The Ultimate Digital Marketing Training for 2026 (Scale from £0 to £50m+)

Scaling a business through digital marketing can feel really hard. Trust me, I know. We've grown Exposure Ninja to a team of over a hundred and we've worked with hundreds of clients in every imaginable market around the world. Taking some of them from ideas phase all the way through to 8 figure revenues and eight figure X's. But the hardest part of growing a business through digital marketing isn't the eight figure part because by then you've got the revenue. You can afford an agency. You can work with a team. You can build your own team if you want. The hardest part of scaling a business through digital marketing is actually the startup and the early days phase. Whether you're a brand new business and you haven't generated your customers yet, or whether you're an existing business, but you haven't fully tapped into digital marketing yet, businesses in this stage can often get stuck into a chicken and egg cycle. And that's this. until they have the revenue to invest in digital marketing through an agency like Exposure Ninja, how do they get the growth? But until they get the growth, how do they get the revenue to invest in their digital marketing? So, they get stuck in this cycle. They don't have the revenue, they don't have the sales to invest in their growth, but until they have the growth, they can't invest in the marketing, right? Chicken and egg. Really difficult situation to be in. It might feel familiar to you. So businesses at this point have basically two choices. They can either pursue investment, get someone to come and invest in your business. You give them a chunk of your business, a chunk of the control, spend the next 6 to 12 months of your life pitching people on why they should invest in your idea. That's one route to go down. But the other route to go down, the much more sort of safe and the most frequently uh traveled route is to try and do your digital marketing yourself. But this can also be high-risisk, right? We all know businesses that have failed and withered and died because the business never found that marketing source of new customers in time and they either ran out of runway or they got tired and dispirited and it didn't work. This has become more common since digital marketing has become more competitive. Whatever channel you're using, whether it's SEO, pay-per-click, social, paid social, digital marketing is more competitive than it's ever been. So, businesses are stuck. they're stuck in this before they have the revenue to invest in an agency. Do we go investment or do we go do it ourselves? If we go do it ourselves, that feels more compelling. That feels like a a better option, but then that's also high risk. How do we learn about all this stuff? We're really busy. We're already doing loads of stuff, growing the business. Now, over the last eight years, Exposure Ninja has worked with hundreds of clients around the world in every imaginable market, and we've analyzed the digital marketing of tens of thousands of businesses. literally tens of thousands of businesses. And a few years ago, we started asking ourselves the question, if we were going to start a business or grow an existing business, but that was new to digital, what would we do? Is there a framework? Is there like a process that we could follow which we thought was really, you know, based on what works out there, is there a reliable process that we could follow to get ourselves the scale that we need? Now, we started asking this question a few years ago and I started spending a lot of time looking at our most successful clients, the clients that were seeing the biggest scale in their business, the clients that got the most traction with their marketing. We also started looking at the highest growth businesses out there. As you may have seen our YouTube videos where we analyze some of the highest growth businesses in the world who've used digital marketing and then we started looking at other high growth businesses. So businesses in like the Sunday Times Fastrackk 100 for example that were just rapidly growing and we started trying to distill okay what are all what the the commonalities what are the things that all of these businesses are doing what's the stuff that they're doing differently to the rest who are like flatlining or failing and what we started to distill was exactly what you see on this page the star marketing system now the star marketing system contains five principles if you like they're kind of legs on on a five-legged table if you want. Five-legged tables are fairly uncommon. So, but there's basically five aspects of the star marketing system. And each of these is really important. You can operate a business with only four of them in place. You can struggle your way through if only three of them in place. If only two of them in place, you're in difficulty. Okay, these five aspects are uncommon but very common sense. Okay, very few startup businesses put their time and energy into the right place in these five. Typically, most businesses go straight for traffic. You know, we just need to get more traffic to our business. And they've they haven't even considered the first aspect, which is positioning, and then everything else they do, they feel like they're beating their head against the wall because it's not working as well as it could. Or they get everything else right, but they fail to put the fifth one in place, progression, and they don't get the customer lifetime value that they really need in order to generate the profits to scale. So, each of these five aspect contributes something to the scale of a business. And on this page, you'll find out about a course that we've put together which takes you through each of these elements so you can copy and paste this framework into your business. So the first thing that you get as part of the course is that there are video modules for each of the five elements. These explain the theory behind them. So you've got the principles. You understand why this thing is important and how it works. There's also examples both of clients but also other businesses out there to make it feel a bit more real. And then there's practical. Now the practical piece is really important and I'm going to come back to that in just a second. The second aspect of the course as well as the video uh tutorials is the interviews. So what I've done is I've interviewed some of the team here at Exposure Ninja that do this stuff all day every day. For example, who better to talk about paid social than someone who spends their entire lives doing paid social advertising? So, we've brought them in to talk through their channels and to give you additional insight about how to run those campaigns for your business. The third aspect of the course is I think the most important and this is your worksheet. Now, your star system worksheet will become your blueprint. This will become your marketing road map that the entire business can follow. This is based on the worksheets that we use for our clients at Exposure Ninja. So all of the tasks that we do for our clients, all of the marketing activity that we do across their website, their conversion rate optimization, their SEO, uh content marketing, PPC, social media, paid social, all of this is contained in the client's worksheet. And we've taken this worksheet and adapted it for you so you can run your marketing campaign. exactly the same as we would for a client of Exposure Ninja, but obviously you can do it yourself rather than paying us 1020,000 a month to do it for you. This star system worksheet breaks down each of the elements in the modules in logical order and we've made it so it's really fill in the blanks for you. Let's say, for example, that you want to get your website ranking higher on Google. Well, there's a bunch of tabs here which show you exactly how to do keyword research. You just fill in the blanks and it tells you what priority keywords you need to be targeting on your website. Or maybe you need to do a technical SEO audit of your site. Well, the instructions are there. You just do the things that it shows you how to do and it shows you what the most important fixes are going to be on your site. Or maybe you need to improve the content on your site. Well, there's a thing that allows you to do that. And again, it's fill in the blanks to make it as easy as possible for you to do this stuff. So what you'll do is you'll go through the video courses, you'll watch the interviews, and you'll go through your worksheet and you'll fill in the blanks. What you'll have then is a complete digital marketing plan tailored and bespoke for your business. You then go and implement the stuff in that worksheet and that is how you get past this sticky chicken and egg. We don't have the budget to scale, but we can't scale until we have the budget thing. This will get you the traction and the growth that you need to start generating more revenue in the business so that you can either, you know, invest more in your own digital marketing knowledge and continue doing it for yourself or you can invest in an agency like Exposure Ninja to do this stuff for you. So, feel free to check out the stuff on this page all about the course showing you how it all works. And of course, check out the course. I'd love to see you on the inside. If you've got any questions at all, don't forget you can contact us. You can, you know, we're really happy to answer questions about this because we looked for something like this that existed and couldn't find it. We couldn't find a really practical guide to digital marketing. Everything is either really theory and no practical or it's all practical. This is how you run Facebook ads, but ignores the bigger question of yeah, but how do you know if your proposition is actually going to work on Facebook? How do you create an offer which gets people really excited and all the other stuff? And then what do you do to monetize the customers that you're getting through Facebook ads? So everything was either in one of these two camps. And what we've done with the star system course is yes, we've got the theory, we've got why stuff works and the examples, but we've also got the practicals to actually help you do this for your business. So I hope you enjoy the course. I look forward to seeing you on the inside. Welcome to the Exposure Ninja Star Marketing System course. I'm so excited to be sharing this stuff with you. Now, if it's all right with you, there's a whole bunch of information in this course. I'm actually going to keep this introduction section fairly short. I'm going to tell you how the style was developed. I'm going to show you through the worksheet that you're going to be using uh throughout and we're going to talk about the structure of each module and then we're just going to get on with it. So, if you don't already know me, my name is Tim. I am CEO of Exposure Ninja. We're a digital marketing agency. I've been working in digital marketing since 2005. Uh and we've been running Exposure Ninja since about 2013. I was freelance marketer before that. And what that has done is that's given me a huge range of digital marketing experience over this time. Exposure Ninja has always dealt with a lot of businesses, right? We've um we've done reviews for we've analyzed, we've consulted with, and we've worked with, if I had to guess, I'd say probably it's going to be over 20,000 businesses in that time. Okay. free marketing review in particular. Hugely popular tool. We often consult with businesses on the back of this. We'll see their Google Analytics. We'll get to dig in and understand how the business works and how their marketing um has worked. And we've also got a YouTube channel where we do lots of deep dives and analyze large high performing um sites. We do lots of client work where we work with hundreds of clients across every imaginable market, working on their digital marketing, actually doing the stuff that I'm going to teach you in this course. And all of this has given us a really good perspective on what it takes to grow a business through digital marketing. And a few years ago, I started to get really obsessed with this idea of, well, we've seen so much digital marketing out there and we've implemented so much ourselves. What if we could reverse engineer what the best businesses are doing and turn it into a sort of model like a framework that we could then replicate and implement for our clients. And that's basically what we've been working on for the last 3 years. And then we decided why don't we share this information with people who maybe don't have the budget to work with exposure ninja or they have their own internal team and they want to implement this stuff themselves but working with us in a done for you way isn't right for them at this stage that is what this is. So in this course we're going to break down the exposure ninja star marketing system and it looks a little bit like this. In fact it looks exactly like this. This is it. So this is the exposure ninja star system. There are five different components or five different modules if you like. And those are the colored boxes. So we got positioning, we got presence, we got process, people, and progression. Now before I take you through each one of those and what they all kind of mean, um each one has its own framework, its own model, right? So the Bravo business builder is the framework inside the positioning module. And in this course, I'm going to take you through each of these in turn. We're going to talk about what it does, how it works. There's going to be some theory stuff, there's going to be some practical stuff, and there's going to be some exercise stuff as well for you to fill in. Now, you might be wondering, well, who is this for? Who has this been designed for? This star system training has been designed for either business owners or marketing managers or marketers working in businesses. Okay? So, this isn't like a a a student course for students of marketing or this isn't for people who are just curious about marketing, although of course they're welcome to take it, but really this is for people that are going to be implementing the marketing in their business. It's also not particularly designed for agencies. Although, of course, agencies are welcome to apply this um to their own client work too. But most of the exercises, in fact all of the exercises that we're going to be going through, you're going to be working through a worksheet which is is basically modeled on what we use at Exposure Ninja for our clients. So you're going to be doing a marketing campaign to your own business and then the training is designed to give you the context to be able to do that work well. So each um section like I say is there's a bit of theory because I have to explain some of the background. Uh, and then there's some exercises for you to fill in in the worksheet. And then there's in in many cases there are interviews with ninjas from the team because the reality is that for example, whether it's uh running Facebook ads or um Google ads or doing UX audits, whilst I've done a huge amount of this stuff myself over the years, we have people at Exposure Ninja that have huge background knowledge. They're extremely experienced in these areas and they are on the absolute cutting edge. So, in some cases, I'll be bringing in interviews and talking through with these people to help uh get their expertise over to you so that you can implement this stuff as well. Now, I'm going to take you through the worksheet and show you how that works in just a minute. But before we do that, let's go through an overview of what these five elements are. So, firstly, we've got positioning. Now, [snorts] positioning is about how your business is positioned in the market against your competitors. This is so important and quite often this is the piece that most particularly smaller businesses that are doing their own marketing or maybe getting a digital marketing program in place for the first time. This is the bit that they miss. They overlook it. They [snorts] think, "Ah, do you know what? All we need is traffic to our website. If we just had traffic to our website, all our problems would be solved. Our dreams would come true. Instant billionaires." Right? [snorts] but because they haven't got the positioning piece sorted, whatever they do just doesn't work out as well as it could do. So, there are five elements inside positioning. You've got the the branding and the visual. So, the business's kind of visual identity, what it looks like. This is important. Uh, and many businesses, particularly in the early stages, don't really have it figured out or they haven't figured out why some bits are really important. They're ignoring those bits. We'll talk about this in the module. Then we've got the R, the reason for existing. Again, absolutely fundamental. A lot of people start businesses because they want to do it, right? Find something you love and turn it into a business. Well, that's okay to an extent, but at some point when you want to scale, you need to be able to give potential customers a clear and compelling reason why they should do business with you, why they should buy from you, part with their money with you rather than somebody else. And that's this reason for existing. So, we're going to talk about some examples. We're going to look at some different ways of figuring out what your reason could be, what makes a good reason, what makes a bad reason. But that is a really crucial point of leverage because if we get this right, a lot of the other stuff gets easier. Then we've got a your target audience. Um, again, identifying your target audience, finding a choosing an audience which you can have a direct correlation with, a deep resonance with, makes all of the rest of your marketing that much easier. If you've ever run ads on Facebook, for example, and you think, "I've got this really compelling message, but they just get no traction at all." Often the problem is actually that you haven't designed your message around a specific target audience. And even when that person sees it, that perfect customer sees it because they don't resonate with it because it hasn't actually been designed and optimized for them and their drivers, it doesn't quite land and you don't get the results that you want. So that's the A component. Then we've got V. This is your tone of voice, how you talk. Uh, a lot of this will be designed, by the way, from your target customers. And we actually combine the audience and the the voice um in one because you can kind of reverse engineer what your business's voice needs to be based on your target audience. Very, very cool. And then finally, we've got O, the offering. So, this is the price to value relationship, if you like. Um, you don't need to be the cheapest, but if you're going to be the most expensive, there needs to be a reason why. there needs to be a justification. So, we talk about the price to value graph and where you need to be on that graph if you want to significantly increase market share which most businesses do. Then we've got presence. This is your website. So, this is your kind of online home if you like. This is about how we make that online home heavy lifting as we say, how we make your website do the work for you. It's a crucial marketing asset yet for many businesses their websites are really underperforming. Then we got processed. So process is all about how you turn cold unfamiliar people into leads or sales for your business. And a scalable business has a scalable process for doing that. So it's not ad hoc. It's not yeah well some people ask us this and some people do this. It's here's how people come into our business. Here's how people enter the steps that we go through with them. the things that need to happen at each stage and how we explain and present that on our website so that we get as many leads as possible from our site. Then we got the people component. This is about driving traffic to the whole system. So the first three are about kind of building a system which is optimized and ready to take people. And then in step four, we start driving people into this system. So this is when you scale the traffic coming into your business. We're going to look at five areas inside this. locating your perfect target customer, running profitable ads, having a good search visibility, organic search visibility, having great social presence, and then optimizing and refining as you go to make sure you're bringing in more of the customers and leads that you want and fewer of the stuff that you don't want. And then finally, we have progression. Progression is an underground invisible element to this system. Many businesses will get started with the first four elements. They'll have good positioning. They'll have a good website. They'll have some form of conversion process. Very often it's not very optimized, but they'll have something. And then they'll start driving traffic to it and they'll get leads and they'll get some sales. But then once those leads or sales have come into the business, that's kind of it. They're just left to sit there while the business owner and the marketers go off and find the new stuff that's out there. Progression is about how you turn those people that come anywhere near your business, how you turn them into fans, how you turn them into advocates, loyal customers, subscribers. So, and most of this should be done on autopilot. So a lot of this is about utilizing email marketing and building different automation streams to do this stuff on autopilot so that when someone comes onto your website they sign up for whatever they buy something from you. There is a sequence of things that happens in the background automatically to turn that person into a reviewer into a referer into a fan um into a repeat customer. And all of this stuff happens to help you scale because it's great getting a customer for the first time. It's even better keeping that customer for 10 plus years and having all of those follow-up purchases happen automatically or with very little manual involvement from you. So that's progression. So there's five elements to these system this system. And the way I like to explain them is imagine that you've got a five-sided table and the table has a leg in each corner. Right? If you had a five-sided table with a leg in each corner, that's going to be a pretty stable table, right? You can put big, heavy stuff on that table anywhere you like and the table's not going to fall over. The same with a business that has all five of these elements in place. Generally, they'll be a very scalable business. They'll be operationally sound. They'll be getting a good volume of leads and sales. It'll be very repeatable, recurring, tend to have a higher uh EBIT multiple if you were interested in selling because they've got all of these things in place. Now, what happens if you take one of the legs away from a five-sided table? Well, on the whole, it's still pretty stable, but now there's some areas where you've got to be a little bit careful. You got to be thinking about where you're putting stuff, and occasionally can be a little bit wobbly. Sometimes if you put something very heavy in the wrong place, it can fall over. But generally, that's unlikely. It's just a little bit less stable. Exactly the same for a business that has four of these elements, but there's a weakness or a deficiency or even a total lag in one of the areas. They will just be a little bit less stable. Take away two legs on a five-sided table. Now, you're constantly thinking about where are the weaknesses, where are the vulnerabilities. Exactly the same with a business that only has three of these elements in place. Once you've got a business that's that's missing two of these areas, well then you start to realize that actually this business is not meeting its full potential. There are some areas which feel a little bit wobbly. You might get less traffic than you like and you don't really know what to do. Things feel a little bit less secure, a little bit uh it's just, you know, when you're riding uh let's say you're riding a horse and it's a little bit weward. That's your three-sided table. Now, as soon as you've got a business that's only got two legs, well, that table is on the floor. And it's the same with a business that only has two of these elements in place. Usually, they will be in extreme struggle and take a huge amount of manual work to get the business growing either from the founder or from a very small team. So, a business that only has two of these elements in place, they will be having a difficult time, a very difficult time. Okay? Usually they're struggling, usually they need help. And of course one then you don't really have a business. You have uh the starting point of an idea really but really need to build this marketing machine. So think of this like a marketing machine a five-sided table with five different elements. Now as we're going through this course there is a huge amount of stuff in here. There really is. Um, when when I was putting this together, I was wrestling with the question, do I take stuff out in order to prioritize how easy this is to follow? I could make this really simple. I can make it quite an enjoyable experience, let's say, to just go through, tick some boxes, and feel like you've made great progress. or do I give you everything that I think you might need on your journey, even if that risks overwhelm? I've decided to go for the route, too. Because this, in reality, is what you actually need. It's all well and good me saying, you know what, there are three keys to a successful business. Great website, great conversion rate, great traffic. Off you go. Thing is, that's not all you need. You need to go through this stuff in more detail. There are levels to these things. There is organization, there is planning, there is strategy behind it. The positioning piece alone, so much to think about, so much to do. It touches on broader market strategy. It touches on like blue ocean strategy and business proposition design and all this type of stuff. And if I was building something that was really simple and reassuring to go through, I would have just cut this stuff out because honestly, you could just cut it out. But the reason I've included it is because I cannot tell you that this is the best system. Like this is a complete system to follow through unless we put that stuff in. The reality is we have dealt with clients that have the other elements in place, but they're missing this positioning thing. They don't have an appealing brand. Their reason for existing is fuzzy or muddy or it doesn't exist. Their target audience is unclear. Their tone of voice is uncompelling. their problem, their offering doesn't make sense. And because they don't have that stuff in place, all of the rest of it underperforms. It's like, imagine that you've got a pipe and you've got lots of valves along this pipe. Well, if you turn down the flow at the start of the pipe, the amount of water passing through all the subsequent valves is going to be lower. It's the same with this system. If you cut down, if you squash any one area, the other areas behind it will underperform because you've restricted the flow going into that area. If that makes sense. You'll learn that I love metaphors. I love relating it to like physical stuff because I it helps me understand these things. So, that's why there's a huge amount of stuff in here. Now, in order to not get overwhelmed and in order to prioritize what you're working on, you'll see we've also given you a prioritization sheet. So, as you're going through this course, there's going to be loads of things that you want to do. Not all of it is going to be top priority. So, this is where your prioritization sheet comes in. You don't have to do everything all at once to grow your business. The most useful use of your time is not to get everything designed, everything planned out, and then start implementing. The most useful use of your time is to start implementing the most important stuff as soon as you can because then it can start having an effect. So, uh, with that said, I'm going to start taking you through the, um, the worksheet that is included with this course. Um, so this worksheet is it's essentially based on the campaign planning worksheet that we use for clients at Exposure Ninja. So, you can make a copy of this. You can either go to file, make a copy, and then you can use it in Google Drive. Or if you want to use it in Excel, you can go to downloads and then you can download a Microsoft Excel version which will also work um in Apple Pages and then you can start using a version of it on your machine. Whatever you do, there's a whole number of different tabs and these tabs are broken into sections. So remember, we've got five elements at the start and there are five different kind of categories along the bottom here. We've got positioning, we've got a couple of sheets of presence, we've got uh process, and then we've got a whole bunch of people stuff. The people stuff is kind of the biggest practical module because this is all about traffic generation. There's lots of different strategies there. And then we've got some progression stuff. Lots and lots of people tabs. And then we've got some progression stuff. Then right at the end, we've got the to-dos and prioritization. So this is where you throw everything that you want to do all in this sheet. And then you can sort through and prioritize. So inside each of these tabs, well, you'll notice there's a couple of different types of tabs, right? Sometimes there's a questionnaire. There are questions to go through. And as I'm talking through the slides, you can be filling in these questions and answering them for yourself. So, this helps you organize your thoughts. It helps you prioritize the things that you need. It helps you identify what the marketing messages that you're going to be pushing are all about. Okay? So, that's what the questionnaires are for. They're to kind of help you think through things. In some cases, there is a checklist. So in the checklist, for example, this one in the uh presence section. So this is about your website and here's like a basic website um uh heavy lifting website blueprint checklist that helps you go through and analyze how do you sit against each of these principles and where are the opportunities for improvement? So the format here is a question is the answer yes or no? If the answer is no, what action can you take to improve this? And then there's an optional section for you where you can assign it to yourself or someone on your team or an external partner. And then once it's done, you can mark it done. So those are the main two types of um sheet you've got. You got questionnaires and you got checklists. And you'll see variations of this. So here's a landing page checklist. Um here's a process checklist. Uh here's a questionnaire for finding your best target customers. Then you've also got um some sheets like this. So, this is a paid traffic planner, which don't worry, we'll come back to all of this stuff in the modules, but this basically helps you prioritize and sort through lots of different options in your head so you can work out what your priorities are and stuff like that. So, each module has its own sheets in here, and we'll go through them in more detail, and I'll explain what they're all about as we go through those sections. So, that is the star system course. Um, it's going to be amazing. It's going to be huge. It's going to take quite a bit of work to go through, but I really hope that you're going to enjoy this as much as I've enjoyed putting this stuff together. Like I say, this is the kind of accumulation of so much marketing experience across Exposure Ninja over the decade that we've been in business and we've tried to break it down as um easily to digest as possible. There is a fair amount of strategy here as there needs to be because a lot of the time people think of marketing as you know I need more traffic to my website right I'm just going to go and put some pennies in the Google ads machine and my business is going to take off. What they don't realize is and here's another metaphor for you that actually a lot of this stuff is like winning a motor race. Right? When you're winning a motor race you need a great car, you need a great talented driver and you need great mechanics. you need a great technical team on the back end. Now, most people when they're just putting the money into Google ads, all that they're doing is they're just trying to buy a faster car. And what they don't realize is that actually they haven't focused on the driver. So, they don't know where they're going. They aren't good at navigating. They haven't got the strategy in place. And because they don't have that great mechanic team, they actually don't know how to implement what they're doing. So, they're just they're saying, "Right, the key to winning a motor race is speed." Well, yes it is, but as long as you're going in the right direction, you're good at racing, and you've got the the kind of technical knowhow. So, that's what this course is designed to do, give you all three. So, let's get started with module one, all about progression. I'll see you there. In module one of the star system, we're going to be talking about positioning. So this is where your business sits in the market. How you fit against your competitors, uh your tone of voice, your branding and visuals, your target audience, and the thing that you're offering. This is fundamental. Like I said in the intro, a lot of businesses, they rush past this because it might feel like an unnecessary step or, you know, branding and corporate strategy, that's kind of something for much bigger companies. But that's a big mistake because if you fail to get this stuff right, what you can end up doing is spending years pushing a business or a proposition that actually doesn't really resonate with the target market and that can be very expensive, very disheartening. On the other hand, if you get this right and if we think about some business, if you think about any viral business, basically stuff that just blows up and you know when you're uh reading uh you know the Sunday Times Fastrackk 100, right? and you're looking through these businesses, what they've been going four years and they're however big. Often it's because they've absolutely nailed their positioning. They're offering something that is so compelling to their market that everything else that they do, it makes so much sense and it's much easier to market a business that is strong in this area. So, skip this stuff at your peril. Now, what does a business that gets this stuff right look like? Well, they have product market fit. the thing that they're offering matches the thing that the market wants to buy. They are solving a significant enough problem for a sufficientlysized audience to achieve their goals. Really important this if you want to be a billionaire, if you want your company to be, you know, [snorts] worth a billion pounds or dollars or whatever, there's no use selling cookies on the corner of a street. It's just it's not going to happen. The numbers do not work. Now, you might be solving a significant enough problem, i.e. people love cookies, your cookies are brilliant, they're hungry. If you're selling it like say you're selling it outside a place where people are absolutely starving, like you're selling outside a swimming pool where everyone's been swimming and they're really hungry, right? Big problem. You're solving a significant problem there. So, people will pay you a premium for your cookies if you're selling them to them when they're really hungry and they got low blood sugar, but the audience isn't big enough. You could even sell them outside a sports stadium, but you're still not going to get to that. So, we need to be solving a significantly sized problem for enough people to achieve your goals. Now, if you've got much more modest goals, obviously that makes things a lot easier. If you ever only ever want to operate a lifestyle business, you don't have to be aggressive as aggressive with the proposition and how big your target audience is. But the important thing is whatever the size of your ambition is that we're matching the ambition to the problem that we're solving and the size of the audience that we're hoping to sell into. And then of course the key to getting traction with our positioning is to make sure that how we're offering this means that our audience chooses us over competitors. That's what we're aiming for in this section. sufficient problem to a sufficiently sized audience and people choose us over our competitors. So what are the elements that we need to go through in order to do this? Well, there are five aspects to positioning. We've got branding and visuals. So this is a visual identity of the business. We've got the reason for existing, why someone should choose you over a competitor. We have the audience. So your target customers, who specifically are we selling to? Do we go niche? Do we go broad? We've got the tone of voice and personality. So, what's the language that we use? What's the personality of our business? How do we make sure that what we're selling resonates with our customer? And then we've got our offering. So, this is the thing that we're actually going to the market with. Here's what it costs. Here's what you get. Okay? Now, all of these need to be in play in order to maximize the opportunity with positioning. And that's what we're going through in this module. So key metrics inside positioning. So how do you know if you've got a problem here or if you've got an opportunity with positioning? Well, there are a number of metrics which give us a bit of an indication about how strong our positioning is. Now I'm going to talk very broadly about these because quite of like with web conversion rate, there are lots of other elements in play. But if you've got a really low conversion rate on your website, right, you get a lot of people, there are a lot of sessions, a lot of events happening on your site, but very few actual conversions or any few goals or sales. Often, not always, but often this can be a positioning problem where it can be a reflection of a lack of positioning, a lack of strong positioning. Website engagement. If you have very low engagement with your site, sometimes it's because there's an aspect whether it's branding and visual identity or clear target audience which your audience just doesn't resonate with and they are leaving. Okay, so web engagement rate can be another one. Advert click-through rate. So this is potentially jargony, but it's pretty straightforward term. Basically, of all the people that see your advert, how many people are clicking on it? And again, if you've got weak positioning, if you don't haven't matched your ad copy or the images in your ad to your target audience, very few people will click on your ad and it will make make the whole campaign underperform. You'll have to overpay for the clicks that you do get. You won't get as much traffic as you want. You won't get as many sales or conversions as you want. Uh market research can also be impacted by this. So, how does your um when you're when you're doing some market research, you can get feedback like people don't really know about your business or uh what you're selling doesn't really resonate with people or they don't really feel like they have much need for it. We're going to talk about some basic methods of incredibly useful market research later on in this module. You can also use um search volume of your brand versus your competitors and how this changes over time, right? So let's say that you're selling uh calculators and your calculators called Ninja calculators and you're selling against Casio calculators. Well, you can use uh search tools like Seamrush or SE ranking or Google Trends to monitor how many people are searching for Ninja calculators versus Casio calculators over time. And you can use this to understand how well your positioning is landing with your audience, your sales team conversion rate. If your if your website is generating leads and your sales team then closed them, their conversion rate can be impacted by this stuff as well. Are we bringing the right target audience to our website? So when they're becoming a lead, our sales team can actually convert them. That's a big big thing and that's also affected by this. The social analytics, are you picking up new followers on your social channels? Are they the right sort of followers? Are they turning as customers and all this type of stuff. So you see there's lots and lots of different elements to branding uh positioning this whole concept before we even start to get into the tactics of digital marketing that can be influenced by this stuff. So let's talk about branding and visuals. Um first of all this is really really fundamental and it's pretty straightforward. Now I often when I'm doing a seminar I'll use this illustration. You may have seen me do this before on YouTube. I absolutely love it because when you're doing a seminar and you've got an exercise to run with people, it can be, you know, oh, am I going to get the right result? Is this going to work? Is my am I going to be able to illustrate my point? This always works, right? Every single time I've ever on it, it has worked. The largest audience I've done this with is probably 500 people, maybe 6, 700, huge number of people. And it worked really, really well there. And it's worked in small rooms as well. Works every time. So, I'm going to play it with you. If you've already seen it, then you know, don't reveal the answers. So, here we've got two different websites. Now, both of these sites sell a similar sort of thing. It's actually a survey uh software for agencies. Website A on the left, website B on the right. Website A on the screen. Website A on the left, B on the right. It's opposite when you're doing a seminar because you're facing your object. Um, so what I do in the seminar is I say to people now, which of these I'm going to ask for a show of hands. Which of these businesses do you think has a better product judging by their website? Website A, website B. Now, everybody says website B, right? And if I ask them why, well, their website looks nicer. Okay, very interesting. Which of these websites do you think has a better uh customer reviews? Better customer reviews, like better customer reputation, A or B? Everyone says B. Uh, which of these customers do you think has happier staff? A or B? Everyone says B. Which of these websites has cleaner customer toilets? Right, A or B? People are like, um, well, I just know it's going to be B, right? They can't see the toilet, but they just know it's going to be B. I'll ask something totally random like, which of these businesses is most up to date with their tax, A or B? B. And of course, the punchline is that this is the before and after of a website redesign. So, it's the same company. And then you watch the people in the audience and I'm like, you judgmental so and so, you've just told me that website B has cleaner customer toilets based on nothing other than the design of their website. First impressions matter, right? I remember very early on someone got very upset with this. You know, people shouldn't judge books by their covers. Website A might be a lovely business. You know, all this stuff. Yeah, they might be. People shouldn't judge books by their covers. Actually, maybe they should because that's technically what a book cover is for, right? So, people judge books by their covers. People are judging your business by your website right now. They're making all these assessments about every aspect of how your business is run, how good your products are, how good your customer service is. They are making all of those based on shortcut flawed assumptions. Flawed, but they're making those assumptions. Now, it's pointless us trying to fight those. We are first impression creatures. you are judging me on my appearance. I would be judging you on your appearance if we met. That's just what we do as animals. We cannot stop doing that. So, as marketers, we don't want to try and change people's fundamental nature. We want to play into that. So, we need to be really conscious about how our branding and visuals are coming across to our target audience. First impressions absolutely matter. We cannot discount that. We cannot ignore it. We cannot change that. People are judging your website right now. So if you're another thing I do in a seminar is I'll say right who wants to get their website up on the screen here now and we're all going to have a look at it and tear it apart and you see people like shrinking into their chairs like oh uh checking my phone oh yeah they don't want their website up on the screen. Well think about it. They might be in a room full of people who are potential customers. They're so embarrassed about their website they don't want it up in the screen in front of their potential customers. Makes no sense. If you're ashamed of your website, if a customer says, "What's your website address?" And you say, "Oh, it's, you know, blah blah blah exposion.com, but we're just about to redo it or you add some sort of caveat, that's really important because you're not going to push that as hard as you could if you were really proud of your site. So, first impressions and visuals absolutely matter. We cannot ignore the fact that we are design-led creatures. Now, there's another aspect of branding and visuals and that is consistency." Uh, consistency builds familiarity. The more times we feel more times we meet someone, the more we trust them. Even if there's absolutely no reason to trust them, they're a total con artist, but we've met them before, we feel like we trust them. It's exactly the same when you have a consistent brand across all of your channels. Now, I'm going to show you a website now. you know the airline that this site belongs to. Not because you've been on this site and because you recognize it, but because they are they have a very consistent branding across all of their marketing and they have done for years. This is EasyJet, right? They've chosen orange and white as their colors and that's it. Really simple. Now, there's loads of benefits to this. When EasyJet wants to design a social post, well, what accent colors do they use? Orange and white. When I want to, as an EasyJet employee, when I want to redo my employees signature, let's say, let's say I'm doing that myself, what colors do I use? I use orange and white. It's going to look like EasyJet, whatever I do because I'm using their accent colors. Probably just orange. Not a good idea to use white in your email signature, but you get the point. Here's another example. Blue and yellow, Ryionaire, right? We know it. We know it immediately because we know what colors they use in their branding. So the important thing here is to choose your colors and to choose a consistent visual approach. Now I'm going to show you um in the worksheet that you've got there is um an example our branding guidelines here is exposure ninja and I've shared these with you to show you what branding guidelines can look like. Now they don't your branding guidelines don't need to be this detailed. These are like super super overkill to an extent because we've also got tone of voice stuff in here as well. We've got 50 pages here. You don't need 50 pages. But what you do need to do, you can add the who we are stuff as well with your values and things like that. But what you do need to do is you need to choose your colors and your logos and your fonts, right? So things like um things like this where we talk about how our logo is going to be used. You'll never see the Exposure Ninja logo in red because that would not provide a consistent brand identity. You will always see us use the same fonts for headings and body copy. Even this doc uses those fonts. The presentation I'm giving you today uses these fonts because we have decided when you're inside the exposure ninja world, you see Leato and you see Mully and that is your life. You do not see calibbri. You do not see Ariel. We are being consistent with that because it creates a consistent brand identity. It feels familiar to people when they see something, when they see a piece of Exposure Ninja work, when they see a social media post, they know, right, this feels familiar. It's Exposure Ninja. Same with color schemes. You'll see all of the colors used in our world use these colors. If we want to use accents, we use black and white. And if we want to use tertiary colors, for example, for um icons or these little, you know, these little shinobi graphics and pictures, they're using a very set range of colors. So, this both limits us if we're using a Google sheet. We even have the defined colors for a Google sheet. This both limits us, but also makes means that when we post something on our socials, it feels consistent because we're using the same color palette all the time. So it takes some of the um the thought process away. It allows us to template stuff really easily and that saves us time. Same on our YouTube, same on everything. So that's familiarity. Um and that is branding guidelines. So you don't, like I say, you don't need to go through the whole thing. You don't need to do the 50page dock for yourself, but make sure that you have chosen and set in stone your color schemes, your logo, your fonts, and any rules about visual identity that you want to embed. Then when you work with an outside design firm or you work with an agency like Exposure Ninja, we ask clients, "Have you got branding guidelines?" If they say yes, they can guarantee and they're decent branding guidelines. They can guarantee every piece of work that we ever do on their behalf is going to look like their brand. If they say no, we don't have any branding guidelines. Well, then every piece of work that we do for them, it might look like them or it might not because nobody has actually decided what they look like. Okay? So, it saves everyone a whole bunch of time getting this stuff in place. So feel free to go through the branding guidelines doc and have a look for yourself and see how it works. Right, let's talk about the next component in positioning then. So that's branding and visuals. Now let's talk about your reason for existing. Now I mentioned in the intro the reason for existing is one of the most uh difficult and challenging things for a lot of startup businesses because people will often start a business doing something that they love. Right? I love eating chocolate. So, I might decide to start a chocolate business. I love dark chocolate. So, I'm gonna start a dark chocolate business and I'm gonna make these beautiful dark chocolates and I'm going to sell them online. And someone says, "Why should I buy from you rather than anybody else?" And I think, "Ah, that's a good question. Cuz I love chocolate cuz I'm making them myself." Well, maybe that's a benefit. Probably not if you know my cooking, but maybe that's a benefit. But then what happens when we scale? because I won't be able to make them all myself. So, because I haven't built that business with a reason for existing, I haven't spotted a gap in the market and say, "We're building this, all of my marketing becomes more difficult because I can only market myself as a me too. If you want dark chocolate, great. I've got dark chocolate for you. Happy days." And a customer looks at that and thinks, "So what? I've already got loads of dark chocolate." Right? So, we need to find a reason for existing. Now, by the way, what I'm not saying is that you have to create something completely new that the world has never seen before. That is a very difficult thing to get right. It's a very high-risk thing and you have to educate a huge number of people about this new thing that they've never seen before. Right? Selling a car for the first time. You don't need to do that. That's a difficult thing to do. I know it looks like a genius move in hindsight, but at the time actually pretty contentious to make cars on mass production. because people didn't know that they wanted it. So, you don't need to, you know, change the world here. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying you need to come up with something completely new and completely different, but you need to play into some sort of pain point that people have. So, let's look at some examples. You might remember Neutra Bullet. Anybody remember when this came out? I think it was uh 2015, I think. Now, I had one a few years before that cuz one of my friends was really, really into this. But 2015, Christmas 2015 was like peak neutra bullet. In fact, they sold one every 30 seconds. So, they're selling a whole bunch of these uh blenders with a cup attachment like this took 70% of sales in the market over that Christmas. And crazy fruit sales over that Christmas went up 21% which was attributed to the craze in smoothie making from people with their new neutrilets. So this literally changed the feeding habits of millions of humans. But what happened? Because blenders have existed for ages, right? I bought a Neutri Bullet. I already had a blender in. Now it may not have been shaped not like the Nutri Bullet, but it's, you know, it's basically the same thing, right? It's just a spinning blade. Why have I bought another thing rather than a Neutra Bullet, which I've already got? Particularly when stuff like this was already out there. So, Bosch have been making blenders since 1922, I believe. They've perfected it. Look at the attachments on this thing. This is Multi-talent 3. It's 800 W. It's brushed stainless steel. Yes, it's got something that looks like the Neutri Bullet stuff, but it's got a whole bunch of other stuff as well. It goes at different speeds. It's got two switching stages. It's got different types of blades. It's got things for ribboning your carrots and slicing your corettes. It's got way more than a Neutri Bullet. And it's a bit cheaper than a Neutri Bullet. So, what's going on here? How could Bosch be disrupted by Neutri Bullet when no one had ever heard of Neutra Bullet a few years earlier? They're sold by through TV infomercials by guys like this with very dubious sounding job titles and they talk about things like getting the most out of your life. You need to get the most out of your food. How could Neutra Bullet disrupt Bosch who are so well established? Well, it was all about the reason for purchase. NeutriBullet came with a completely different reason for purchase. Look at the pictures there. In fact, let's go back to the neutra bullet slide. What are we getting here? Look at these images. Are we talking about two-stage switching? Are we talking about 800 watts? Are we talking about all the different attachments? No, we're showing happy, fit people surrounded by fruit in aspirational environments. Right? We are selling a lifestyle. We are selling the the pictures could not contrast more. Right? is selling transformation. That is what people are buying when they buy a Neutra Bullet. They are not buying a two-stage switching 800 W blender. They've got one of them in the cupboard already. They haven't used it for years. But this advert persuaded them that if they buy this thing, they can get all of the vitamins and health benefits from fruit and veg without having to eat the fruit and veg. And it's really delicious and it works really well. So they rushed out to buy the Neutra Bullet even though it was exactly the same as what they already had because there was a compelling reason and that is transformation. That is what people really wanted to buy from this product. Not the spinning blade. They wanted the transformation. Another example now Pelaton has been up and down in stock price. It's had a difficult life as a business. But one thing that cannot be denied is that they have totally disrupted the exercise bike space. Pelaton is one of those brands now like Hoover where you go and do the hoovering. Well, you might be hoovering using a a Bosch vacuum cleaner, but you call it Hoovering because they've kind of established that category. Pelaton sells an exercise bike, which you've always been able to buy, with an iPad stuck on top. But it's not that though, is it? It's a private indoor cycling studio at your home. And because they're not just selling it as an exercise bike, that takes them out of the 200 pound exercise bike market and into the $150 a month boutique spin studio market because that's what they're selling. They're selling the personalized boutique spinning class. That's the thing that they're selling, not the exercise bike. The exercise bike is how you get the boutique spinning class. So, it's a totally totally different pitch. It looks the same, but if you look at their marketing, it's completely different. What they're really selling is they're selling timesaving. They're selling that cycle studio, the soul cycle, the, you know, the spin class gig. They're selling that offering to a group of people that don't have the time to go and get that. They don't have the time to go to the classes. And you can see this in the testimonials that they use on the site. best way to start or finish my day. It doesn't take time away from my family. So, what are they selling there? They're selling the family time. That's what they're selling, right? That's the thing that they're selling or they're selling the transformation experience plus family time. So, very very different reason for purchase. Exercise bike something that you struggle to motivate yourself to do. Pelaton really fun group classes, community vibe. You don't have to go all the way to your spin studio and it saves you money as well. Saves you money. It's a 2,000 exercise 2,000 exercise bike, 40 quid a month membership and they're positioning it as saving money because they're going up against $150 spin cycle classes. So, very different reason for existing. Another example, I know all of these are BTOC. We're going to look at a B2B example in a moment. The reason I use a lot of B to C examples in this sort of thing is because they're easiest to understand. Now, this is Gym Shark. They sell clothing. Um, here you can see a bunch of people wearing Gym Shark clothing. But the world is not short of sportsware, right? Nobody woke up and thought, "Nah, I wish I had a t-shirt that I could go to the gym in." Right? I know the founder Ben talks about the fact that they really wanted a specific type of shirt that they couldn't get and that's why they started the company. But like, don't be fooled. This is not a business that is revolutionizing the world of clothing. That is not what Gym Shark is selling. As you can see from this picture, what is Gym Shark selling? Gym Shark is selling membership to the club, the tribe that your favorite people are already a member of, right? This is join the cool kids gang. What do you notice about all of these people? Very similar type, demographic, social media influencer type. very very clear target audience. Now that is what Gym Shark is appealing. Gym Shark is selling actually not clothing. They are selling a sense of belonging to this tribe. Come with us. Join us. You're one of the cool kids now. That is what they are selling. Right? You don't get to become a company worth a billion pounds by just selling a few t-shirts because the world is not short of t-shirts. You can buy t-shirts very cheaply. It's about the brand. You know this. You know this. Are we using this in our businesses all the time? Maybe not. Excuse me. Okay, let's look at a B toc a B2B example now. Salesforce. Now, Salesforce is a CRM, customer relationship management tool. It's basically a place where you put your customer details and you can do customer service and you can sell, right? But there's loads of CRM. What is Salesforce actually selling? Well, we don't even need to guess here because we can see from this landing page what they think they're selling. They're selling more sales, better service, greater customer insight. What's the reason for buying Salesforce? Because you're going to make more money. That's basically the pitch here. Very, very different reason. All of their marketing messages are configured around this. The copy on this page says things like, "Sell faster, sell better." They're selling sales. It says things like improve, centralize, and automate your sales process with SalesCloud. Streamline your customer service. What's the purpose of that? Reducing costs. Okay. Increasing customer satisfaction, retention, lifetime value of ServiceCloud. What they're selling there? They're selling increased value from your customers on an ongoing basis. Salesforce is in many ways making the ultimate pitch. They're saying the reason for purchasing our CRM rather than another CRM is that you will make more money with our CRM. That is their pitch. They're not saying, "We've got all these great features." They might say that later on down the page, but the opening message is we're here to make you more money. We're here to get you more sales, improve your attention, streamline your customer service, basically reduce costs and pain. So, reason for existing, very, very compelling. So, how do you find your reason for existing? Let's say at the moment you're the generic chocolate company. you don't really have a reason for existing yet. Well, we need to find one. So, how do we do this? Well, one of the things that we can do is we can work out what our customers are upset about, right? Um, if you watch anything about the impact that fashion has, particularly fast fashion, has on the environment, five minutes later you'll find yourself on the Patagonia website or downloading the Good on You app, right? Why? because all of a sudden you have a different framework of looking at the world and every market has people that are upset with the status quo in some way. We're going to look at some ways to find this stuff in just a minute. And also thinking about what do you stand for or what do you stand against? Now, even with my chocolate example, I will be massively for dark chocolate and massively against milk chocolate. Okay? So, I'd be like, well, milk chocolate isn't proper chocolate. It tastes really watery. There's loads of sugar in it. Dark chocolate is absolutely where it's at. Right? Hotel Chocolate have t-shirts that say more cocoa, right? That is me. I'm buying into that message. I'm part of that tribe. Right? So, what do you stand for? What do you stand against? There's going to be something that your business reacts viscerally against that you really hate about your space. If you've got passion, if you've been in your space long enough, there's going to be something that upsets you about it. And if you can tap into what upsets your customers and those things match, happy days. That might be your reason for existing. By the way, this stuff works. So, EY found that 87% of customers believe companies perform best over time if their purpose goes beyond profit. So, this is about monetizing that purpose. um companies with a purpose outperform S&P by 10x according to firms of endearment. So this stuff actually has a commercial impact as well as improving your marketing. So let's look at how we would identify some of these things that your customers or potential customers or your market might be upset about. Google is a fantastic tool. You heard it here first. One of the things that you can do is you can search for why do and then whatever your market never or why do your market always. So let's say that I was going to start a plumbing company, right? Why do plumbers never? Well, just there I've got two things that people are upset with the plumbing world about. Why do plumbers never turn up? Why do plumbers never call back? Great. So, if I'm setting up a plumbing company, my tagline, my reason for existing might be, we always turn up exactly when we say we're either 5 minutes early or we're on time or you get your money back. Simple. There's my reason for existing. I meet a potential customer on the street and they say, "Why should I buy from you rather than anybody else?" Well, because if we're not there on time, we will give you your money back. We'll do the job for free. Boom. I've got that customer. because that is an established complaint with an existing solution. Let's say I'm creating weight loss products, services, whatever. How do I lose weight without? And here I've got all the things that people don't want to have to do in order to lose weight. So, if I'm selling a weight loss course, I might say how to lose weight without doing exercise, right? I might make it all about the diet or I might say exercise means stuff that you don't enjoy. I actually don't think that you need to do stuff that you don't enjoy. I actually favor something that we call happy size or whatever. You know, it's so it's tapping into their thing and it's kind of giving them it but not really. So, how do I do something without how do I do pleasure without the pain? And then you can make that your reason for existing clothing brands that support. So, if you're a cause-based business, let's say you're a clothing brand, you want to, you know, you want to pick something that you're really passionate about, but you want to make sure there's sufficient awareness in your space, and you want make sure there's going to be a compelling reason. Clothing brands that support whatever. Okay. Um, clothing brands that support climate change. I think they mean clothing brands that support preventing climate change. Anyway, not sure. So, these are some ways that you can use Google to identify what people are already annoyed about. You can also go on sites like Reddit. So, let's say that we're building a Salesforce competitor. I could spend five minutes on Reddit in the Salesforce channel and come up with a list of features and a list of reasons why my CRM was going to be better than Salesforce just from the established complaints. Why is Salesforce so bad? Unintuitive, horrendous looking interface stuck in 1995. Okay, so great. My CRM all about beautiful design. We build the CRM that your team actually wants to use. The CRM that your team enjoys logging in on because when they enjoy logging in on it, they use it more. The entries are more complete. You get the business result. There's the story for my business. Boom. We prioritize design. We think it's important that your employees have somewhere to work which looks nice, which is why we make our design and our interface absolutely beautiful. There's my reason. That's how I sell against an established competitor. Really, really simple. So, what you want to do here is you want to forget about what you and your competitors actually sell and how for a minute. Just brainstorm it from a blank sheet of paper. What do your customers really want? What would what would get them saying, "Oh, yes. Finally, if you could offer that, because if you can offer that, that's the compelling reason. That's the thing that they want." And by the way, this works for even businesses that you'd think would be impossible to compete with. So say Amazon, let's say it's unless you're very very aggressive, you might think that it's impossible to compete with Amazon. And it is to an extent because what's Amazon's reason for people shopping with them? Well, it's basically massive choice. They've got a few reasons, but massive choice and fast delivery. Now, if you want to beat Amazon on choice, you're going to struggle. If you want to beat Amazon on delivery, you're going to struggle. So, will the company that beats Amazon beat them on delivery speed? It's very unlikely. It's very unlikely anybody could build a logistics network that could compete with Amazon. That ship has sailed. But the company that will be Amazon won't need to. The company that will be Amazon will address one of the problems that people have with Amazon, which might be huge numbers of lowquality products, unreliable reviews. You have to troll through mountains of stuff. And if you want to find something really good, it's very difficult because there's not much curation going on. Okay. So, Amazon's strength is also its weakness. Massive product selection. So, could you compete with Amazon by curating your product selection to ensure quality? Well, you probably could. There's certainly a segment of the market that would move over to an Amazon competitor that said, "We vet everything." That's why people still buy from you know department store e-commerce sites because the products are assured to be a certain quality. So think about what would your customers say ah yes finally and if you can make that your reason then your marketing becomes a lot easier because you're pushing a message which matches exactly what they want. Okay. Now, some common reasons that people choose. If you're still stuck or before you start on your brainstorming, here are some prompts that may help you. Price. So, often people can choose price as a compelling reason for purchase. You should buy from us because we are the cheapest or you should buy from us because we are the most expensive, which is also an interesting one. Now, we're going to talk a little bit more about price versus value in the offering section of this module later on, but there's been some really interesting studies on price. For example, oil of Olay before they changed their name to Olay. They wanted to shake their old expensive old lady image and they wanted to reposition their brand. So, what they did was they tested some different price points. They tested three in particular. Now in the US at this time they had a bit of a conundrum because they had the department stores which tended to be the um the you know the the the more expensive higher quality products and then they had like mass- prodduced retail at the lower end. And what they wanted to do was find a balance between these two different audiences. So the first price point they tested was $12.99. Now, at $12.99, the buyers who signal that they would be most likely to purchase were mass market, the discount shoppers. Few department stores, few of the expensive, high-end people were interested at this range because, you know, it's too cheap. It's not even on my radar. And we all have these things, right? We all have these things where, you know, if I'm out and let's say I want to buy a sandwich, I'm not going to buy a sandwich that's like really cheap because I just assume it's not going to be very good or it's going to be bad quality. So, we all have these kind of levels and thresholds. We all have an expectation of what things should cost. So, at $12.99, they got the the small ones, but they really turned off the department store buyers. So, then they tested $15.99. Now, at $15.99, both of them were less interested. Okay, the mass market buyers said, "Nah, it's too expensive for us." The department store people said, "No, we're still not interested." Okay, still not interested. That's really not for us. So, they kind of lost out. It confused people about the proposition. Is this an expensive product or is it a cheap product? Now, at $18.99, purchase intent went back up. At this point, people because they tapped into a newer audience, people were crossing over from prestige specialtity in department stores to buy this product in the retailers. So, they were buying it in discount drug and grocery stores because it was now expensive enough to be in their target zone. And this pivoting, moving their strategy to there actually helped Olay exceed their $1 billion sales targets by 2.5x. So, it was massive, massive. This helped them reposition their brand by charging more for the same product. Now, they obviously had marketing to back that up. They didn't just put the price up and that's the only thing that they changed. So, that's the important caveat. We'll talk more about this later on, but high price can also be a reason being the best service. Now, again, good customer service isn't always necessary. You can also sell a lack of customer service. For example, I don't actually ever want to talk to my bank. We've just moved banks at Exposure Ninja, and one of the main reasons is cuz I have to talk to HSBC and I have to talk to them a lot. I don't want to talk to my bank. I want my bank to operate with no this is a utility. I want them to operate just do their stuff, just get on with it. I want it to work. I don't want them to block our card and I have to phone a number and talk to someone for ages. I don't want to have to call up a customer relationship manager to get extra users. I want to be able to do it easily on an app because that takes one minute instead of a 30 minute appointment. I might have to go and visit someone. HSBC wants to tell me I had to go and visit someone to get new users set up for our account. I'm going to spend half a day getting new users set up for our business bank. Like what sort of world is that where a CEO wants to spend half their day on something pointless when you could just log into an app and just do it? So Amazon also takes this sort of approach, right? When you buy something from Amazon, you don't have to talk to customer service. There's no concurge. Everything you can do from the app. And Jeff Bezos very early on said if people are seeking out customer service, we actually see that as a bit of a fail. A user experience fail. They shouldn't have to seek out customer service. So lack of service, making sure everything is self-s served can also be a benefit. Choice uh again or lack of choice. So, Amazon offers you unlimited choice. Sometimes that's a complete nightmare. If you want to buy some smart shoes, go on Amazon. Good luck. Nightmare. Go somewhere else. They've curated a nice range. You can be assured of where they're coming from. What sort of quality are they real? All this type of stuff. Much better. So, curation can also be a reason that people would choose you over competitors. And safety or the removal of risk. Um, this is an interesting one. Anytime you see a a middle person in a in a transaction, right, you know that there is a problem with risk. So, I'll give you an example. In the UK, we have a lot of trades comparison services. So, I mentioned earlier, why do plumbers never turn out? Well, I started out Exposure Ninja building websites for trades. And one of [snorts] the things I figured out quickly is that these plumbers, they're not answering their phones, right? They're not. I was driving so much business, so many leads to these sites. I was tracking the phone number so I could see, but they weren't picking up the phones. I once spoke to a plumber who said unless a job builds more than £100, he doesn't even go back to collect the money from the customer. That's how unreliable these people are. Unless it was over a certain amount. He he would do the job. He just then wouldn't go back to collect their money, right? It's a different breed. So what you saw happening in the early 2010s and 201s was this whole industry set up to basically try and sanitize the world of trades. You got companies like Checker Trade who I consulted with in the very early days and what they were basically saying is this whole thing is a chaotic wild west. What we do is we sanitize this for you. We take the best ones, we vet them, we get reviews from their customers, and we make this reliable for you. So when you come onto our site, we are removing the perceived risk of this purchase. We're making it safe for you. And then you get other ones which you know, you could book the trade through the site or you could get quotes and it was basically a way of saying we know that there is this problem with risk when you phone a plumber or you contact a plumber. Massive risk that you never hear from them again, right? or they're completely unreliable or they're a total cowboy. So this industry was set up to try and remove that risk. So if you see profitable middlemen like this or middle women, you show that business, it shows that businesses have failed to differentiate themselves enough or that customers feel the buying process is risky or difficult. So, if I was going to set up a business like that, and I work in the world of middlemen, I would say, "Right, I'm going to beat all of them by being the most credible business. We're going to turn up in suits, right? We're going to offer guarantees against the things that people are most worried about." And you would sell against that, right? Really compelling reason. You We once had someone come over to our house to do a bit of work. They stood with their outdoor shoes on one of our child's bed toys because they just walked with their outdoor shoes to the house, right? So, if I was selling against that, we're clean, tidy, we're respectable. We treat your house like our own houses. We turn up on time. And here's our customer guarantee. And if we miss any of these, we will do the job for free. As soon as you do that, you position yourselves away from everybody else. all of your marketing becomes more effective because that's when the customers say, "Ah, yes, finally." And you get businesses that do this like Pimlo plumbers in Pimlo Pimlo plumbers in London charge ridiculous rates, but they can because they fix these problems for people. They've built a reputation based on not turning up with their rear ends hanging out, being on time, being respectful, clean vans, you know, fixed prices, all this type of stuff. So there are great economic rewards for fixing this type of thing. So um safety removal of risk also one as well. So how how else can you find your reason? Well going back to this idea of what are your customers annoyed about? What do your customer what do you stand for or against? Another thing that you can use is your background story. So this is the reason that you got into the business. For example, um in the early days of Exposure Ninja, our background story was and basically still is because it's 100% true. I built a website for my next door neighbor who's a plaster. It completely changed his life and that changed my life because finally I'd found something which I could do which changed people's lives. Right? I think that's fun. It's definitely what people like me, people pleasers um like doing is having a massive positive effect on other people. So I found this thing. It completely changed his life and I started an agency on the back of that. So now that's the origin story and when people hear that they're like, "Okay, I know who that person is. I know who this Tim guy is. I know what drives him." That's a cool story. It gives me credibility as well because obviously I had to change his life through this website in order for that thing to happen. And it shows that my heart's in it for the right reasons, right? I didn't start this because I thought, hm, you know what's the corner of the market? I could become a trillionaire through exploitation. Uh yeah, let's let's start some high interest doorstep loan business, right? Let's try and make loads of money on people's misery. It's not that, right? It's like what what drives me? What are my values? And that's what your origin story really gives you. Another example of a great origin story, Richard Branson. So the whole story of the Virgin Airlines was he was trying to get um an airline and you know he was trying to get a flight and it had been cancelled. So, um, they, you know, he charted a plane and split the cost and everyone and, you know, now he's a hero. He's one of us. He's helping people get to their destinations. And then they used the another story was uh facing against British Airways in the in the Atlantic routes and BA's dirty tricks campaign. And he tells this story about Virgin going up against, you know, the big boys, the enemy. And he does this to position them against the evil empire, right? Virgin is the underdog, the scrappy underdog, the hero that you want to win. Well, what does that do? That aligns you with Virgin. That proves why they're different because they don't embark in these dirty tricks. They're not evil. So, this origin story can kind of communicate your values to your audience in a way that can be difficult just through copy on your site. So um that is your reason. So there's some exercises in the sheet that you can go through to kind of work out what your reason might be. But spend some time on this because it is really important. Okay, let's look at the third aspect of positioning which is your audience, your target customers. Now, I'm actually going to combine the audience and the voice, the tone of voice, personality, because there is a lot of crossover here. And you can use your target audience and your audience research to inform your voice. I'll explain how. So, um, who do you really sell to? This is a question that many people struggle with and particularly in the early days of their business because the fear is and I've felt this fear by the way. If we identify our target audience too narrowly, we limit who can purchase our product. Why would we want to limit who can purchase our product? Because we want to sell as many as possible, right? But it's kind of counterintuitive. Now once you've built traction with a particular niche once you've established you know that you've got a particular target audience you've served them well then of course yes you expand but you expand in a very strategic way. Okay you expand in a very strategic way. So yeah we need to identify a clear target audience and then we need to make a marketing message which really truly resonates with them. Now this idea of you know expanding into different audiences people will look at uh large companies like Nike or McDonald's and they will say well they don't niche. Nike doesn't niche. You can see people of all different types in all different economic backgrounds wearing Nike products. They don't niche. Actually they do because if you look at Nike what you've actually got is a huge number of subbrands. Okay, you've got brands which are targeted to people of different interests, different sports. You've got brands targeted to people at different income levels. You can buy a Nike t-shirt for £10. You can buy a Nike t-shirt for £250. You can buy super secret one-off collabs with crazy designers if you want to. Right? So, actually, they've got very, you know, they've got…

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