Posted by: Daniel Levis
July 30, 2008
Issue #470

Divide and Conquer!

• How to jostle your way into hotly competitive, seemingly impenetrable traffic sources …
• How tackling a market “in detail” explodes your traffic and fattens your bottom line …
• Some fun examples to inspire your thinking …
• Plus more!

Dear Web Business-Builder,

Civilization is the result of abject terror.

Imagine our primordial forefathers and foremothers cowering in the shadows of the hostile environment of our early world.

Without the advantages of fangs, claws, fur, and sheer brute strength enjoyed by the saber-toothed tigers, mastodon and woolly mammoths who shared the planet, we must have felt utterly defenseless, exposed, and alone.

Doubtless we would have perished from the face of this Earth as a species had it not been for our remarkable ability to form groups and unite against the common enemies that surrounded us on all sides.

Only by banding together were we able to successfully defend against attack … hunt successfully … and leverage the great human invention — the division of labor.

Eventually, organized groupings of human beings came to dominate the world. And God said it was good.

There was just one problem …

Having become such a dominant force in the world, our natural enemies became scarce. And since humans need a steady supply, rival groups formed and began to rape and pillage one another.

Funny thing is, it wasn’t always the largest group who did the lion’s share of the raping and pillaging.

Very early in the history of warfare, shrewd military and political strategists understood the power of “divide et impera” — divide and conquer.

They discovered that by forcing the enemy to divide its forces and then dealing with those forces “in detail,” a small highly organized group could defeat a much larger one.

And so it is today, on the battlefield of traffic and conversion …

Yet few online marketers understand or appreciate this.

They send a single, solitary campaign out in to the marketing melee — attacking the tidal wave of traffic head on — full frontal. And then they wonder why it’s so darn hard to make a buck.

What should they be doing?

They should be employing the age old strategy of divide et impera, dividing the available pool of traffic into manageable chunks, and then writing customized sales copy to penetrate each one of those chunks individually.

Allow me to explain …

How to jostle your way into hotly competitive,
seemingly impenetrable traffic sources …

Suppose you want to tap into weight loss traffic. It’s a humungous market, but there are many different kinds of people looking to lose weight and many reasons why they want to do it.

Most marketers will try to put a single campaign in front of that traffic. They will do their best to pull the widest appeal out of their research, and seek to express that appeal in the most forceful way possible.

Or maybe they’ll pick a certain sub-set of the available traffic, and focus their attention on that.

Invariably what they discover is that only a small portion of the overall traffic pool is profitable. Sometimes that portion is large enough to make the product successful, sometimes not.

Tweaking and testing can increase that pool of profitable traffic, but there are limits.

Increasingly, savvy marketers are overcoming this problem with a powerful new copy strategy, and coming up big. How? By front-ending a single product with multiple differentiated campaigns, each one specifically targeted toward a sub-set of the available traffic.

Instead of just giving up on unprofitable traffic, they morph their sales copy strategically to make more of that traffic profitable.

Instead of having a single campaign selling the product, they have multiple campaigns — weight loss for parents, weight loss for teens, weight loss for young women, weight loss for new Moms, weight loss for mature men, weight loss for mature women, weight loss for busy professionals, and so on.

The copy’s targeting is therefore uncompromised. It can tap more clearly into the myriad desires, fears and frustrations of the overall market.

And as a result, it converts far more effectively than the one-size-fits-all approach most marketers use.

I’ll give you a real life example …

I have a money-making product I use as a front-end lead generator for my business. I started with copy that speaks broadly to people who have a dominant desire to be in business for themselves. My ads ran profitably on a couple of dozen sites.

Simply by taking that copy and tweaking it to appeal only to women, I was able to make another handful of sites profitable. By tweaking it again to appeal to parents, another handful became profitable.

My next experiment will be to target investors and hopefully widen my net still further. At that point, I’ll have four different campaigns arching out in different directions to sell a single product.

I know this sounds like a lot of work, and it is. But that’s one of the reasons it’s so incredibly effective. Most of your competitors just don’t have the copywriting horsepower to do it.

But don’t YOU be intimidated by the extra work. Remember, it’s really just the front part of the campaign that needs to be customized.

Once you get past the headline and the lead, your campaigns can pretty much converge save minor alterations. The heavy lifting is in your headline and lead. And even there, sometimes small tweaks can yield big results.

With keyword advertising, you start with a long list of keywords and then organize them into tightly related keyword groups. Beginning with the group that promises the most searches at a reasonable cost, you write a campaign from top to bottom that addresses the needs of the people doing those searches.

Next, you rinse and repeat for other keyword groups, by writing new ads, new landing page headlines and leads, and tweaking the rest of the campaign where necessary.

How tackling a market “in detail” explodes
your traffic and fattens your bottom line …

The result is a much tighter match between what your prospect is typing into the search engine and your ad, and a much tighter match between your ad and your landing page in each case.

This has a major impact on the relevancy of your ads and therefore your costs. And it has a major impact on your conversions as well, allowing you to increase your bids and suck traffic away from other bidders.

When using banner ads, or text ads, or Google placement targeted ads, you look at the available pool of sites and categorize them by the kinds of people who frequent them. Then you write a separate campaign for each of these groups.

This gives you higher click through rates which means more traffic. And it gives you a higher conversion rate which means you can raise your bids and attract still more traffic.

To demonstrate, I’ll give you a few hypothetical headlines for the weight loss example above:

Weight loss for women:

Thousands of Women like Sandy Here are Feeling Sexy Again Who Never Thought They Would

New miracle nutrient slims you gently … naturally … effortlessly… melts up to 25 pounds in as little as 30 days …

Finally, fast, safe weight loss without starvation diets, drugs, or surgery is within your reach. Read on for the exciting details …

Weight loss for parents:

“Mommy MY NICKNAME AT SCHOOL IS FLABBY!
I’m not eating for the rest of this week …”

Kids can be mean as hell. Obesity can leave your child emotionally crushed and scarred for life. Here’s how to
solve your child’s weight problem, starting today …

Weight loss for over 40s:

Did you know?

Obesity is The Leading Cause of Diabetes In Men and Women Over 40!

This revolutionary new eating plan
could be your best defense …

Same product, different campaigns … That’s how you divide and conquer. That’s how you can gradually dominate highly competitive, seemingly impenetrable traffic sources online.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

Looking for resources related to this article? Try some of these.

Looking for more of Daniel’s articles? Check these out.

Looking for past issues of The Total Package? Click here for our archives.

Want to share or reprint this article? Feel free. Just give us full attribution and a link to our Home Page when you do.

Attribution Statement: This article was first published in The Total Package. To sign-up to receive your own FREE subscription to The Total Package and claim four FREE money making e-books go to www.makepeacetotalpackage.com.

Related posts

• JUST-IN-TIME COPYWRITING: Secrets of the “Overnight” Promo Writer
• How to Close the Deal
• How Jay Abraham, Michel Fortin, Peter Stone and Dr. Martin Weiss Each Made Me Millions Yesterday
• Could This Be The Next Secret?
• The 3 Most Common Blunders Even “A” Level Copywriters Make

---

7 Comments »

1. Comment by Jennifer Gibbs — July 30, 2008 @ 10:49 am

   Daniel,

   What a fabulous idea!

   I’ve come across several new niches for my services, and I was thinking of taking a break from my "normal" promotion to focus on the targeted promotion. Now, thanks to you, I’ll be doing it ALL!

   I’ll keep you posted on how things go…

   Keep the great advice coming!

   Warmest Wishes,

   Jennifer

2. Comment by Chris Lake — July 30, 2008 @ 11:04 am

   Thanks Daniel!

   Great info, as always, week after week. Your example of weight loss mirrors one of my niches that I’ve not done much with. This is the perfect strategy for me to follow.

   Oh, and bonus points for the proper use of "myriad" (sans "of"!). That’s one of my grammatical pet peeves….

   Look forward to seeing you again next Wednesday,

   Chris Lake

3. Comment by Bonnie — July 30, 2008 @ 2:38 pm

   I do agree it’s a terrific idea, but (depending on the product) this can be more work than tweaking only the sales copy. With my own product, for example (job interview tips), if I target it for… let’s say teachers… I’d need to address teacher-specific interview questions in the product, right? In your example, as a parent buying a weight-loss product targeting kids, I would want to see kid-specific information/kid meals.  If what I got was just a generic weight-loss guide, I’d be disappointed and may even feel the copy was misleading.

4. Comment by Daniel Levis — July 30, 2008 @ 4:36 pm

   Bonnie, like all silver bullets, this strategy has it’s place and limitations. Common sense is necessary. As long as the solution is in the product though, and you are careful not to misrepresent said product, you are free to provide the necessary education and connection to various specific problems that product solves in the copy to the exclusion of others. 

   The vast majority of children, for example, are obese for the same reason obese adults are obese. Namely, acute sugar and simple carbohydrate overdose.

   Educating parents in this regard in your copy and then providing a diet void of these health killers is my mind fair game. The idea that kids should eat kids-meals is just a marketing fabrication designed to sell nutritionless, processed food-poison that makes kids bloat up like hot air balloons.

5. Comment by Carlos — July 31, 2008 @ 4:15 am

   Thanks for your articles, Daniel.
   This "divide and conquer" technique just made me think that we can apply it to anything we want to achieve in life. For instance, if you want to learn to create websites, you could just divide the process in pieces (planning, choosing domain and hosting, finding a template, CSS for tweaking the design…) and then deal with them one at a time. If you repeat that process several times, you’ll know to create a website on your own.

   I guess we can call this technique "chunk it down" as well, can’t we?

   Looking forward to your next article.
   Carlos

6. Comment by Jeremy Reeves — August 3, 2008 @ 11:15 am

   That’s brilliant, and like you said although there’s a lot more work involved - it’s well worth it.

   Your examples are especially true for weight loss, although it also seems very important for the financial niche as well.

   Great stuff!

   Jeremy Reeves
   http://www.GetClientsIn20.com

7. Comment by rizwan abas — August 4, 2008 @ 3:09 am

   this is very good