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.

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 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