Most mid-market company CEOs don’t have a strong background in marketing. In fact, it’s rare if they do, and few CEOs focus on refining their marketing skills, instead focusing on leadership, motivation, and operations. This becomes a company problem, though, only if nobody else on the leadership team has experience developing marketing strategy.

Good marketing strategy always starts with positioning and branding, even at the mid-market B2B company level. Positioning can be complex; market research is laborious, time consuming, and often expensive. Then comes the more challenging part: interpreting the market research to determine what turf you should and can defend, and how to defend it.

Most mid-market leadership teams don’t have the bandwidth or experience to complete this work with the same depth and vigor as their Fortune 500 counterparts. Yet it’s vitally important: Positioning strategy is the foundation for your brand.

Positioning 101

If you’re a casual reader who doesn’t have the bandwidth to commit to creating a full-blown marketing strategy, but needs to make incremental improvements, there is one quick exercise that can greatly impact your results.

To improve your positioning and branding:

• Choose one thing you (your product/service/company) should represent and focus all of your one-to-many communications on reinforcing it.

In today’s hectic world, our minds are more cluttered than ever, so oversimplification is what you’re shooting for here.  Email, the Web, radio, TV, and social media bombard us with so much information that we, as humans, have been forced to develop coping mechanisms to recall the things that are important to us. We’ve had to learn to oversimplify. Studies have shown that one weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than a US resident of the mid-1800s encountered during an entire lifetime.

You get the picture. Since most mid-market companies’ marketing activities are sales driven, their high-level messaging is lengthy, and benefit oriented. It’s fine to use that strategy within the sales process, but it has no place as the lead message in your primary one-to-many communications. People just will not remember it.

If you’ve read the marketing classic Positioning by Jack Trout, this concept will sound familiar, as it’s the main takeaway from the book. But many small and mid-market companies don’t follow his suggestion, attempting instead to sell product in their marketing communications, rather than focusing on simply owning a mindshare.

To Be Remembered, Simplify Your Message

Of course selling is important, but it’s effective only when you deliver the right information at the right time, i.e., when the market is ready for it.

To effectively penetrate your market to win market share and increase your company value, you must communicate your message in a way that makes people remember it. If your message is memorable, some people will reach out to your sales team for more information so they can make a buying decision.

To be remembered, own one thing in the mind of the consumer. Oversimplify!