Positioning 101: How to live rent-free in your best clients’ minds

Good positioning captures what makes you valuable—ideally, uniquely so—to your clients. And it lives rent-free in their minds. To find it, look no further than what makes you different. Then follow the process in this post.

Without positioning, you don’t exist

If you don’t have a position in your clients’ mental map, you don’t have a business.

It sounds dramatic, but here’s what no positioning actually looks like for a copywriter:

• You come across smaller or are invisible to clients who pay well for your skills.
• You’re competing on price with everyone else who “does copywriting.”
• You’re second-guessing every lead gen decision because you don’t have focus.
• You’re watching AI panic spread through the industry, wondering if you’ll still do this next year.

Or maybe you’re doing well—great! Then you already have positioning, you just might not be fully aware of it. 

And you might not have a positioning document yet.

That’s about to change.

What is positioning?

Positioning is three things: 

• A strategic thinking process
• The result of that process, in one sentence
• The document in your drive where the answers from the process live and are regularly revisited

In the words of the GOATs:

“Positioning is the process of differentiating a product, service or company in the customer’s mind to obtain a strategic competitive advantage; the first step in building a brand.“
—Positioning: The battle for your mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout, 2000

“Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.”
—Obviously Awesome: how to nail product positioning so customers get it, buy it, love it, April Dunford, 2019

“Your phrase that pays is the unfair advantage.”
—loose quote from the OG Conversion Copywriting Sensei, Joanna Wiebe

The deliverable—your positioning document—is the X-ray of the value your business creates: what you do, your differentiated way to do it, and for whom.

How can I know my positioning?

What are your clients thinking of when they think of your business? What do they associate you with? For knowledge businesses, such as copywriting, answering is part detective, part creative work.

Here’s the starting point: your biggest business asset is you. Your uniqueness. Your strengths. Positioning is how you place them in the right market context so you make bank to the fullest. To complete the process, draw from two reservoirs:

1) the raw energy of your mind as owner, creator, and keeper of the holies.

2) the wealth of clues from the mind of your client: interviews, review mining, surveys, etc. 

“The correct solution is buried in the problem itself. It has never been written before. It cannot be produced by rote, carbon copy or mutations. But it can be sprung to the surface—automatically—by asking the right questions.”
—Eugene M. Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising

So ask these five, as outlined by April Dunford, global expert in positioning for tech and author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It.

The fundamental five positioning Qs

Question #1: If you didn’t exist, what would your clients do?

You might want to say they’d get another copywriter. But chances are they’d tell ChatGPT to “write me a homepage” (completely unadvisable for multiple reasons). Or ask the intern. Or delay, delay, delay.

The alternatives to hiring you range from doing nothing to briefing the owner’s nephew to hiring a copywriting master. If, and that’s the most essential of ifs, these are the options your clients are thinking of.

Cheerleading newsflash: nobody will comb through all copywriters alive on planet Earth before making a choice. They’ll pick from what enters their attention span—referrals, feeds and searches, or events. Make sure you meet and have them at hello, and you are in business. Hurray!

Pro tip: Do your “Jobs to Be Done” research to know who truly competes with you, and why they’d hire or delay hiring you. 

Question #2: What features or capabilities do you have that alternatives do not?

While this comes second in April Dunford’s framework, for a copywriting business, this is the starting question. Skill and capacity create advantage. And you are in business to make the most of your skills and capacity, both existing and emerging (congratulations on entering the Copyhackers universe! It’s the home of great copywriters all over).

So what are your skills? Copywriting, of course, but let’s aim to be—as Joanna Wiebe will say—surgically precise here:

• Voice of customer research
• Website copy
• Sales pages
• Funnels
• Launches
• Testing and validation
• Email
• Something else.

Then, go lateral. Listening. Interviewing. Collaborating. Advanced use of AI for research. Design. Any skill that sets you apart.

A word of warning! Saying what you have to offer that competitors don’t can read like an invitation to the impostor syndrome festival. Please don’t entertain those thoughts. If you do the work in Copy School, that in itself will be your differentiator.

Just starting out? The best strategy is to pick one lane and go deep: study it on the Copy School platform, do client work, and build expertise and authority around it. 

If you would like more clarity around it, I have created a workshop specifically to help you zoom into your business capacity and intention, and let your positioning surface, a la GOAT Eugene Schwartz. If you’re a Copy School member, watch your inbox for an invite to a positioning special training.

Question #3: What value do your business attributes enable for clients?

Or: what problems can you solve?

Have you ever seen a breadmaking machine? You put in flour, yeast, water, and salt, push the button, and out comes bread. But you could also put in fruit, sugar, and water, and end up with jam.

The breadmaker solves the problem of fresh, homemade bread. And the problem of jam.

Make a list of what is amazing about your work, in your words and in your clients’ words (open that testimonials doc). Look for patterns and group them, as April Dunford puts it, into buckets. Or feed them into the AI of your choice and ask for the top three themes. What emerges? A few ideas:

• Speed: Your turnaround times are low, and for the right fee, you could make yourself available on short notice (hello, VIP days!).
• Ease: You deliver thorough, plug-and-play assets. Working with you is a no-brainer for large teams.
• Performance: Your work is so good at capturing brand voice or so well engineered for conversion that your results consistently beat the baseline.

If you’d like to know how many kinds of buckets there could be, my workshop—The Dark Horse Protocol—looks in depth at the types of value you could offer your clients and how to choose yours.

Question #4: Who cares a lot about that value?

Your best service means nothing to the wrong people. Just as the right people would pay top dollar for it, on time, recommend you, and come back for more.

If you’ve already completed projects, feed your favorites into an AI and flesh out an Ideal Client Profile (ICP).

If you’ve just started out and don’t know who values your output yet, the answer is: micro-experiment. Do your jobs-to-be-done interviews. Look at your sales calls and interactions. And then make your best choice and sign them.

Then, as we do with any copywriting project, test and evaluate: does this ICP care a lot about your value? If yes, and you enjoy the work, how easily can you sign more? And if not, what in your ICP hypothesis needs to change?

Question #5: What context makes the value obvious to your targeted clients?

This is, probably, the hardest to crack of all five. 

Context is where your work is recognized as the solution. The stage you need to be on, in front of your ICP, for them to go “yes, that’s exactly what I need.”

• Where there are budgets to be spent on your service;
• Where they make a clear connection between what you offer and their ROI;
• Where they share your values.

If you’re the email strategist, go where email already moves money—SaaS, course creators, etc.—not where they still debate using it.

This will look simple when solved.

Go through the questions. Come up with a hypothesis. Test. Look at the feedback. Course correct and test again. Until the winner emerges.

What does positioning look like?

“I define [positioning] as what the product does and who it’s for. I could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position it as a toilet bar for women with dry skin. This is still working 25 years later.”—David Ogilvy, circa 1980s

Switch back to detective mode: the paragraph tells you the most important things about positioning—that it should clearly state who the ICP is, what the category is, and what the product’s value or main benefit is.

But also, it needs to endure the test of time. And for that, it needs to be big and memorable.

The formula. The descriptor. And the killer.

You will most frequently run into:

For [ICP], [product] is [category] who [main benefit/value proposition].

To paraphrase what GOAT David Ogilvy said, for women with dry skin, Dove is the toilet bar. The main benefit is implied: it’s not just a soap, it’s also a moisturizer.

For example:

For copywriters and marketers, Copyhackers is the digital learning platform for conversion copywriting.

Notice how this sentence is fact-based. No metaphors, no symbols, no signifiers. 

It’s the first level of any positioning attempt—the descriptor. X for Y, where X is the product or service category, and Y is the ICP.

But we want the positioning sentence to land with gut-punching power.

And for that, it needs to be, as David Ogilvy taught us, big and memorable. A killer.

To find your killer, you look for revealing clues. The details that point to the client like a footprint to the “suspect.” And no magnifying glass works like a good old game of “what’s that like?”.

In our hypothetical attempt to position Copyhackers, what is a digital learning platform like? Especially when it also has a built in community? A hub? Which turns the positioning into:

Copyhackers is the learning hub for conversion copywriting.

This is not bad, although the ICP is now implicit, and we might lose the marketers as a result. Can we layer a status signifier to immediately signal the kind of quality Copyhackers offers? Can we add status or “heat”?

How about implying that Copyhackers is the Ivy League option for copywriters out there? 

Notice how I am making an assumption here: that the Copyhackers ICP knows what an alma mater is and is looking for one.

Such an assumption would first need to be validated with the owner’s aspirations and in jobs-to-be-done interviews. That is why that stage is so critical—it can move the conversation to a highly specific, highly effective context.

In that case, the positioning would become:

Copyhackers is the digital alma mater of the world’s best conversion copywriters.

Or,

Copyhackers is the digital alma mater to the world’s conversion copywriting stars.

(Validating question: how do you feel when calling Copyhackers your digital alma mater? Comment below for extra digital positioning love.)

Is this big? Yes.

Is this memorable? Yes.

For positioning to be bulletproof, you would also need to take one more test:

Can anyone else in the market say the same thing?

Is there any other copywriting school that could claim the above? Nope.

Is this a killer? We’ll let Joanna Wiebe call it. But I will argue it’s killer material.

As you strive to answer this question for yourself, please remember this: the bigger the brand, the higher the stakes.

There may be someone out there doing your kind of copywriting for the same ICP. Perhaps specializing in the one thing you picked. 

But unless you show up on the radar for the same clients and they narrow it down to the two of you (see question #1), you do not need to reconsider your positioning. Stay the course of building presence and authority.

Positioning a business of one

Let’s look at a business of one we can all learn from on positioning:

“April Dunford is a globally recognized expert in positioning and market strategy. April helps technology companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love.” (Says her Obviously Awesome book biography.)

The descriptor:

April is an expert in positioning and market strategy. 

With the kind of modifier that establishes the level of the conversation: globally recognized. It immediately places her on a particular stage, in relation to clients of a particular size—global.

The main benefit:

If you work with April, your customers are very likely to understand and love your tech product, even if it’s complicated. And love always means sales in this context. Always.

Cheerleading newsflash: for businesses of one, positioning is the best mini-bio and intro. (Talk about ROI for reading this post!)

The first base you want to land is:

[Your name here] is the [your one thing] copywriter for [your ICP].

Then, as you develop expertise and authority, you zoom in on your value, self-define, and validate. And upgrade to the killer suite.

Keep your positioning alive

• Assemble your positioning document: the descriptor, the killer, the five questions and your iteration on the answers.
• Star it in Google Drive, and give it the red tag reserved for your most important files.
• Go to your calendar and set a recurring 60-minute “Review positioning doc” event every 6 months.
• Set aside 90 minutes this week to update your website, social media profiles, email signature, and mini-bio.
• Write a simple process around it: a how-to file, outlining the steps you went through. On your next review, you’ll just open the doc and play.

And get ready to notice your business muscle flex and grow. The results you help your clients accomplish will sharpen your modifier, deepen your authority, and point you toward the very specific place you now own in your clients’ minds.

That’s the real asset: positioning that compounds.