Your brand positioning strategy is important to develop in order to get to number one in a customer's mind for your products or services. If you don't develop a plan, customers won't think about you when they go to make a purchase. This is sure to lead to low sales and, ultimately, business failure. Here are some characteristics of a first rate brand positioning strategy you can use for your business:

Unique Benefits

What benefits does a customer gain from buying your product or services? It's not enough to develop a generic benefits list that all of your competitors offer. What unique benefits do you offer? This takes diligent research of the competition, as well as prospective customers. Your brand positioning strategy has to revolve around your customers, and what they will benefit from a relationship with your business. Otherwise, they'll go to the competition, where they perceive they can get the most for their money.

Quality Products or Services

The Internet has made it easy for customers to get low prices, and harder for you as a home based business owner to beat larger competitors. However, you can still occupy a higher position over large service firms and product stores by building a brand image that highlights quality products or services. For example, if you're a freelancer, you may not be able to compete on price with freelancers from other countries. However, if you're known as a freelancer who offers quality services, you'll gain a higher brand position than low-priced competitors. You might even be able to charge higher prices for higher quality services, and the higher price may help build that perception that you're offering quality, whereas your competitors are not.

Great Features

You need to think through the features of your products or services that would make customers choose you in the first place, and use it in all of your advertising strategy. Take the time to write a product or service description for everything you offer. Cross out the ones that don't meet the threshold of a great feature. Even if you only have one or two points about your product or service that qualifies, you can use that to differentiate yourself from the competition and boost sales. For example, if you're selling a home security system on Ebay, it's not enough to highlight the fact that it comes with 4 cameras and a DVR. Every similar home security system does, and your customers have no reason to buy from you, rather than someone else on Ebay. However, you could highlight that the security system sends images in real time to your email. Now your product is more compelling to consider, and you'll get more sales, even from a competitor that offers a cheaper price.

Problem Solver

A brand positioning strategy that works well, especially during hard economic times, is positioning yourself as a problem-solver. You want to focus on offering the very best solutions for the problems your target market faces. Your customers will associate your ability to problem-solve with your ability to save them time, money and pain, which will keep them with you and not the competition.

When you use these major characteristics of a brand position strategy, you can improve sales and your financial bottom line. If you don't take the time to work on a strategy, your business won't do as well, and your marketing efforts will be counter-productive.