Anyone who is looking to bring a product or business to market is all too aware that market research is essential to long-term success.
Conducting proper market research before launching a product is important, as it provides you with an opportunity to ensure that whatever product you are trying to bring to the market will match with current consumer trends.
Consumer behaviours and changing consumer trends, however, can often be quite tricky to pin down – and in a world where the tastes and preferences are changing from year to year, conducting this type of research is essential.
With consumer behaviour trends always changing, what are the best methods of uncovering this kind of information?
Google Trends as a marketing tool
Although previously the most important tools in a marketer’s toolbox were interviews, the rise of the digital age has presented marketing professionals with unparalleled range of data and information that provide insights into the tastes and preferences of consumers.
Of these many treasure troves of information, by far the most important these days is Google.
Google provides a range of marketing tools that are invaluable to digital marketers. This includes resources such as Google AdWords, the Google office suite, Google business pages, DoubleClick, Google Alerts, and Google News, among others. However, perhaps the most important and useful marketing tool that Google makes available is Google Trends.
Google Trends is a tool that allows you to evaluate the popularity of search terms and to compare them against other keyword variations. This enables you to evaluate the popularity of specific keyword variations over time, as well as by region and language. It will also provide you with related keywords, which gives you a more expansive overview of the market.
Google Trends can be used to help you identify trending topics and news stories, which might reveal opportunities to build these into your own digital and content marketing strategy.
Some of the things you can search Google Trends for include:
- Comparative keyword research
- Emerging and established global issues and news topics
- Display charts to generate data on specific searches in a given month
- Show top daily searches by countries and regions
Google Trends is a powerful tool for displaying both current and historical data, which can be used for longer-term market research or to respond to emerging trends. Google Trends will pull this data from searches that have been made using the Google search engine and will then categorise it.
With this basic understanding of how Google Trends works and the kind of data it displays in mind, let’s consider some ways that you can put it to use in developing your digital marketing strategy.
Supercharge your keyword research
Google Trends is an incredibly powerful tool for conducting keyword research. This is because it can allow you to check the trends on specific sets of keywords, while also suggesting other potential keywords you can use. These related search queries are incredibly useful, and if used correctly, allow you to notice emerging search trends.
The comparative function of Google Trends is also useful as it allows you to compare a number of search terms at once to select the most effective one.
Conduct market research
By far the best thing about Google Trends is that it pulls a huge amount of data, synthesises it, and presents it in a format that is relatively easy to make sense of.
This is an invaluable tool for conducting either basic or more advanced market research and allows you to compile a data set that far exceeds anything you would ever be able to compile yourself. Google Trends is particularly useful when it comes to season or region-specific market trends, as these are variables that can specifically be accounted for when producing and presenting the data.
You can use this information to get a general sense of the popularity of certain topics, as well as a high-level overview of changing consumer tastes at specific points in time.
Use Google Trends for topic clustering
Another good way to use Google Trends to conduct market research is to help you select topic clusters.
Topic clusters are groups of related content that will cover a broad subject area. For example, if you are creating content on video games, topic clusters will cover various specific topics closely connected to that broad topic. Creating topic clusters is important in digital marketing, as it allows you to identify and generate topics related to your main topic, which you can then use to create content.
Google Trends is useful for creating topic clusters, as once you have searched for a specific term, it will suggest various related topics. These are invaluable and can be used to generate ideas for future content.
Use Google Trends to ‘newsjack’
Newsjacking is essentially what happens when marketers take advantage of – also known as ‘piggybacking’ – popular search trends at a given moment in time and use this to draw attention to their own content. Newsjacking can be used by digital marketers to bring attention to their brands whenever a related search term increases in popularity.
Google Trends can be used to effectively engage in newsjacking as it gives you an insight into when specific topics, and their associated keywords, are beginning to go viral or gain traction.
Trend your way to success
As you can see, Google Trends is a great way for digital marketers and content creators to harness the power of the Google search engine. If you are interested in how this powerful tool can be implemented into your own marketing strategy, reach out to a Purecontent consultant today for some advice. By combining the power of Google Trends with a well-written editorial, article or news piece, you can respond to emerging consumer trends and keep your business ahead of the curve.
