A positioning statement you can actually fill in
The template is Jonathan Stark's (I clipped it from his site in November 2015):
I'm a DISCIPLINE who helps TARGET MARKET with EXPENSIVE PROBLEM. Unlike my competitors, UNIQUE DIFFERENCE.
Take a piece of paper and fill in the blanks. It's brutal. If it felt easy, you probably wrote something soggy like "helps businesses with elegant solutions to complex problems". That describes how you see yourself, to yourself. It tells a buyer nothing.
The good examples are uncomfortably specific: a developer who helps dentists with older patients who forget appointments, using SMS reminders that work on any phone.
My drafts
How mine went for Siftware, in order. Watch it narrow.
- A software development company that helps the owners or managers of custom-built web applications sleep better at night. Unlike our competitors, we work with existing code rather than recommending a complete rewrite.
- A web development company that helps the owners or managers of PHP web applications keep their businesses running. Unlike our competitors, we specialise in taking over existing projects and bringing them back to life.
- ...helps the owners or managers of complex web applications keep their online businesses running. Unlike our competitors, we specialise in taking over existing projects and will provide measurable improvements from the outset.
- ...helps the owners or managers of complex web applications keep their businesses running. Unlike our competitors, we specialise in taking over and breathing new life into existing projects.
"Sleep better at night" is a feeling, not a problem anyone budgets for.
"Taking over existing projects" is a thing a buyer can recognise in their own week.
This sits with choosing an audience and picking a niche: the audience comes first, the niche narrows it, and the positioning statement is the sentence you can say out loud afterwards. Then it becomes the first line of a service-offering page.