Big business models depend on millions of dollars of market research taken from thousands of billable hours.
However, for most small or medium size businesses (SMBs) the opportunity to mine this detailed research has been an unobtainable dream, until recently that is. Google Trends opens up direct access to data that could help your business find market trends to capitalize on.
Google Trends is like a window to the Internet, letting you see what, where, and when people are interested in a particular product, service, or subject. Market focus groups often rely on randomly sourced interviews from unreliable subjects. The fundamental problem with such research is that there is a difference between what people say they do and what they really do. Online, digital information gathering lets the truth of the marketplace shine through in easily perceived graphs. The only question now is what do you want to know?
Strike while the iron’s hot
Suppose you are selling books. You might find out which books are popular, and when people are buying these books. Through easily entered data frames, you might find out if people buy thriller books more in the winter or the summer. You might also find out who is trending now in sales lists, and examine the cycles of their popularity. If your business is a service, you can also find out about the variations in popularity so you can target your marketing. Special deals and leveraged at just the right time to coincide with market trends are a fantastic opportunity for businesses.
Asking the right questions
OK, interested now? Sure, but how much time will this take me to learn? The answer is, hardly any time at all. Finding key market data doesn’t take much more time then a good Google search. It’s just about asking the right questions, setting the most effective frames on the searches, and then entering in the data. What will come back is an enriched portrait of your marketplace that simply wasn’t available to small business owners just a few years ago.
Gaining SEO traction
If your promotional business model includes blogs, targeted emails and email blasts, plus online visibility, you can also use Google Trends to find out subjects that are popularly trending, and how you might fit these into your blogs in order to gain SEO traction. For example, if there is a certain celebrity who is popular in a given week, according to Google Trends, you might want to make a blog entry that incorporates their name. If there is a big news story about information privacy, you might consider a blog entry on this subject. The key is that the content fits with your business otherwise you will lose credibility.
Big or small information searches
What you need to know is waiting to be found, with no limits to how small or how large you search. If you want to find broad data such as when people most likely buy new computers, and what type have been most popular in the past decade, finding these answers is relatively easy. If you want to narrow your focus, such as finding out when people tend to replace their carburetors in Athens, in Georgia, that information is just a few entries away.
Empowering decisions
For small business owners, the development in research couldn’t be better. Empowering decisions by informing them, the Google Trends tool opens up entirely new levels of marketplace effectiveness. Yesterday’s budget barriers have vanished, so that the only limit a small business owner has to tapping valuable market research is more a matter of interest, time, and a little application of relevant details.
Do you need help in utilizing powerful change for your business? Get in touch. We have the information at our fingertips to help.
