PLAN
This is the third in a series of articles on positioning. It follows the June 10 article, “The First Step in Positioning: Know Your Competition,” and the June 25 article, “What’s Your Position?”

The Positioning Action Plan — how you will achieve your Positioning — is the power behind your Positioning statement. Without it, your Positioning statement is just a collection of words that you’ll have trouble relating to over the long term. Putting an Action Plan behind your Positioning will give you something to hold onto, a clear plan that makes the Positioning believable and do-able.

What key actions will support your Positioning?
Now that you’ve got your positioning, it’s time to put a plan into place so you’ll make the best use of it. Some of this may come from your strategic plan, if you’ve done work in this area recently.

1. What actions must you take to assure your desired Positioning?
For example, if you're positioning your company as being the latest, or as a leader in a high tech or fast moving sector, you may need to continually invest in the newest technology. If you’re positioning your company as being the best in customer service or patient care, you may need to make training a higher priority. For other specialized positioning, you may need to form alliances with partners and vendors. Make note of these actions.

2. What steps can you take to assure your Ideal Customer recognizes
your Positioning?
Your new positioning won’t mean much if your customers and prospects don’t know about it. In order to make sure they do, you may need to expand your advertising presence, get some good PR, and find ways to locate where your Ideal Customer hangs out. How can you creatively promote your new positioning? Write these ideas down.

3. How will you keep on track to assure the Positioning stays active
and visible?
It’s easy to come up with new marketing and business-building strategies and just let them sit there, isn’t it? After all the work you do to craft these initiatives, wouldn’t it be great if your efforts were finally at an end, and they’d just implement themselves? That’s not going to happen, but if you can put some processes and procedures in place to monitor and benchmark your progress, you’ll be that much more likely to stay on track. For instance, would setting up quarterly checkpoint meetings help you to assess the effect the new positioning language has on customers? Is it working? Are people using it? What procedures might help you keep on track? Write down your ideas.

Now, follow through!