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Principle #2: Avoid Strength, Attack Weakness

Now that we've learned exactly what the ultimate goal of our small business should be, it's time to define exactly how, in a strategic market and business sense, we are to accomplish this goal. Sun Tzu's second principle, deception and foreknowledge, is rather simple, but at times the application can be tricky. Let's see what we can do...

Attacking Weakness:

• Leverages your resources as effectively as possible
• Increases the value of your victory
• Avoids the "we only need to do what our competition has been successful doing to be successful" mind set
• Keeps you from missing opportunities

How To Attack Weakness in other Companies:

• Evaluate your competitors value chain and attack their weakest point. (lure away distributors, strengthen/improve your operations n opponents weaker area to profit where they are not succeeding, etc.).
  
• Identify your strongest competitors and smaller, weaker, competitors. In your market you may attack companies that are more fragile than you to gain market share in order to build strength against a larger company.
• Enter new geographic markets
• Create new products
• Identify under served market niches or new markets
• Utilize the first mover advantage when possible and feasible. Use this preemptive strike to build a defensible position in markets.
• Identify boundary points within competing companies - areas in which one part of the company intersects another in responsibilities. These points often expose value chain weaknesses and areas for creative attack and useful insights.
• Find psychological weak points and attack those (through PR, swaying of customers by emphasizing your strengths in areas of competitor weakness, etc.)
• Determine your point of attack in the weakest/high yield area possible.
• UTILIZE THE WEB
  

Keys for a successful attack:

• Attack from a defensible position, and when the time is right. Do not attack if situations change, be aware of your surroundings.
• Attack the weakest point with the highest yield.
• Do not always assume the obvious answer is right. Develop your strategy and analysis capabilities to identify a variety of options.

Web Marketing and your Strategic Attacks:
Marketing and web marketing especially provide some unique tools for capitalizing on your competitors' weaknesses. Whether it be supply or value chain, psychological, or a quick strike into a new market, the web provides tools to improve each of these areas within your own business, as well as research and identify weaker areas in your competitors.

• Learn what web applications may be used to enhance your own supply and value chains
• Study your comeptitors website for weakness - web marketing and search engine optimization is often a weak point, especially for small businesses.
• Utilize sights such as spyfu.com, compete.com, and semrush.com to identify competitors strategies for online marketing.
• Sell product online when it makese sense (expand your geographic market)
• Utilize the web to quickly distrbute a new product
  
• Utilize the social media and viral aspects of the web to launch psychological attacks on your opponent and influence consumers' opinions.
• Utilize analytics tools and web testing strategies to gain insights into consumers and new market opportunities.

Principle 3 coming soon...

Sun Tzu principle #1: Win All Without Fighting

Below are a couple of key points from this first principle of Sun Tzu. Again, the principles are basic, but hopefully this information sparks some strategic thinking and web marketing ideas on your end! If you've read the book and have some thoughts to add please do.

1) Gain a position in your niche/industry that is defensible and allows you to shape surrounding influences.

• If you are a new small business in a large industry, focus on developing your core competencies and uniqueness. As these traits are developed, it will become harder and harder for someone to attack you.
• If you are starting in a new market/niche, or a smaller industry, or one that may be geographically segregated, you already have a somewhat defensible position. Build your core competencies and make sure you define who you are as a company, and who your market is. These fundamental elements will help you build the protection you need early on from new entrants, thus neutralizing a big threat many new, small businesses can face.
  
• In both cases, setup standard review times to check progress and make adjustments for advancing/defending your position. Review your goals (financial, marketing, conversion, etc.) and make sure your strategy is inline and working.
  
• At this point, making a plan for what role you want the web to play in your strategy is key. A web presence can be a defensible position built upon strong marketing, creative content, unique offers of value, etc.. It's the easiest second storefront that you can maintain and use to build a following.
• Always remember that the only true way to control your firm's destiny is to dominate the market. Build a position with this concept in mind.
  

2) Fight without fighting: Leave your market intact.

• As a small business, it is especially important to keep an eye on competitors. When you find a company you are competing with, work to fight them without fighting. If they lower their prices, don't automatically lower yours. If a war of attrition ensues, you may both lose out and potential damage to the market can be done (think of kmart fighting wal-mart). Instead, stick to your core competencies, and learn to identify weaknesses that you can capitalize on.
• This is an area where a strong web presence can be a huge benefit. If you have one, and your competitor doesn't, you have access to new customers, new relationships, connections, marketing, etc., that your competitor is missing out on. The potential to lower costs is a single advantage that could mean the difference between survive and thrive or die and goodbye.
• The web can greatly assist you in gaining control of the most market territory with the smallest investment. Controlling territory rather than destroying competition should be the goal.

The remaining sections of this book detail exactly how to accomplish the ultimate goal of attaining market dominance, and thus controlling your destiny. I'll continue to work on building in thoughts on how to accomplish these individual tactics with basic business principles, as well as thoughts on how the web can help you accomplish your strategic goals.

Sun Tzu Intro and Small Business Strategy

This post marks the first post in several I'm planning on doing that relate to the book I mentioned yesterday entitled "Sun Tzu and the Art of Business" written by Mark McNeilly. Today I'm going to outline the 6 major strategies discussed in the book and how I plan to analyze them.

6 Strategic Principles for Management

1) Win all Without fighting
2) Avoid Strength and Attack Weakness
3) Deception and Foreknowledge
4) Speed and Preparation
5) Shape your Opponent
6) Character-based Leadership

The correlation between war and business strategies has long been slammed as being irrelevant by a variety of noted authors. My hope from this comparison is that some very basic elements of crafting strategy and potential methods for building strategy will become clear.

My hope is that as I present the information, it will be particularly valuable for small businesses, and for those looking to utilize the web for their business. As I go through the basics of the principles I'll do my best to match the principle with elements unique to starting/running a small business, as well as how the principle could be applied to building a web presence or utilizing the web.

Some Recommended Reading

Over the past couple of weeks I've been devoting my blog time to doing some heavy strategic research and process development. I have a couple of books that I wanted to reccommend if anyone is interested in learning more about business strategy and market development.

The first one is Sun Tzu and the Art of Business. For some more information you can visit the Sun Tzu site, or check the book out at Amazon. I plan on going through the book on my blog in some more detail, as I work to relate it to not only web strategy, but specifically to how small businesses in Southern Oregon (my home) could use these principles to help deliver success.

The second quick mention is actually a text book I "read" while completing my masters work. I'm pulling a lot of good strategy information from it and working with it to develop some processes for performing small business strategic analysis and development. The name of the book is Crafting and Executing Strategy 15th edition, and is a standard Mcgraw-Hill publication. I believe mine is the international Edition. A quick google search should help you get some more info on it. I will also be walking through different ideas in this book to complement future blogs so stay tuned if you are interested in small business development and want some FREE info.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) Road Map

Quick post today -

Below is a link to an article on developing a Social Media Marketing Road map and some SEO integration ideas.

social media seo


I also was lucky enough to be included in some phone interviews between Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Perry Marshall the PPC guru. If you'd like my EXTREMLY unrefined but somewhat detailed notes on the interviews I'll pass them along - Just leave me a comment with the best way to reach you.

Seth Godin, Aaron Wall, and Rand Fishkin Brawl!...Ok not really

I realize that I've strayed from my marketing research information over the last few posts, but I do plan to return to that topic soon. Today is not that day however, as I've been doing some reading that has got me thinking...For those of you who know me yes I DO read and even think sometimes.

First off - get some background for this one (read in order):

1)How to make money with seo
2)Theres more than two ways to make money with seo
3)Most SEO strategies are not focused hitting home runs

From this point on, I'm assuming you've dug through the previous three posts.

I'm not going to agree, disagree, rant, berate or any of that (as if I have any place to anyway) these three articles, but I wanted to make note of a key part of marketing that I think many small to medium sized businesses miss - making sure that offline and online marketing operations are cohesive.

Seth Godin (article 1) argues for building brand identity through a phrase, name, etc. that can be established online. The idea is than that you began to organically build your own following off of this term/brand/whatever you want to call it and gain web traffic as a result.

This makes perfect sense. Build the brand, create something unique, leverage it.

If this does not take place, or there is a lack of cohesiveness between your online marketing strategy/presence/seo efforts then you are in for a world of hurt. Not only will you end up double spending at times, you will suffer an opportunity cost loss from not taking advantage of a cohesive marketing strategy that takes potential customers from both channels (web, offline) and directs one to the other giving the customer a few simple options to satisfy their desire for what you've got. Sounds kind of sexy, and frankly, it is when utilized.

If you can creatively marry your offline and online strategies with your business operations and all the other nitty gritty you can find yourself in marketing heaven. You'll be effectively leveraging your brand both on and offline, and the power of social marketing, WOM, and all those other good things will really come to life for you as word spreads. Strength is gained as well in the longtail keyword, adwords, etc. development as you can began to pull strength from your established brand that people are hunting for into other words, phrases, pages, etc. that you want to fight for.

Marry the online and offline, have kids and reap the benefits of a cohesive strategy. I think that's part of what Seth was saying..or maybe I should just go back to not thinking.

Passion Must Fuel Market Strategy

I just finished reading an interesting post by Aaron Wall of SEO Book. I hesitate to share the link as I have a secret desire to keep his brain and knowledge all to myself...unfortunately several thousands have already tapped him and he's now giving his freshest content/knowledge away for free via his blog. So at some point it becomes fruitless to think I'm being sneaky by keeping is name away from you. After all, if you were really into SEO or search marketing you would already know his name.

I suggest reading the article entitled Links Based Economy? No. Passion Based Economy? Yes. if you aren't familiar with it as it will give you some good background.

The main point I want to focus on is the need for new internet content to be passionate. There is something I hear implicitly, that I am not hearing explicitly as much as I think I should when I study web marketing. I believe this concept plays a key role in understanding how to market a site well. (Before I say this I need to point out that I am by many people's standards an SEO/web marketing novice, although I'm quickly becoming a junkie and want to flex my thinking a bit.)

To market a site well - don't play games, be true to what makes marketing a great field of study.

Be creative, be thoughtful, be genuine and real, operate ethically and work hard to understand what you have to offer people that is of real value and think creatively in how the message can be presented. BE PASSIONATE about what you are doing and working on. If you are, then without too much effort that passion can spill into how you work to communicate your message and will greatly help you bring the targeted, interested, traffic that you want.

As you work on the different aspects of online marketing, remember that Google and other search engines are attempting to match people with the most accurate information for their searches. Tricks, games, and everything that goes with them are continually being rooted out by these companies and won't give you long term, sustainable traffic. Be genuine in what you do, work hard to promote as you would normally and watch what happens. If you have something of value and know your market as you should the traffic, rankings, etc., will all come.

About 8 months ago someone asked me to write about why I enjoyed the SEO/web marketing concept as much as I did, when I often have a BIG problem with how the field of marketing is being run. Here's what I came up with:

"...good SEO represents a pure form of marketing to me as well. Instead of being as simple as paying for a billboard in an appropriate location to throw an ad on, you have to work at crafting several parts of your business into a cohesive effort that will bring you as much traffic and visibility online as possible. Because Google is now the major search engine, SEO is often focused on achieving high google rankings for certain keywords. The “pure” part is evidenced because Google is attempting to deliver exactly what a user is searching for...therefore tricks, games, lies etc. are all filtered out (or pushed lower) and the sites that are creating genuinely solid contributions in whatever their field (shoe sales, personal blog, etc.) will be picked IF they have an excellent SEO strategy to get them noticed.
The marketing here is to Google’s algorithm, not to an individual. This distinction creates a very interesting and unique challenge for businesses’ as the goal is not to market themselves to the end consumer, but to the machine with no emotions, thoughts, feelings, stupidity, etc, to play upon. Strange...but in some ways it strikes me as a purest form of marketing with some fascinating challenges that force a business to really learn who their customer is, and then apply the knowledge to create a truly valuable product for the customer. The business must be good, the value proposition must be good, and the SEO strategy must be good in order to gain success and web dominance."

The Comedic side of Marketing

One thing that I think we often miss when discussing marketing, online marketing, marketing strategy, research, etc., is the comedy that is truly involved in it. Below is a video I watched on youtube recently which DOES HAVE SOME GOOD INFO...but I found myself laughing at.

Between the accent, the suite, the fact that the guy BURNS people for going to seminars when not necessary - while giving a seminar - just hit my funny bone the right way. I realize the market here is for people learning the basics..but come on, how are you in business if you aren't doing this stuff?

The idea that we run around trying to convince people to do certain things or take certain actions so that we can eat dinner at night is a little absurd. Anyway, hope you enjoy and get some good info, and maybe some comedic enjoyment out of the video as well.

Last thing - I love the drawings we come up with for these high level, grown-up thinking activities....a bucket that's leaking...just warms my heart :). GOOD GRAVY THE BUCKETS LEAKING I MUST BE LOSING CUSTOMERS LIKE CRAZY!





Here are some comments on the video that I also found amusing...

Nathan R. Elson on Web Marketing

This week I was fortunate enough to wrangle in a friend and past colleague of mine, Nathan Elson from Enthusiast Web Solutions, to do a quick marketing/marketing strategy post for me. So without further delay...

"In your browser open a new tab. Navigate to google.com. Do a search for “Web Marketing Strategy”. What do you see?

I see nearly 45 million search results with the top page amounting to gimmicks, formulas and folks trying to sell a commoditized version of what they do.

Now ask yourself, what does any of this have to do with my business?

There is the rub.

The hardest part about navigating the environment that is the modern webasphere is understanding how you fit in. There are some simple things that you can do to figure out what you should be doing on the web – and armed with this information you can create a set of criteria for you to make an intelligent strategic decision about how to spend your web dollars.

The very first thing I do when I engage a new client about web services is to find out about what marketing means to them, what they have done in the past, and their personal experiences as a citizen of the web. This sets a great foundation for understanding on all sides of what web means. This allows a framework to be built that can compare apples to apples when evaluating services rather then guessing about it.

The second thing that is important is to create a baseline for future measurement. Seriously, how can you figure out if you are doing what you need to be doing on the web without some way to figure out if what you are doing is successful?

Third, look at what is being done and ask this question:

1.) Is what is being done in my field working?

If yes, what can I do better – if no, what can I do different? The key to being strategic with web marketing is to create an opportunity to win, too many website are built that have no shot of winning in their marketplace.

Finally, only do as much as you are capable of handling. That is, content creation and management can be a tricky deal that can be both expensive and time consuming. This means being realistic in both estimating your time and your budget. If you have the right circumstances, outside providers can be a great thing.

Once you work through these four issues you can put together a checklist of things that are the non-negotiables for any solution that you evaluate as well as a checklist of things that are great but not deal breakers. Once you have an objective criterion in which to evaluate vendor offerings it is not such a big deal to wade through web service proposals to see which one is the best fit (and remember price should also be considered as a checklist item – but do it with an eye for total cost of ownership, not initial fees).

The bottom line – have a strategy for the web, better yet have a strategy for marketing in general and develop an arm of that specifically for the web.

By Nathan R. Elson - Enthusiast Web Solutions - Visit Nathan R. Elson's Bio

SEO prioritization post by Aaron Wall at SEOBook

I rarely jump up and down in excitement over what I read on other blogs (not that mine is so great...). However, I am consistently impressed at the information given and the straightforward writing style of Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com. I just read a post titled "What Aspect Of SEO Should You Be Spending Most Of Your Time On?", that needed to be shared, as it is one of the better basic starting point lists for building an SEO campaign (and remembering what SEO is all about) that I have come across. Nice job Aaron and thanks for the references within the post as well!

Marketing Situation Analysis and Resources

Before we start, if the text looks small hit "ctrl" and "+" together to increase the size.

If you've come once and decided to come back - I appreciate it. Marketing research and market analysis aren't always the most stimulating topics but they are key to success, and I believe even more so for smaller businesses where every dollar is very precious.

I've been studying more specifically on how to perform a strong market analysis, and have some basic outline information I'd like to share, that some of you may find valuable in your market analysis efforts. Also, at the very bottom are some links to basic, but good resources non the less for getting some data on your target market.

Situation Analysis

First off, lets get some purpose behind doing a situation analysis. I like the general one given in the text I've largely been reviewing (Author information below) called Marketing Research - A practical approach for the new millennium. Essentially, they argue that the point of a situation analysis is simply to determine whether or not a marketing strategy is proving effective or not. This analysis is broken into 3 main areas:

1. Market analysis
2. Market segmentation
3. Competition analysis

The Breakdown

Market Analysis

Market Analysis refers to studying a product market to possible gain information on how the market may change in the future. This includes studying such aspects as political trends, regulatory actions, economic trends, social trends and culture (this one is big), and changes in technology. On a side note - I like to watch for when these trends are combining and think of what opportunities or changes that might be creating (read social+technological).

Three great ways to work on a market analysis include:

1) Content Analysis through studying written works, stored data, various forms of media
2) Interviews - Strong, deep, interviews of experts in the industry with formal structure
3) Interviews - Formal questionnaires designed to pass to a variety of users to gain information on an environment.

Market Segmentation

The short and sweet of this is to figure out what makes people similar, and what makes them different, and then organize them into groups based upon this information. Market segmentation can include gathering information on brand preferences, product likes/dislikes, customer characteristics, as well as the normal social/economic studies.

I believe that this is an area where a business can gain an advantage through clever evaluation of the data gathered. Obviously gathering this information is helpful and obvious trends and groupings will probably appear, however the real competitive edge comes when a business is unique in interpreting and measuring the data. Learning to look across a set of data and spot unique trends or groupings can open up a deeper understanding of a market and how to reach them. The internet is great for this as there are thousands of attempts being made to combine different market segmentations into new products/venues for attracting consumers.

Competition Analysis

I'll try to make this breif. The goal is to understand your competition and predict their movements. Take your competition and rip them apart just as you would examine and rip apart your own company to spot flaws in your amour. Examine operations, strategies, marketing techniques, financial moves, branding, everything that you can think of. Then, go to the consumer and ask specific questions relating to a product market (brand preference, pricing, quality, shipping accuracy, etc). The goal is to identify a list of items that consumers can then rank by level of importance. This list can then be used to help evaluate how successful competiting companies are with hitting the consumers in the target market by measuring their success in each of the ranked areas. This competitive market analysis may show you areas to improve as well as help you predict what your comeptition may attempt to do next.

Quick resources for research data:
www.census.gov
market research firms (expensive, but good ones can give you a big leg up)
censtats.census.gov (provides some pattern information, by county, zip, etc.)
www.fedstats.gov (federal government stats)
www.businesslaw.gov (business law information
www.lexisnexis.com (gotta pay to play, but if you know how to do it you can gain some good info)

Marketing Concept, Marketing Culture, SEO and Responsibility

As some of you may or may not know, I recently graduated (within the last few years) from Azusa Pacific University with an MBA degree. Throughout my course work, I was hit by an “I don’t give a...” feeling. I guess that’s the problem with going straight from undergrad work to masters. Lately I’ve been finding myself diving back into old textbooks revisiting concepts and theories that I had bothered to learn, but not remember any true useful details.

One of these said areas is Marketing. SURPRISE! As I've heavily invested time and effort into learning everything I can about web marketing and specifically the SEO/SMM fields, it's becoming clear that there are great advantages to diving back into the old materials, as marketing principles don't really change despite the medium. The next few posts (I'm not sure how many) will relate to marketing, marketing research, and specifically some thoughts on combining the old school thoughts with the "new" marketing medium (www). Much of my reading will come from the Marketing Research A Practical Approach for the New Millennium book written by Joseph Hair Jr., Robert Bush, and David Ortinau.

Marketing: Concept and Culture

According to the text, the common marketing concept for all businesses consists of three major elements:

1) consumer oriented

2) goal directed

3) system driven

The authors continue to discuss the concept that businesses normally produce what consumers want, not what the business believes they need. Let's stop right there.

The big question (or one of them) I have is this: Do B2B businesses need to follow the marketing theory stated in this last section?

As a B2B business, Forefront Consulting aims to of course give a business what it wants. However, I believe that part of truly serving a business is giving them what they "need" even if they don't want it. Whether they choose to accept what is offered, is of course, up to them.

The SEO and Web Marketing Link
This is a bit of a leap, but for those that choose to stay with me, I think it will make sense. In general, there are more and more businesses that are aware of some of the possibilities that exist for building their brand online, but don't really understand what they are playing with. Think of a 16 year old who knows that a Porsche can go really fast and handle well, but has never driven a car. 16 year old + porsche (often could) = disaster.

As a Web marketing consultant, I believe that we ( me and others like me) have a duty to "take the keys" at times and get control of a situation. Marketing, no matter what the medium needs to be holistic in nature, and if web marketing is not properly supported by other parts of the business (goals, people, processes, resources) then great waste and damage can occur. As was stated in the text, the general marketing concept for firms is an all inclusive one.

I believe a major key to developing a strong web marketing and SEO/SMM campaign, is tight coordination with all aspects of the business. If this does not exist, you are playing with fire and the job of a web marketer to be successful hinges on things often outside of his control. This takes honest, an ability to analyze a business fully, dig deep into what the process are, flow is, buy in for your project, and identification of potential problems. To get started I often use a SWOT analysis for the business. This brings things into focus and begins to clear the picture for what role the web marketing campaign needs to fill. It's more than keywords, link building, competitive analysis, etc. It will affect all parts of the business.

So here is the next big question:

As business owner, if you spot signs of danger (lack of offline business and marketing support) would you worn the business (even if you may lose the client) or would you continue with a plan that may make short term profits for the both of you, but may ultimately end in damage for the business?

Tell me more about how you've seen interplay between a businesses offline operations and it's web marketing support.

Google Reader makes you smarter!

I have to admit, I'm not the first person to jump for joy over new things. Not that I'm against them, but I have often found it beneficial to look before leaping into new things that may end up costing more then they are worth.

As a result, I was late to the Google scene when it came to turly utilizing some of their applications, but have recently been diving in head first to take advantage of some of the better ones (in my humble opinion) for business, particularly small or technology based businesses.

Thus, we land at Google Reader. My friend and the brain behind the rising social networking and college review website communiversity.com, Michael Sprague, recently informed me that I was behind the times by not capitalizing on this reader's potential.

Within minutes I had quickly added many of my favorite blogs and sites related to web marketing, consulting, technology, SMM, SEO, etc. (as well as a few I hadn't heard of before) to my subscriptions and was off reading in no time. This concept is nothing new, but what I found most enjoyable was how simple it was to get exactly what I wanted and to know that I only had one place to go to get all the latest information from my choice sources.

The main point I'd like to make as a small business owner is the time savings and knowledge base that is at our fingertips. Instead of hunting, googling, asking, requesting, paying or whatever for valuable information related to my industry and field, I was instantly given the information in a format I could digest at my pace, but truly improved my ability to quickly digest information as well.

Here is a screen shot for those unfamiliar with the layout:

From Drop Box