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February 25, 2006
How To Leverage From Competitive Alliances
Competitive alliances—the phrase almost sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Can competitors in business truly form alliances that benefit each other? Or are businesses forever deadlocked in a dog-eat-dog struggle where neither side gives any quarter in a frenzied quest for every dollar?
Competitive alliances can in fact offer mutual benefits for both parties engaged in such relationships. First it is important to consider the how and why we have come to the place where such alliances are becoming more commonplace than ever.
Clearly, we are living in a global marketplace where competition is fierce, and the marketplace has been opened up to more players than ever. Businesses realize that they can’t do it all alone, and that no one company has a singular monopoly on all the innovation that exists in an industry. Smaller businesses, especially, don’t have the patience to wait for internal growth to take place, while the bigger companies just pounce ahead, gobbling up market share with more resources at their disposal.
Companies realize that it might be more advantageous for them to share resources. For a small business, the prospect of teaming up with a large firm—most notably an industry leader—has its own unique appeal. An established, national brand goes a long way in opening up new vistas of market opportunities.
Some companies join forces for the purpose of outsourcing certain manufacturing and marketing functions to a competitor, especially where one company is better positioned to succeed in certain geographic locations. Another scenario would be competitors who agree to join forces for the purposes of expanding a new product line that would be mutually profitable.
An example given is Uniformity LLC, a Los Angeles manufacturer of fashionable high school uniforms. The company approached the department store Macy’s West with the prospect of selling Uniformity’s clothing line through Macy’s nationwide franchise.
The proposal appealed to Macy’s, as they had never entered the uniform market before that time. The two joined forces, in an obvious win-win situation: Macy’s got into the uniform market, while Uniformity got nationwide exposure for its products through the Macy’s nationwide chain.
It should be noted that a competitive alliance is, effectively, a marriage of convenience. They are temporary partnerships, and the transitory nature of the union make them more palatable to entrepreneurs than say, mergers or acquisitions, where one party or the other faces a considerable loss of corporate identity and reign over the operations of the business.
In order to benefit from a competitive alliance, a business must determine first why it is intending to enter into the relationship. Each business still retains its own unique identity. Therefore you must ask yourself plainly, how does entering into this competitive alliance enter into your business plan? Many businesses, eager to jump on the bandwagon of competitive alliances, fail to give proper forethought to their decision, and wind up making the wrong choices.
The preceding example given, of Uniformity LLC, was the correct decision because the company was seeking nationwide distribution of its product line and a partnership with Macy’s was the perfect vehicle to that end.
Once it is determined why you are entering into a relationship, you should then know what to look for. You are not interested in entering into a competitive alliance with just any competitor. For that matter, your choice should not even be based on size or market share alone. For a small business, the ideal choice is a competitor that is established as a market leader, those companies that are setting the pace for their particular industries.
A small business can effectively piggby-back onto a market leader to gain widespread market exposure, as in the example cited above. The advantage of this ideal arrangement is that the smaller business can focus on developing their product line rather than spending money on, and worrying about, a nationwide marketing campaign.
Beyond market leaders, small businesses may also consider partnering with a key customer. This would be advantageous if you were selling large quantities of your product or service to this customer. Explore opportunities to cement the relationship further by entering into a competitive alliance. This arrangement would help to ensure that you continue to retain the position of this client as a key customer, while exploring avenues for advancement that are mutually beneficial.
Once you have identified a potential partner in a competitive alliance, evaluate the competitor’s financial situation, its current market share, and interview companies with which it has been allied in the past to find out about their relationship with the competitor. Do as much background investigation as possible to determine the nature of, and the risks involved in, the relationship you are about to enter.
Even though it is temporary, it will still involve your having to adapt in order to blend in with your new partner. In this respect, you will also want to consider the corporate culture of the company you are considering partnering with, and ask how their corporate culture will fit in with your own. Evaluate their management styles to determine how compatible yours would be with theirs, and be able to prepare your employees to make the transition.
David
Small Business Resource
Posted by David at 6:36 PM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2006
How to Build Traffic To Your Website With Content
Every small business that has a website should take advantage of free traffic... Here's how to use content to build, advertise and drive traffic to your online business
Why is Content Important?
Are you new to online marketing? Or are you one of the millions of frustrated website owners watching helplessly as your site fluctuates up and down (even on and off) the search engines?
Is your traffic suffering as you try to stay on top of the most current methods of finding traffic, only to find that they are ineffective for bringing targeted traffic or stop working soon after the search engines catch on?
There is a reason that staying in the search engines is vitally important. The amount of people who are searching for information online is increasing rapidly.
An Ipsos-Reid poll showed that people are starting to rely more heavily on the internet with increases in the frequency of internet usage in North America the UK and Asia. At the time of the poll 72% of Americans were online within the previous month, and that number continues to rise.
How are they finding information on the internet?
According to research published by GVU (Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center), most users novice, expert, young, old, male and female find new websites from two main sources: hyperlinks and search engines.
Pew Internet & American Life Project also published statistics about search engine use which indicated that '84% of online American adults have used search engines. That amounts to 108 million people. On any given day, 56% of those online use search engines.'
How many of these potential visitors are finding YOUR website? More websites are created each day leading to increased congestion and competition for the top spots in search engine results. How are you able to compete? Well first of all, how do search engines bring you traffic?
Two of the most popular methods of getting traffic from search engines include PPC Pay Per Click and SEO Search Engine Optimization.
PPC:
Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo! and others) where you PAY for top placement. Their strategies for placement differ slightly. Some search engines will give you higher placement if your ad has a higher click-through rate (meaning more people click on your ad in ratio to the amount of times your ad was shown), others give top positions to the highest bidder.
In either case, you PAY. It is a quick way to get listed in the search engines and a smart way to get your traffic flowing but it is not the cheapest AND you could spend far more than is profitable for your business if you don't know what you're doing.
SEO:
There are a lot of companies working behind the scenes' to help website owners get plenty of traffic from the natural search engine listings. Natural listings mean the search engine has ranked you according to the value it believes your site will offer an individual searching for a specific word or phrase.
Understanding exactly WHAT the search engines want to see when ranking sites requires knowledge of the algorithms. These algorithms change all the time as search engine providers try to outwit the search engine optimizers trying to find loopholes in the ranking system.
Some SEO companies will promise you top spots for a certain cost. Some are honestly creating optimized websites others may be using techniques that could possibly get your site BANNED from the search engines entirely (once the search engine catches on). However, optimizing your website for better placement in the search engines is a technique that you should become familiar with and use to your advantage.
Both of these traffic methods have their pros and cons for generating traffic from the search engines. You will find out more about using them properly later on. But first you need to know what REALLY works
Content is KING!
Before you start to think that this is another SEO technique that may or may not work depending on the current algorithms of the search engines, think about it
EVERYTHING on the internet is CONTENT.
The internet is a veritable treasure trove of information. Good, bad, valuable or not, the internet is all about providing information to people. That is why smart internet marketers know that people want information from their websites not just SEO enriched pages of advertising.
The loopholes that search engine optimizers have been trying to use for high ranking in the search engine has created a plethora of sites that boast high keyword ratios, thousands of irrelevant hyperlinks and sometimes even redirection. These redirected websites try to create an optimized web page that the search engines will rank high but actually redirect the viewer to a less search engine friendly site.
Well, the search engines caught on. The websites that were getting the highest placements weren't always providing quality information or useful content. In fact, they not only lowered the ranking of these sites they even removed them from the listings completely.
This sent a shock wave through the internet community and smart marketers realized that there is only one sure way to convince the search engines that they were meant to be at the top: Quality Content.
Not only do the search engines love content, but visitors do too. By providing visitors with useful information and relevant links to other sites, they come back again and again! And that's not the only benefit.
Because website owners are now hungry for content, there is a huge market for informative articles that other website owners can use on their sites. By offering information to these sites in exchange for a hyperlink to your website, you get even more exposure, both to search engines AND customers.
So, how do you harness the power of content? How do you pull the most benefit and profits from your information?
Find out right in the next article
David
Small Business Resource
Posted by David at 9:02 PM | Comments (0)
