A positioning statement explains briefly how your mobile app solves the needs of your target user and aligns your internal team on how to move forward. The statement sets the foundation for your marketing efforts and how you want the market to perceive your mobile app.
A positioning statement must be an integral part of your mobile app’s branding strategy since it can explain the value of your app and showcase how it’s different from the competition to attract more potential users.
5 Steps to Writing a Positioning Statement
Here’s what you need to do to write the best positioning statement for your mobile app:
1. Identify Your Brand Values
It’s essential to define your brand values first because it’s how you’ll explain the “why” behind your mobile app’s mission to users.
Your brand values are the beliefs your brand stands for — the reason you launched your app or the impact you want to have on the lives of your users.
Twitter’s brand value, for example, is to empower users to express themselves to the world and easily share information. So they said as much in their positioning statement: “The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.”
2. Define Your Target Audience
It’s impossible to create a positioning statement that will be impactful to your users if you don’t understand who they are in the first place. By identifying who your target audience is, you can then know how to formulate your positioning statement in a way that is relevant and speaks to them.
To write your positioning statement, you must first create a buyer persona, which includes the following elements:
- Demographics: You have to pin down primary data on the demographics of your audience, such as their age, gender, and location.
- Challenges/pain points: Identify the common problems and challenges that led your users to download your mobile app in the first place.
- Goals: Write down the goals of your ideal user. What are customers trying to achieve with your mobile app?
3. Identify How You Solve Your Users’ Needs
A positioning statement must explain the apparent benefits your app will bring to your user’s life. When you show the user how the mobile app will solve their needs, you position your app as the solution to their challenges.
Think about any specific feature you want to highlight to your user that makes their life easier and solves their challenges. You can even interview previous happy users of your app to collect feedback on what they liked the most about it.
4. Explain Why You’re Better Than the Competition
You’re not the only app fighting for the attention of users, which is why you must understand how you stand out. Identify why the customer should choose your app over competitors in your positioning statement.
To find your advantages over other apps, you’ll have to run a competitor analysis. Here are factors to examine while you compare how you stand against other apps in your market:
- What strengths do you have over the competition?
- What features does your app offer that the competition doesn’t?
During this process, create a list of all of your strengths and choose the ones you want to include within your positioning statement.
5. Combine All the Information Together
Once you identify everything listed here, it’s time to write down your positioning statement. With the information you uncovered about your app, you can use the following formula to write down your positioning statement:
[Your app] offers [benefits/values that make you stand out from the competition] for [your users], which does [how you solve your users’ needs] because [why you’re better than your competition].
3 Examples of Positioning Statements from Popular Apps
In need of inspiration? Here are examples of positioning statements from other top apps:
Spotify
Spotify is a music-streaming platform that allows users to listen to songs from anywhere. Here’s what their positioning statement looks like on their website:
“With Spotify, it’s easy to find the right music or podcast for every moment – on your phone, your computer, your tablet and more. There are millions of tracks and episodes on Spotify. So whether you’re behind the wheel, working out, partying or relaxing, the right music or podcast is always at your fingertips. Choose what you want to listen to, or let Spotify surprise you. You can also browse through the collections of friends, artists, and celebrities, or create a radio station and just sit back.”
Why It’s Good:
In this positioning statement, Spotify highlights how easy it is for users to find what they’re looking for with their app, regardless of which device they use.
The statement explains how the user can use Spotify’s app in the most straightforward way possible. The user can either go through the millions of songs that Spotify offers based on different themes or let the streaming app choose the best song for them.
MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal, a mobile app that helps users track their calories and lose weight, has the following positioning statement:
“At MyFitnessPal.com, we focus on making sure you can log your meals as quickly and easily as possible. Because the easier we make it for you, the more likely you are to stay on track, and the more likely you are to succeed in your weight loss goals. [...] *MyFitnessPal.com remembers what you've eaten and done most often in the past, and makes it easy for you to add those foods again to your log. So the more you track your meals, the easier it becomes!”
Why It’s Good:
MyFitnessPal highlights both the challenges (tracking meals manually) and goals (losing weight) of their users and showcases how the app can help. MyFitnessPal users can track their food intake in one app to measure how it impacts their weight loss goals.
Hinge
Hinge is a mobile dating app that places a hard focus on long-term relationships and helping users find the one. Here is the messaging that they use on their website to position their mobile app in the best light:
“We want anyone looking for love to be able to find it. Relationships are at the core of everything we do. And not just the romantic kind. We can’t accomplish really hard things alone—so we make great relationships the foundation of our teamwork.”
Why It’s Good:
With this positioning statement, Hinge addresses a common issue that their users have with other dating apps: finding a partner who wants a serious relationship. The dating app then highlights why Hinge is different with their priority of helping users find long-term relationships to build trust.
A Good Positioning Statement Empowers Your App
Effective branding is key to promoting your mobile app. A positioning statement helps you better understand your target user and the value of your mobile app, which you can then use to direct your marketing strategy.