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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.