Improve Marketing with Apps
Marketing is an easy concept to grasp – get customers to want your product, or associate your company with a certain product or service, and then to act on that desire. On the other hand, it’s hard to execute successfully. Take a look at the most successful marketing campaigns. One of the similarities they share is they take advantage of trends. How can you identify these though? Why not turn to Google?
Here’s two Google apps that can help your marketing efforts:
Google Trends The online world is constantly changing and evolving. Something considered trendy last year is now old-hat and forgotten about. It can be tough to figure out what search terms, marketing language or descriptive terminology is popular. That’s where Google Trends comes in. This site is an aggregation of almost all search terms people enter into Google’s Search engine. It provides data such as how popular a search has been over time, the countries it’s been most popular in and even related terms.
This powerful tool can really help you narrow in on specific terms. Let’s look at a quick example: You run a chain of sport stores in New York. You want to create a new marketing initiative to drive interest but aren’t sure which product to market.
Go to Google Trends, and type Ski in the search bar. You’ll see a worldwide overview of interest in the term Ski, including a graph indicating searches. This is ok, but not enough to make marketing decisions off of. Under Search Terms press Add item and type in Bike. Under Limit to: Click on the box that says Worldwide and narrow your search to New York – select United States and click on New York on the map.
You should see user interest in both terms, in New York state. Both terms are cyclical, but there’s a general downward trend in Ski while Bike is mostly flat. This shows that maybe you should focus on bikes instead of skis. Beyond that, the graph shows that when Ski is at its lowest interest level, Bike is at its highest.
A good marketer will view this as an opportunity. In the fall or early winter you could focus on ski related products while in the late spring you could focus on bikes.
For Google Trends to really help you, take your current marketing terms and enter them into the search bar. Next, take similar words and enter these too. If there is an upward trend on one, and a downward shift on another, focus on the upward trending word.
Think with Google Struggling with market research? Did you know that Google has a site devoted to helping businesses with their marketing? Think with Google contains marketing insight, studies, facts and figures and even information on popular trends and industries. All this is free, and could be a big help with the development of your next digital based marketing campaign.
While we can’t guarantee success if you use these resources, they should go a long way in helping your company develop more effective marketing that your target market is interested in. When you develop your next campaign, why not check out these two resources. Or you can contact us, we may be able to help you further.
