You might have heard of a book called Blue Ocean Strategy. If you haven’t, find it as soon as you can and read it immediately. This is one of the best business reads you could get and it will change the way you see your company or job.
What the book means by Blue Ocean Strategy is the area where you have no competition. Most businesses focus way too much on fighting with competitors creating bloody oceans with a diminishing pray. The blue ocean is an area unexplored by many people from your sector. It might be a group of customers none from your business is targeting. It might be a modified type of product which was never offered to a segment of audience.
Here are my top tips on how to implement a blue ocean strategy with your marketing:
Don’t start a bidding war on Google AdWords.
A lot of clients will first ask you – can you get my ad to be the first one on Google? Yes, you probably can. You can bid higher, you can optimize ad copy and keywords. First, however ask yourself if this is necessary. If you raise bids, other people out there will see their dropping position and try to outbid you. Before you thought about it you are in a bloody red ocean, which is increasing your costs and diminishing yours and everyone else’s profits.
Think outside of the box.
Think of who is your customer and where they spend their time online. Don’t make assumptions – use the data from your remarketing lists to find out exactly who they are. To do this, go to Shared Library, then Audiences and then choose your biggest remarketing list. In the new interface you have a section called Audience Insights. Here you can find out how old are they, where they come from, what music they listen on YouTube, what are their interests and mainly – what they are looking to buy online. This information is available on the tips of your fingers. You don’t have to fight for an expensive ad placement on the biggest online news site with everyone else. Show your ads on places your potential customers spend their time.
Find global trends.
The best tool for doing this is Google trends. Here you can explore search data over the last 14 years. Search for your brand and compare it to others. You can identify countries where you are more popular than your competitors. Also, research terms related to your product – what data tells you about people’s interest overtime. In some cases, you can see a downtrend for a whole industry. Maybe it is time to innovate. It does not necessarily mean that you must change business. It might show a necessity of rebranding your product, or presenting it through a different angle.
Google-Trends
Google Trends gives you interesting graphs of search volume of terms over time.
Innovation is disrupting almost all industries and this will be happening more and more in the future. This means that blue oceans are opening every single day. There is no need to fight for the leftovers.