As is the case at the Battle of Pelennor Fields and Battle of the Bastards (both fictitious battles from the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones respectively), or in real life wars like World War II, sometimes you’ll need assistance in winning a battle or defeating the competition. When you need help, you might consider rallying your allies or at least having some to rally in the first place.

The idea behind the Rally the Banners strategy is that you need help winning over a specific market and that you’re calling on agreements previously made with other companies to help you or you’re going out to find allies to help you.

More than just a standard affiliate or Pay Per Action (PPA) program, rallying the banners requires a certain level of cooperation among participants. Let’s say for example you’re trying to sell a new product line online but you’re current ecommerce sales funnel, affiliate program, and SEO aren’t quite cutting it. You notice that some of your biggest affiliates are not highlighting the new product line because it doesn’t sell very well for them. You could rally these banners by offering them a higher commission, offering to create unique content for them, or work with them to find other ways their audience might be encouraged to buy the new product line. Perhaps the product line isn’t selling well because this partner gets most of their traffic from search engines but they had to make a new page for it and put little effort into it or haven’t optimized it, you could offer to fix those issues for them which would help propel sales as their search rankings climbed.

I heard a story about a prescription dermatological product that had a similar problem and solution, they built an entire new website for an existing sales partner and then hired an SEO agency to optimize it on their behalf. The sales exploded in a few months and soon many of their other partners were clamoring to sell the product too.

As an SEO specific strategy you can use Rally the Banners for something I like to call “Allies in the SERPs”. With this type of Rally the Banners you go out and find partners that will allow you to create content or tools that attract organic search traffic and will eventually funnel that traffic to your site. This allows you to better control search results and ward off any potential competition as Google and other engines often try to make their results diverse with different websites owned by different companies.

Many reputation management campaigns revolve around this strategy as well, working to find partner websites to highlight good, positive content and reviews in on in hopes of improving how a brand looks in search results or across social media.

Getting social media influencers to promote a product, framing, or message can also be part of your Rally the Banners strategy when done correctly.

Pros vs. Cons
Pros: This strategy allows you to leverage the strengths of others to promote sales of your product or services while defending against competitors.

Cons: You’ll spend quite a bit of time and money building content, design assets, and tools for your allies. You’ll also have to pay a referral fee or affiliate commission and if you’re already paying one probably a higher rate.