Build your fact-based B2B value proposition
Learn how OSP’s B2B brand positioning strategy turns your complex feature set into compelling audience-driven messaging. Tracy Evans shares strategies for crafting positioning that resonates and drives tech product marketing success.
B2B Brand Positioning: Frameworks and Strategies for 2025 Success
OSP Partner, Co-Founder, and Strategic Lead Tracy Evans shares her perspective on the core of our approach to content marketing.
There is an art to explaining the unique benefits your products offer to your customers in a non-generic way: You need your target audience to see the value of what you offer and understand what sets you apart in the market. In this article, we’ll outline what goes into capturing the value proposition for a B2B technology offering, and cover the tools and outputs of the process, including the Value Map, Value Cases, brand positioning, and more.
When we first started Open Strategy Partners (OSP), our goal was simple: to bridge the gap between technical truth and effective communication. Today, we sit down with one of OSP’s co-founders, Tracy, to talk about her journey, motivations, and the unique methodologies that have defined our approach to content strategy. Tracy’s insights provide a window into how OSP helps technology companies communicate effectively by aligning complex technical realities with meaningful, audience-centered messaging.
We’ll start by explaining why this work is important and providing a few helpful definitions. Then, we’ll explain how to create your own brand positioning strategy.
Guided B2B value proposition workshops
We offer a Guided B2B brand positioning and value proposition workshop if you want to work through this with exert guidance.
If you need help or have any questions along the way, get in touch. Our strategic communications experts and tech marketers are standing by!
Know your value proposition, improve your brand equity.
Your B2B value proposition is the unique value you will deliver if someone chooses to become your customer. It is the shortest possible way to express the sum total of the strategy work we’ll explain below. Your value proposition:
- Serves as the foundation for your brand's positioning strategy.
- Articulates the unique benefits and value your product or service offers to your target customers.
- Clearly communicates why customers should pick you over the competition.
Enhanced brand equity and perception. Knowing your value proposition—and being able to show how you arrived at it through your various strategic assets—helps you make your brand more valuable. As you publish consistent, effective content, following a clear strategic direction establishes a positive perception in customers' minds, increasing the overall value of your brand, aka your brand equity.
"Your value proposition is more than just a catchy phrase—it’s the core of why someone should care about your product. It distills the benefits, the differentiation, and the outcomes into something that customers immediately understand and find compelling. It answers the question: 'Why should I choose this product over any other?',"—Tracy Evans
What can I do with my value proposition?
When you’ve gotten through the steps we outline here, you will have a powerful set of communication tools at your disposal. With it, you can:
- Communicate consistently about your product. Marketers and salespeople can rest assured, safe in the knowledge that the technical teams have signed off on the description and language describing your product.
- Gain strategic insights. Show the connection between technical functionality and business value for all roles, technical and business.
- Help marketers and salespeople be technically accurate in their communications. This is especially important when marketing to software developers.
- Inform all communications, marketing assets, and content, for example, product pages, sales decks, blog posts, etc.
- Streamline content ideation and production, based on technical truth.
What is brand positioning?
A brand positioning strategy is the process of understanding and defining how you want your B2B brand perceived by your target audience and also in relation to your competitors. In this process, you identify and capture your value proposition (the unique value that your offerings provide), establish a distinct market position, and differentiate yourself from others in the market.
Note: “Brand” for the purposes of this article is mostly the value of your product and service offering, not your “brand” as in your corporate identity, logo, etc.
A strong B2B technology brand positioning must be:
- Compelling: capturing the attention and interest of the target audience by showing that you understand and address their needs and challenges
- Clear and accurate: ensuring that the messaging is straightforward, honest, and precise
- Technically accurate: building credibility and trust with technically-minded audiences
- Unique and non-generic: positioning your brand in the market with distinct advantages and differentiators
Why is brand positioning important? What’s in it for me?
Consistently following and communicating your positioning will help create deeper connections with your audience, and loyalty and engagement with your customers and community.
- Strategic direction for sales and marketing efforts. A well-defined brand positioning guides the sales and marketing teams, helping them focus their efforts on impactful activities and ensuring that all initiatives and efforts support your overall business objectives.
- Clear and consistent messaging. The work that goes into your brand positioning captures and organizes the unique value that the features of your offering deliver. By defining and communicating your brand's distinctive qualities, you can ensure that all messaging across all channels is clear, consistent, and aligned with your priorities.
- Cross-team alignment. The information in the Value Map, positioning statement, and Value Case (and all the work that goes into making them) is a powerful toolset for all of your teams. This gives them the best chance to create great content and campaigns that accurately represent the brand and resonate with your target audience.
Your brand positioning strategy enables anyone, but especially your sales marketing teams, to produce consistent, effective content that aligns with your vision, strategy, and messaging built on technical truth.
Connecting the dots
Tracy’s path to co-founding OSP started as an entrepreneur looking for a technology to support her business. With a non-technical background that spanned marketing, leadership, and business strategy, Tracy saw first-hand how difficult it was for tech companies to tell their stories in a way that connected with her—their target audience.
"There’s this gap," Tracy explains, "between what a product can do and how to talk about it in ways that matter to real people. I wanted to address that gap—to bring clarity where there was complexity. That’s why we started OSP."
Tracy identified a missing link in the industry: technology products are often communicated purely in technical terms—developers think in features—or they are oversimplified, which is often how B2B tech is promoted to business roles, losing their essence along the way. She wanted to create an approach that stayed true to a product’s capabilities while translating those features into benefits that customers could understand and appreciate. This gap in tech marketing, she realized, was an opportunity—an opportunity to connect the dots between engineering, marketing, and the end customer. Thus, OSP was born, and with it, an entire framework designed to align technology storytelling with audience needs.
What goes into your value proposition
How to build your value proposition
We start with the Value Map and then move on to brand positioning, value case, and taglines. Each step builds on the last. Let’s shift gears now and go through the practical steps to creating your product’s value proposition.
The OSP Value Map: Repeatable strategic insights
At the heart of OSP’s product marketing approach lies a set of structured methodologies designed to create clarity and connection in your communications strategy. One of these frameworks is our Value Mapping process. Tracy breaks down this cornerstone of OSP’s work:
"Value Mapping helps us take the technical truth of a product and map it directly to the challenges and needs of the audience … and then put it into great B2B copywriting. It’s about finding that point where what the product does intersects with what the audience really cares about."
Make it easier for your audiences to see the value of your tech clearly, without having to sift through jargon or guess at the benefits. The Value Mapping process ensures that you communicate your product’s features in terms of benefits, or added value. It starts with understanding the technical truth—what your product actually does—and linking the features to challenges solved and outcomes achieved.
In a nutshell, the Value Map is the clay from which your positioning emerges. It provides an up-to-date canonical inventory of product information, integrating the brand positioning within it. It is a single source of truth encapsulating the full potential of your product that helps you produce relevant content and aligns your communications with your vision, strategy, and technical truth. And it helps you communicate effectively and build strong relationships with your audiences—your potential customers.
Your value proposition includes the sum total of your Value Map, brand positioning, Value case, and taglines—AND the work you put into capturing and defining it all. "It’s the distilled essence of all these elements. It all gives you ways to communicate your product's unique value to its intended audience," clarifies Tracy.
Value Map your B2B tech product
For those of you looking to try out OSP’s methodologies, download the Value Mapping and Positioning Templates we use.
Follow these steps to Value Map a B2B tech product.
SME Interviews
Identify the Technical Truth: Internal SME interviews
- Start by gathering all the details about the product's features, capabilities, and technical specifics. Interview team members (product owners, developers, etc.) who know the product to understand its intended market and value.
- Tip: In these conversations, we are trying to understand why any given feature is included. To justify investing in it, it should deliver customer value. We often say that a product feature or set of features is a technical answer to a business question.
Understand the Audience: External SME interviews
- Define your target audience segments. Who are they, what challenges do they face, and what do they care about? To align deeply with their needs, this can include direct research, personas, and audience interviews.
- Interview customers or users about the value they get and understand whether their needs, challenges, and perceptions of your product meet (or do not meet) internal perceptions.
- Tip: In these interviews, we want to find out what customers get out of using the product. If they love a feature, ask how they benefit from it and what it solves for them. In the end, we need to connect a technical feature back to the benefit.
SME interview tip: the Value Case questions
The OSP Value Case structure—benefit, challenge, solution—is at the heart of the Value Map. Keeping the Value Case in mind helps us channel our internal and external SMEs (subject-matter experts) to insight and clarity about their products.
A value case has a solution, and the specific benefits and challenges linked to it matter. A solution, in this case, is one or more product features.
We create Value Cases by answering three questions. Try different variations of these questions to get the fullest perspective on your product.
- "What benefit is a customer seeking when they are looking for these features?"
- "What challenge does a customer face that prevents them from having that benefit already?"
- "What solution does the product offer (using these features) that overcomes the challenge and provides the benefit?"
Optional: Conduct a competitive analysis.
- Looking at others in your industry, you might find things you want to emulate or areas where you can stand out by offering unique value or addressing unmet customer needs.
Compile and structure your product information:
- Collect the data using our Value Map template.
- Categorize every item as a feature, benefit, or challenge.
- Group the items into logical-functional groups (Feature Areas) and groups of groups (Feature Categories) to create a comprehensive inventory of product information.
- Give every Feature Area and Feature Category a
- Name
- Tagline
- Value Case (Benefit, Challenge, Solution)
Map Features to Challenges
- Take each feature of the product and ask, "What problem does this solve for the audience?" This step is crucial for connecting the technical truth with real-world challenges. It requires empathy and an understanding of both the product and the audience’s pain points.
Articulate the Benefits
- Once you have mapped features to audience challenges, articulate the benefits. How does solving this challenge make the audience’s life—business, career, job—easier or better? Be specific—quantify improvements if possible, and highlight tangible outcomes.
Refine Messaging
- Turn the features and benefits into clear, audience-centered messaging. Simplicity is key. Avoid jargon and ensure that each message addresses an audience need or challenge in straightforward language.
Test and Iterate
- Use feedback from stakeholders or even potential customers to refine the messaging. Value Mapping is an iterative process, and each version should move you closer to alignment with what the audience cares about most.
Validate
- Whenever possible, incorporate customer testimonials that speak to the challenges and benefits you’ve outlined. Authentic experiences help validate your messaging and build trust. "The testimonials we gathered were a game changer," Tracy adds. "Hearing directly from existing customers about their experiences added a level of trust that pure marketing speak just can’t achieve."
Repeat!
- You should maintain your Value Map, updating it with every new release of your product.
- Tip: "Value Mapping isn’t just a one-time exercise, “Tracy emphasizes, “it’s something we revisit as our clients’ products evolve and as we learn more about their audiences. It’s an ongoing journey of making sure the value we’re communicating is always real, relevant, and resonant."
Example Value Map sample excerpt
Here are the top few rows of the Value Map we created for Palantir.net's EditTogether collaborative editing solution for the Drupal CMS:
OSP was able to put together a fantastic Value Map that made obvious and clear the great benefits of the Drupal Certified Partner program and structure them in a way that we could clearly communicate them. The rigor they brought to the table in guiding us made all the difference.
From value map to positioning and value proposition
After completing the Value Map, the next step is to translate these insights into a compelling product positioning and an overall value proposition. Tracy explains that the Value Map gives us the core ingredients we need to craft messaging that truly resonates with the audience—but it's the positioning that brings everything together.
"Once we have the Value Map," Tracy says, "we take what we've learned about the challenges, solutions, and benefits, and start building the overarching story for the product. This is about showing why the product matters in the broader context of the market. It's where we take all the individual Value Cases and shape them into a cohesive narrative that demonstrates the product's unique strengths."
Steps to develop your positioning and round out your value proposition:
Prioritize challenges, features, and benefits
- Start by distilling the insights from the Value Map. Identify the top challenges and benefits that resonate most strongly with your target audience and the solutions (aka your features) that differentiate your product from the competition.
- Tip: We often use a voting exercise to identify the most important features, challenges, and benefits.
- Collaborate with your team and the SMEs you interviewed to vote on and prioritize the most important features, challenges, and benefits.
- Focus on those that align with your strategic goals and resonate most with your target audience.
- Copy the top 3-5 features, challenges, and benefits to the Positioning Base Information template.
- If you haven't downloaded them yet, here are the Value Mapping and Positioning Templates we're using.
Define your unique brand positioning statement
Positioning Statements describe what a product does and what value it delivers (for an implied or explicit audience). Read more on positioning statements in our product communication guide.
Here is our formula for a full (unpolished) positioning statement: How [your brand], in [product category], helps [your audience] address [challenge(s)] with [benefit] by offering [solution].
- In the positioning template, fill in
- the remaining sections with your brand, category, and audience information.
- various different keywords for each square bracket item in the positioning formula.
- Try different versions of the raw brand positioning statement in the formula. You may find several promising and useful variations.
- It will need polish and color to be compelling, but it forms the basis for consistent communication.
- Tip: Tracy adds, "The positioning is where we show that not only do we understand the audience’s pain points, but we also have a distinct, superior way of solving them."
- Note: You don’t need to use the full statement in this format for every situation, but you have all the ingredients you need to apply it to various marketing assets.
VIT (very important tip): Product and brand Positioning Statements should be specific and non-generic. Try substituting another tech product or service into the statement—if it’s easily substituted, drill down into more detail or specificity until you are describing your offering only.
Example: OSP’s full positioning statement is, “Open Strategy Partners helps B2B and open source tech companies align marketing strategy and content with your vision and technical truth to generate leads, win customers, and gain advocates.”
Example: Our client, Lockr's full positioning statement is: “Lockr's secrets management platform makes state-of-the-art security affordable, fast, and easy to use. We can help you protect your business by securing the keys to your site, systems, and data.”
Summarize your Product Value Case
- "Boil up," that is, combine and summarize, the top features, benefits, and challenges in your Value Map into a single Value Case that represents what value your product delivers by solving which problems, and how.
- Tip: You might struggle to summarize things from individual features all the way up to this level of concentration—those of us with a technical background love accuracy and details after all. Keep in mind that when prospects do their due diligence on your offering, even the broadest statements you make are backed up by your technical truth. You started with your features and worked your way up. This is the huge advantage of doing this "bottom-up" positioning versus "top-down" guesswork and trying to make the details fit later.
Create taglines
Once your positioning statement is finalized, it's time to develop taglines. Taglines are short sentences or fragments typically found at the top of the page or as section headers.
Taglines are meant to grab attention while introducing the content that follows. They’re often the most verbally playful and brand-driven statements. Our Product Communications Guide has more on taglines.
Create taglines that capture the essence of your positioning in a memorable and impactful way.
- Tagline Best Practices:
- Keep taglines short and rhythmic
- Try alliteration, wordplay, and rhyming
- Feel free to use fragments
- Capture brand character and values
- Make taglines clever, attention-grabbing, and that pop out at you
- Example: OSP taglines include
- Communicate, Connect, Grow.
- Your tech is complex. Your message shouldn't be.
- Tech marketers for tech companies.
- Example: Lockr's tagline is: Affordable, ironclad security in a flash.
- Example: EditTogether's taglines are
- Edit better, Edit Together.
- Add content collaboration to your content management
- Write, Edit, Approve. Keep your intranet content in your intranet. Safe. Secure. Drupal.
Align with market trends and audience needs
- To ensure the positioning and value proposition are relevant, align them with current market trends and the evolving needs of your target audience. Tracy mentions, "It’s important to keep iterating based on how the market changes. The value proposition should always reflect what the audience values most at any given time."
Test messaging for clarity and resonance
- Just like with Value Mapping, testing the final positioning and value proposition is crucial. Use stakeholder feedback, customer interviews, and audience insights to refine the language and ensure it resonates effectively.
- Example: Lockr completed base positioning worksheet:
Elevate your B2B brand positioning
Building a strong B2B brand positioning communicates your unique value to potential customers and distinguishes your company in a competitive market. By understanding and implementing the concepts of Value Mapping, brand positioning, and your value proposition, into your marketing strategy, you can create a compelling and consistent brand narrative that resonates with your target audience.
This strategic approach enhances brand equity and provides clear direction for sales and marketing efforts, ensuring alignment with your company's vision and technical truth.
Following along with this post, you have gone through a repeatable set of exercises that build on each other to give you a catalog of the product information you need to market and sell your offering.
You now have at your fingertips the combination of several perspectives and insights about your product at varying levels of technical detail. You can present them in ways that highlight why customers should choose your product over competitors' products.
If your organization is looking to align your technology messaging with your audience’s needs, we'd love to talk with you about it.
Contact us to book a B2B brand positioning and value proposition workshop.
Or get in touch to talk about your B2B tech marketing needs.