Marketing is a war against your competition known and unknown. Some business don’t like to see it that way and that’s where Darwinism deals the last blow to businesses that failed to understand the art of war.

Alan Osborne

What is marketing

“Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product, service, or goods. It is one of the primary components of business management and commerce. Marketers can direct their product to other businesses or directly to consumers”. {Marketing – Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing) including market research, SEO, branding and advertising

With a 94% market share, Google is the most popular search engine. (SparkToro). This is why digital marketing needs optimizing no matter what digital platform you are on. The pandemic caused an acceleration of businesses moving online, and an evolution in marketing and sales methods, tactic and strategies to keep them successful. However, such a saturation of online activity has forced search engines to evolve with the change. We are fortunate that Google is making it’s search engine deliver relevant content to queries, and making cheating harder. (on a side note years ago I nearly closed my business doors due to cheats and blackhat eroding my clients with promises of quick page one success. Then February 2011 google released the Panda algorithm and by 2012 penguin hit cheats so badly that I was back in full business with new skills. I learned then to follow googles guidelines, use the Inbound marketing methodology and that everything needed SEO. Search engine optimization was hard to demonstrate the value because business owners were still hearing “page one tricksters” and because SEO is too often measured as a direct or short-term advertising solution. Not understanding that SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that needs to start now not later to be reaching clients that might not be ready yet but makes you part of the journey and with inbound you also become branded and top of mind)

Marketing strategies

Sounds nice and simple, just a matter of getting your message in front of your target market. Do market research to understand who your target market is and this data will help you make choices on how to reach them. So you have some options from a traditional or inbound. Basically traditional is expensive push on to anybody or pull/ attract only those interested in your message(save money). Digital marketing, unlike traditional marketing, is measurable, and as we all know, what gets measured and optimized will improve. (we will stay on the path of digital as that is where most clients are now).

Digital marketing has a couple of options PPC/SEM which are quick traffic, Dark social and social media marketing and my favourite SEO, which is slowly built traffic that keeps on giving. However, in reality, SEO always wins like the rabbit and the tortuous story.

PPC has instant traffic that has caveats of learning and quality of traffic, so at first, it’s not the best and depending on competition, it will be expensive. SEO is slow because it performs so well Google besides wanting you to pay has a lot of cheating to catch; Google is a black box of indexing, ranking and SERPs. The internet has become astronomically large; it’s hard to find the needle in the haystack or your web presence in searches. Try it, go to google search and type in not your brand name but your non-branded keyword. Notice on the left side the number of pages for that keyword……. that’s many pages ahead of you and to be honest page one has been lost to ads, people also ask, directories, videos, image search and more.

Depending on your business vertical, most have something called market saturation and ease into the market. The Blue ocean or red ocean is a fantastic way of understanding this issue. Red is so saturated it’s cutthroat and blooded with the race to the bottom on price, Blue being the opposite. A unique selling point (USP) helps until your competition also uses it, but a real blue ocean strategy would be amazing and expands the boundaries of an existing industry. Often clients get the two mixed up and tell me their unique selling proposition thinking this is a blue ocean strategy.

Marketing war strategies

Marketing is a war against your competition, known and unknown. Some don’t like to see it that way, and that’s where Darwinism deals the last blow to such businesses that failed to understand “its WAR” & “evolve or perish.”

Marketing needs war strategies to deal with market saturation, easy online entry, and the race to the bottom with pricing. The art of war happens to be a book full of sound advice for planing marketing war.