The RedShift Strategic Positioning Process
Rapidly expand in your market.
Are you ready to shape your vision and lead your market?
The RedShift Strategic Positioning Process harnesses the full power of your team so you can enter the market as not just a newcomer, but as a disruptor.
We guarantee results.
Your website’s authority is a litmus test for whether or not you are perceived as a leader in the market.
We guarantee that our process will position your brand and your website for exponential growth.
If you go through our entire Strategic Positioning Process and do not see at least 5X growth in your website’s monthly users, visits, and page views, we will give you your money back.
We guide your company to market leadership by:
Stage 0: Onboarding Your Team
At the start of every project, we conduct a 90-minute onboarding meeting where everyone gets on the same page so we can provide the best possible strategic guidance to you and your team. We introduce our teams and set expectations so you have full clarity on what to expect in the stages to follow.
Then we conduct our first workshop: Roles & Responsibilities. Together, we clarify what each team member is responsible for doing, discussing, and deciding throughout the project.
We all walk out with a Roles & Responsibilities Matrix that unites our teams, streamlines communication, and makes it quick and easy to add new members to the project.
Stage 1: Building Your Positioning Brief
Branding doesn’t start with your website or sales materials.
Every great brand begins by committing their position to paper.
Your Positioning Brief is the engine that powers your brand marketing efforts for generations.
What’s Included in Your Positioning Brief
- Audience Analysis with Personas
- Competitive Analysis
- Name Analysis
- Category
- Unique Value Proposition
- Mission
- Vision
- Values
- Brand Voice Statement
- Taglines
- Brand Story
How We Create Your Positioning Brief
In Stage 1, we facilitate a series of strategic workshops with your team, conduct an in-depth analysis of your audience and your industry, and articulate your brand position in your very own comprehensive Positioning Brief.
Brand Positioning Strategy Workshops
Assumption Collecting & Mapping Workshop
Gain a clear picture of how to focus your brand and your message. Collect assumptions that reflect what you and your team think might be true about the project, then prioritize your assumptions based on certainty and risk.
Clarifying everyone’s assumptions early in the process prevents any unpleasant surprises later in the project.
Articulate the point of your service, who it’s for, and what makes it unique.
Embrace the perspective of each and every one of your team members by comparing insights until you reach the best possible way of framing your unique value proposition.
Value Proposition Workshop
Empathy Mapping Workshop
Get inside the heads of your customers so you can create better ways of framing your solution to their problems and communicate what they stand to gain from your business.
Encourage your team to consider what your target audience does, says, thinks, and feels while pursuing their goals.
Strengthen your company culture and make better business decisions.
Discuss the principles that guide your team on a daily basis, and identify the three-to-five values that make your team special. Defining your team values makes it easier to inspire your team, hire the right people, and pursue the right customers.
Team Values Workshop
Market Research & Analysis
Between workshops, our strategists analyze your audience, your competitors, and your brand name.
Audience Analysis
We build on the initial findings gathered during our Empathy Mapping Workshop by clarifying the primary and secondary industries you serve, pinpointing your top prospects, and creating personas that reflect potential customers, users, and champions for your venture.
Competitor Analysis
Based on the information gathered during your Assumption Collecting & Mapping workshop, we assess your direct competitors, indirect competitors, and potential alternatives to your products or services. We observe your competitors’ weaknesses so that you can discover the best opportunities to meet unmet needs, drive demand, and grow your share of the market.
Name Analysis
Your name is a powerful tool that carries meaning, evokes emotions, and shapes perceptions in the minds of your audience. It must differentiate you from your competitors.
We examine the benefits and drawbacks of your organization’s name, analyzing its meaning, how it sounds, how easy it is to type, whether or not it can be confused with the name of another company, and other ways that it might help or hinder your position in the market.
Name analysis reveals whether you should stick with your current name or consider selecting a new one. We may recommend ways of adjusting your brand name to reinforce your market position.
Approve Your Positioning Brief
After we complete our workshops and analysis, we craft a Positioning Brief that clearly articulates your brand’s position, and unveil your Positioning Brief to your team.
We give everyone time to sleep on the presentation before making final changes.
We want to be absolutely certain that your Positioning Brief reflects your vision and that you’re 100% satisfied with your new position.
It’s a crucial decision for your business.
Are you confident in your market position?
Do you have a complete Positioning Brief?
Or if you pulled together what you have, would you find gaps in your brand?
Whether you need assistance in bolstering aspects of your brand position, or you’re starting from scratch, RedShift Strategists can help.
Stage 2: Roadmapping Your Content
Your Content Strategy Roadmap is a comprehensive plan that determines what content to create and where you should distribute it so you can grow your audience, leads, and share of the market.
Your Content Strategy Roadmap
| Deliverable | Specs |
|---|---|
User Needs + SEO Research Identify the needs of your users based on the pain points and opportunities outlined in your buyer personas. Specify the most pressing needs of your users. Discover what keywords drive the highest volume of relevant traffic to your website to generate leads and expand opportunities. |
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| PESO Report See how best to approach Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media to maximize your ROI. |
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| Website Authority Plan Outline all of the website content needed to own a singular position in the mind of the market, including core web pages and ongoing content. |
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| Content Creation Timelines Map out the creation and publication calendar for all content pillars, ensuring that a consistent flow of valuable information reaches your audience. |
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How We Build Your Content Strategy Roadmap
In Stage 2, we outline your site map, identify key user needs, and build a website authority plan that will drive traffic and position you as a leader in the market.
Launch
Our first step in creating your Content Strategy Roadmap is to conduct a 90-minute strategic launch meeting for everyone to celebrate the completion of your Positioning Brief and recalibrate for another successful project.
During the meeting, we prioritize business objectives and establish a schedule for developing your Content Strategy Roadmap.
Facilitate Content Strategy Workshops
Card Sorting Workshop
During this workshop, we will collect and organize key ideas for your website.
By the end of the workshop, you’ll have a visual sitemap for a website that’s easy for your users to navigate.
User Needs Workshop
User needs are carefully considered pain points and goals for each of your personas. During this workshop, we will identify 10+ user needs for each persona, remove needs that don’t lead directly to your services, then prioritize needs by urgency and clarity so you can meet your audience at their highest level of demand.
The purpose of this workshop is to grow your client base and retain your current users by solving their problems when they need you the most.
Topic Ideation Workshop
Your visionary, sales reps, service reps, and support team know what questions your customers are regularly asking. They likely already have dozens of ideas for content that can be created for your business.
During this workshop, we collect, iterate, and evolve your team’s ideas. Your sales team knows how to encourage leads to sign on the dotted line; your service team understands how to retain customers months after the sale.
Together, your team can come up with topics that holistically address the customer experience.
Research SEO Opportunities
Our SEO research is driven by the needs of your customers. We put ourselves in the shoes of your audience and ask, “If I had this need, what would I type into the search bar?”
We then test our assumptions on SEO tools to determine the keywords, phrases, and questions that are most often used when looking for the type of solutions you offer.
While we’re identifying the best keywords for you to rank for, we also look at what else shows up when you Google those terms. Sometimes, we see your direct competitors; other times, we see news stories and academic papers rank high on the page. Usually, it’s a little bit of both.
Once we’ve identified 400+ clear, urgent, high volume keywords that are related to your offering, we look at the top ten search results for each keyword to learn what kind of content ranks highest.
- Do they provide the most in-depth information?
- Do they provide a new perspective on the topic?
- How does the content grab the reader’s attention? Is it presented as a listicle, a burning question, or a bold claim?
- What kind of visual aids, infographics, and other page elements do the highest ranking pieces use to educate the reader and keep them engaged?
- What could those sources have done to make their content even better?
- And how can we create content that not only surpasses them but also introduces your unique perspective to the results page?
By taking time to thoroughly analyze your SEO opportunities, we identify the exact keywords, phrases, and questions you need to rank for in order to drive traffic, engagement, and conversions on your website.
Analyze Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media Opportunities
A lot of users are going to find you through search engines, but there are still plenty of other channels where you should distribute your content to reach a wider audience.
We leverage insights from your Positioning Brief as well as new information that has emerged during your content strategy workshops to find the most effective opportunities to take advantage of Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media.
What is PESO?
| Media Type | Example |
|---|---|
| Paid | Digital ads, print ads, conference sponsorship |
| Earned | Media interviews, guest posts, editorials, mentions on other websites |
| Shared | Partner webinars, joint case studies, social media posts |
| Owned | Website content, email campaigns, brochures, blog |
Note: Some forms of media may fit into multiple categories. The purpose of your PESO analysis is to establish an understanding of your content distribution opportunities, no matter what kind of media you use to distribute your content.
Create Your Website Authority Plan
After we’ve pinpointed the needs of your users, identified the most relevant SEO opportunities, and analyzed the best channels for distributing your content, we organize all of our insights into an actionable plan: your website authority plan.
The purpose of your website authority plan is to list the content that will showcase your expertise and solidify your authority in the industry. It prioritizes which content should be written first, including your homepage, about page, and service pages, as well as ongoing content such as blogs, guides, and articles.
Approve Your Content Strategy Roadmap & Content Rollout Timeline
After we create all the elements of your Content Strategy Roadmap, we present it to you and your team for feedback. We also show you three timelines for executing your Website Content Authority Plan: one year, 18 months, and two years.
We give you a few days to sleep on it so you can consider which content rollout timeline works best for your business while we make any changes you requested.
To finalize your Content Strategy Roadmap, we have one final meeting to review all the changes, make any final adjustments, and agree on a rollout timeline that meets your needs and budget.
We take the time to make sure your Content Strategy Roadmap reflects your vision so that we can take your new position to market and gain traction—fast.
Do you know your path to market?
Do you know what content to create based on your highest-value opportunities?
Target specific challenges and opportunities to bring more users to your platform, and become a known expert in your field.
Stage 3: Craft Winning Content
The Content Creation Stage is where you begin your ascent to true leadership in the market. It consists of four steps: direct, produce, test, and fine-tune.
We kickoff every piece of content with a solid direction. We consider who it’s for, why it matters, and how it ties into your content strategy. We outline the piece, identifying the main idea, the sub-ideas, and how to organize it from top to bottom so that it’s easy to follow and guides readers further along your marketing funnel.
When we produce content, we work in teams of two—one author, one editor—to ensure that there are no mistakes, and that the content is clear and easy to read. We send the first draft to you for review, then make any revisions that need to be made.
After the final draft is approved, added to your site, and distributed across your key marketing channels, we test the performance of the piece by tracking key metrics on Google Analytics and keyword research tools. Does it engage readers? Is it working its way up the search results pages? Is it converting?
We continue to fine-tune content. If we think there are ways to enhance your content’s performance, we adjust the piece. We also consider if there are any adjustments we should make based on updates at your company or even across your entire industry, such as new product features or important changes in regulations. We may go back and strengthen headlines, add new information, or alter calls to action to convert more prospects.
As we move through the content creation process, new ideas and tactics inevitably come to light. We capture all ideas, and if they align with your position, we figure out how we can add them to the roadmap and expand your brand even further.
Do you have the content resources to execute your strategy?
Do you have content momentum?
Is your team at capacity and needs extra help?
RedShift Strategists’ Content Creation scales to meet your sales and budgeting needs as you build a presence in the market.