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 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.

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.

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

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)