Winning with an All Out Assault on the Competition

Have you ever attended a party and the next day people said they didn’t even know you were there? Maybe it was just crowded and noisy, or maybe you’re just not memorable? Invisibility is the opposite of impact.

And have you ever stood at one of the stations on the Coastal Train line between San Diego and Los Angeles, when the train roared by at a 100 miles per hour? It’s frightening. The point is, force makes everyone else get out of the way.

Guns Ablazing! It sounds wild and out of control but what if it was orchestrated just like a naval ship or tank blitz you might have seen in a war movie? The military discovered it can be a good way to make a big impact. And when your ordinary marketing campaign has no impact, you have to bring out the big guns.

Besides making a direct hit and crushing the competition, Guns Ablazing helps you bring your marketing to a laser focus. It creates discipline, coordination, exhilaration, and shared purpose for your staff. With practice and optimization, your marketing team becomes your ultimate weapon.

Guns Ablazing is More than a Blitz

As we found out in the military strategies for marketing post, the market wars are a series of battles to win. We don’t go to market to lose. The blitz strategy is a key tactic in the war. And when the time is right, you strike with weight and total domination. You reach and capture your audience, get your UVP across well, and your market share grows.

Blitzes are efficient, but you must achieve explicit, specific objectives. However, most often, marketing blitzes are done without preparation to “get immediate sales results.” Well, B2B prospects don’t buy right away so you won’t get immediate results. Results come from a marketing strategy persistently executed, and not just from one blitz.

Devastating Effects on Competitors

A promotional blitz is part of an extended strategy that generates lasting impact. And when Guns Ablazing is done well, it devastates your competition. Marketing never speaks of crushing competitor’s confidence yet this often generates the biggest gain. Since your strategy exploits competitor’s weaknesses in value, you will inflict damage.

It’s like that on Google too. An advanced SEO strategy seeks to dominate search results for important keywords. Competitors literally disappear. They duck their heads and withdraw their weak value offer. I’ve done it many times with a casino, hotel, and a marketing company. And when such campaigns are well-funded and have an outstanding UVP, they become epic.

It’s Guns Ablazing because my client’s amazing content crushes competitors in every channel: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and ppc ads. Just when competitors think they can breathe, our content guns pound away, destroying competitor’s value proposition and benefits.

Like a blitz campaign, it completely controls awareness and tilts the battlefield to your favor. If your value proposition is excellent and your content is persuasive, you will inflict lasting damage on your competitor’s brands. Through social media, Google, and online publications, you target their customer base and hammer your UVP home.

And when you time your launch, customers only see your product/brand and at the most opportune times. You’re the only one in the room with the customer and make maximum impact.

What Happens When you Wake Up to Advanced Strategy?

And if you’ve ever wondered why your marketing isn’t making more of an impact, well it could be you’re just sitting in the trenches sleeping. You’re not creating impact events to allow customers to compare your product/service favorably to competitors.

Blitz strategies help you gain attention, expose competitor’s weaknesses, create new opportunities such as SEO rankings and social media connections to engage with a wider audience. You pick your battles and make your strikes powerful with surgical precision using the ideas in this post. Let’s take a look at a California company that soared into their market using a flanking strategy. They created a new angle and market niche and caught big competitors off guard.

Planet Orange Pest Control

Planet Orange is a California pest control company who had a new product. They were up against major pest control companies in the south Bay Area (Orkin, Terminix). They decided to run a blitz campaign during a time of the year when competitors were silent and sleeping (meaning Planet Orange was the only one in the room with prospects).

With a monthly $100,000 budget, they bought ads on TV and radio with strategic content. They created 30-second TV slots to promote and reinforce their brand. And they used 60-second radio slots to educate prospects about an innovative new orange oil based product and extermination process. The uniqueness of their botanical plant-based treatment helped but they had to prove it worked.

It was a gamble and an impressive win. They self-reported $1.1 million in sales that year up to $6.8 million the next year. Another benefit, they discovered is a new 98% customer satisfaction rate. Out of a well-executed, time limited event, they achieved more success than they dreamed of.

They captured their audience, and then followed that up by winning more battles. They tripled their ad budget, and offered to double the service warranty period for two years — double the industry standard. They added a free inspection after two years and if a new infestation occurred, they gave a free treatment. With continuous blasts of value, they toppled their national leader enemy and built a loyal customer base for ongoing sales.

They were smart cookies and have provided us with a good example of a real blitz-supported marketing win. It seemed so effective, they’ve been coasting on that success since!

Funding a Coordinated Attack

The post on blitz marketing strategy explained the aim is to dominate the target market at a specific time for maximum results. The blitz is one advanced technique that could be a continuous part of your overall marketing strategy to push competitors out of the way for full access to customers attention. Of course, it goes without saying that you must coordinate it well. We don’t want to waste our funds.

The reason funds come into play here is because advertising and specific high quality content have a price. PPC ads, brand new research data, graphics, photos, live events, promotional giveaways, videos and more are combined to make a huge impact on your target. Yes, ppc ads are expensive, but they’re a powerful weapon if used well. You can reach your precise target via Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linkedin and other channels on one day or several days.

Before competitors can raise their ad spend to push you down, or distract prospects, it’s too late. And if you’re a small competitor, they may not even know or care.

Additional benefits are that your advanced SEO strategy could pick up backlinks, mentions and shares. It’s one of the few times marketing will deliver benefits back to SEO.

Insufficient Funds Means No Gunship

I don’t know how many campaigns I’ve been involved with that simply didn’t have enough funding to win. Funds gets committed to product development, office space, and other elements before it’s invested in market research, UVP development, and marketing strategy.

Yet, when funding is very low, it becomes a call to a marketing strategist to prepare the Guns Ablazing strategy. To make your work fun and more interesting, you need to give techniques and tactics names like Guns Ablazing” Leaders rally the troops. Whatever engages you best, because if you’re not emotionally engaged, it may not work.

As pointed out in the military marketing tactics post, the weaknesses of your top competitors (everyone ahead of you) is your only opportunity to make an impact. You can’t often go head to head with your market leader competitors, Guns ablazing, with you in the open field and them in their market leader defensive position.

The Strategy, Techniques and Tactics

Preparation:

research competitor’s weaknesses and formulate how to showcase your features and benefits against each weakness and strength (turn their strength into a weakness)
ensure your content is focused on competitor’s weaknesses and portrays their strengths as weaknesses
create customized high quality content for your competitor’s customers to share with one another
tie their weaknesses to the most important benefits you offer
review their advertising and take note of its strengths and what it communicated – attack what they achieved and damage their previous efforts
choose a specific, highly relevant audience that needs a key benefit you offer
choose geographic zone if necessary and best targeted keyword phrases as appropriate to ensure you’re reaching relevant prospects
create a Big Idea as a campaign theme that will get your uvp across and stimulate the right emotions
play off of seasonal trends, recent events, news, new research, tech changes, environment/conservation
choose your advertising/promotional mediums: Google, Facebook, email, Twitter, Linkedin, blogs
prepare your ammunition: create very high quality content (marketing landing pages, photos, in depth blogs, customer stories) which clearly communicate the message/value carried in your blitz media
ensure you have shareable content pieces to let your fans and brand ambassadors share the message
ready your sales team to discuss the questions that arise out of your blitz claims and closing strategy
ready your analytics system to ensure all events are recorded for later analysis

Seamless, All Inclusive Execution:

run your email campaigns with links to your key landing pages and sharable content
run your Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter ad campaigns for 2 or 3 days (so no consumer misses them)
ensure your ppc text ads are in the top 4 places in search results for core keyword phrases (best prospects)
run blog posts and social posts linking to your videos
target all your competitors connections (or the one you want to attack) via social media ad targeting
do direct @sign messages to social influencers, journalists, prospects etc and tell them about your campaign

No campaign is perfect. If you do the above, you’re going well beyond what most companies do. You don’t have to commit huge funds to it right away, if you run it within less expensive channels. Investing in pricey TV commercials and videos is only for the confident. Try a smaller blitz and learn from it. Then take it to a more advanced level next time.

Good luck creating your big idea or theme for the campaign and mapping out your full strategy. I’m confident this will make your company surge, or at least be the most feared in the sector.

Should You Use SEO Software Platforms?

22 Ways to Support Small Business

AI Marketing in the Recovery

Content Strategist Job Description

What is Professional SEO?