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!