Sun Tzu, a Chinese general who lives around 400BC wrote ‘The Art of War‘, an influential book on military strategy. This tome is a masterpiece on strategies used to manage conflicts and win battles. Modern marketing face-offs have been viewed as cultural warfare where brands have met each other in pitched battles to capture their market’s imagination and spoils (read: dollars) .
I see no reason why some of Sun Tzu’s principles cant be used in the battles that are taking place online in PPC, Email marketing and social networks. Here are some tactics that you can follow based on advice from the great general himself.
Principle 1 . Keep your friends close, and keep your enemies closer.
This is a very simple principle. I couch this within the realm of competitive intelligence. It’s key to know what your competition is doing and even better, to be there when they’re doing it. So…
- If they’re on Twitter, become a follower of their tweets.
- If they’re on Facebook, become a fan of their page or join any groups they’ve created.
- If you’re aware that they send out newsletters, join their mailing list.
This will help you keep abreast of any new developments or promotions on their front.
Principle 2 : There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.
After you’ve crafted a marketing strategy, gotten it approved by the business leadership and have begun implementation of the same, monitor all the activities that you’re carrying out as part of your plan.
Why do this ? Because, if a certain media vehicle is not effective, it’s better to pull out sooner rather than later.
- A good example is PPC. If your PPC campaigns are sending ineffective traffic to your website which is resulting in a low conversion rate for your stated goals, then stop the campaigns! If you’re spending time and money on PPC campaigns on Facebook and nothing of significance has occurred, stop advertising! See the results of the PPC campaign below, it’s dismal and needs to be stopped pronto.
- If your homepage is not sticky enough despite a large number of visitors, reevaluate your position right away. Analyze the layout of your website and ask yourself if you need a new design with stronger call-to-action signs or just need to shift some elements on the landing page to increase your stickiness.
The takeaway of this lesson is : Pull out early rather than late. It’s less costly.
Principle 3. In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.
Smart online marketers have very clear objectives that they want to achieve:
- Online sales
- Sales leads
- Email sign-ups and maybe
- Enrollment into some communities of interest.
That’s it. Period.
If neither of these objectives are being achieved and you’re still spending $$ on affiliate websites or PPC, stop right away. Take a breather and look through your analytics to see if you’re breaking even on the money you’re spending on the activity. If not, then just stop right away and rework your online marketing plan.
At the end, you’re doing all this to sell products not fill up profile pages with stuff on social networks or send 140 characters of drivel on a microblog.
Principle 4. The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.
In the end, you’re fighting a war. A marketing war, that is.
Say you’re an insurance company and you’re competing against all the other big firms. All of you have high (and I mean high in the millions) annual PPC spends, you’re on all the social networks, you’re posting garbage on Twitter and you spam your email list every month.
What ever happened to good old fashioned marketing strategy?
- If you’re bidding for high trafficked keywords along with 10 other insurance companies, distinguish yourself from the pack by optimizing your ad copy, bidding on more long-tail (and more profitable) keyword phrases and most importantly, doing some serious landing page optimization. Or, even better, stop doing PPC and wasting your money. See the image below, there are 10 pages of results for the search term ‘auto insurance’ with 12 companies on each page; which means that there are 120 companies competing for this term. Simply ridiculous!
- Develop a keyword and content strategy and plan to implement some serious SEO across your web properties.
- Build a blog.
- Work with creative to have some appealing graphics.
- Tie all your activities with your presence on social networks. See the Whole Foods Facebook page – that’s a model example.
The lesson from this quote is even if you’re not the market leader, don’t just be a sheep and follow the herd. Work on setting the marketing standards on how to make an impact online.
Principle 5. If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.
You and seven other companies are using PPC to spread the word about your products.
Ask yourself, is it really that important to be #1 in the PPC results? Considering that only 10% of all searchers click on PPC ads, maybe being at #2 or #3 is not so bad, as you’re closer to the top organic results.
Also, why not settle for #4 or #5, as that’ll get you to #1 on the right-hand side. Your competition will keep spending top dollar to remain at #1 and will exhaust his budget. You, on the other hand, will have more money to run a blitz during the peak sales season.
Ditto if your competitor suddenly appears on Facebook or Twitter. Big deal! So many firms don’t even know what to do on there and instead make fools of themselves.
The takeaway of this lesson is : Follow principle 1 and know your enemy.
A caveat : It may be hard for B2B businesses to get much information from social networks, but you can still subscribe to your competitors’ blogs through an RSS feed and sign up for his emails. Study his website to see if he has SEO implemented and check PPC to see if he’s advertising.
