Standing out amidst a massive chorus of competitors is a challenge for any healthcare business in today’s climate. The number of offers and sales pitches one receives on a daily basis is staggering and increasingly ineffective. A strong market positioning strategy can increase the awareness of your company. Strong positioning is the foundation that usually results in more effective marketing materials that generates more leads and more patients.

This blog post contains 50 questions that will help you determine your market positioning. We use these questions in a positioning workshop that we conduct with key leadership team members. With the answers, we develop a report that guides marketing communications decision making for future corporate communications materials.

Question about Target Customers

1. Who are my core customers, what do they have in common, how many are there, why do they buy from me?
2. If I could devote 100% of my time to just one type of customer, who (specifically) would it be? What do they “look” like?
3. What are the 5 biggest problems / pains / issues of my ideal customers?
4. What is the buying process for the target customer?
5. What does the buyer “look” like and think about?
6. Where are they? Where do they congregate?
7. Who else touches them?
8. Who are the “closable”, high-yield customers?

Questions about your Competition

1. Who are my ideal customers doing business with right now?
2. Why are my ideal customers doing business with my competition?
3. What is my competition doing that is keeping my ideal customers from coming to me?
4. What value does my ideal customer perceive my competition is providing which is keeping them from buying from me?
5. What are 5 variables that differentiate me from the competition?
6. How is my competition different from / superior to me?
7. How am I different from / superior to my competition?
8. What is my competitive advantage? (Unique Selling Proposition?)

Questions about Value

1. Why do people buy from me in the first place? What values do they seek? Expect? Hope for?
2. What does my ideal customer consider “Value”?
3. What am I doing to meet their expectations?
4. What am I not doing to meet their expectations?
5. What is their true pain / problem?
6. What is my Value Proposition?
7. If this formula is true: Value = Benefits / Price, what must I do to dramatically increase the customer’s perception of value?
8. What is my Niche / Specialisation / Area of Excellence?
9. What do I do for customers that no one else does?
10. What can I do for customers that no one else is doing?
11. Do my ideal customers REALLY care about these differences?
12. What is my reputation? What am I known for? What is my claim to fame?
13. How do customers think and talk about my business?
14. How would I like for them to talk about my business?
15. What can I do to remove or reduce the risk of potential customers switching from my business?
16. How can I reposition my product to meet the customer’s subjective value needs? What does my product “offer” vs. what does my product “do”?
17. What can I do to cause my customers to become addicted to using me?
18. What can I do to cause my customers to say “I would have to be crazy to do business with someone else?”

Questions about Value Creation

1. Where have we compromised on the trade-offs necessary for my business to deliver on our value proposition?
2. What if the only way to grow was on referrals – would I be running my business differently?
3. Where have we compromised or homogenized our niche? (Imitation? Broaden v. Deepen? Blurred uniqueness?)
4. What are the activities we perform which are not aligned with each other? Where are we producing an inconsistent image?
5. What needs to happen for all my employees to know exactly what our value proposition is and what activities they must perform to achieve it?
6. What needs to happen to align my employee’s compensation with “value creation”?

Questions about Marketing / Communications / Positioning

1. What should be my message to the market? (the reason to discriminate in my favour)
2. You must make a proposition to the consumer. Now just words, not just product, not just advertising. Each message must say to each reader, “Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit / value.” What is that message?
3. The proposition must be one that the competition either can not or does not offer. It must be unique. What is Unique about your proposition?
4. The proposition must be so strong that it can move people to take action… which means pull new customers away from the competition to your product. Where is the pull and how do you remove the risk of the customer switching to you?
5. What are the best forms of communicating with the marketplace? (Salespeople / direct mail / advertising / publicity / online / events / etc…)
6. How frequently should this message be sent?
7. What has worked in the past?
8. What are 5 things you could do (which cost less than £1000) to spread the word about your business?
9. What strategic “tie-in” relationships could you form with other businesses?
10. If marketing is anything that touches or impacts the customer in any way, what needs to change?