In my first post about Google Trends, I explained how useful it can be to marketers as an instant, free source of insight. In this post, let’s explore three more ways it can help with marketing strategy.
First, Trends can help us with understanding market seasonality. To bring this to life, imagine we’re a luxury Christmas pudding manufacturer, selling our products online. We want to know precisely when the great British public thinks about buying their puddings, so we can build a digital marketing campaign around this timing. Rather than conduct an expensive and time-consuming research study on the buying habits of Christmas pudding eaters, let’s first see what Google Trends can tell us:
Each year, there’s a spike of interest around the end of November. Presumably, this is when the organised folks start to make their Christmas food preparations. However, the peak point of interest falls much later, with a final-week scramble as Christmas Day approaches. The pattern repeats, almost exactly, year after year.
Google Trends can also put things in a national perspective. For example, if you work in any kind of agency or marketing team right now, you’re sure to hear a lot about Tik Tok. It was the most downloaded app on the Apple app store in the first quarter of 2019, and is valued at over $75m. Tik Tok is certainly enjoying explosive growth, but before we stick the entire annual marketing budget behind it, let’s remember that it’s not yet overtaken Poundland on UK search volumes:
As a third example, Google Trends can reveal changes in consumer behaviour. There’s been a lot of press coverage recently about vegan diets. Is this just a media fad or something people out in the real world are actively investigating and adopting? Again, Google Trends has the answer, with searches for “vegan diet” showing a steady upward trend to a peak in November 2019:
Compare this to searches for Bitcoin, which flared brightest in December 2017 before the price collapsed and interest fell back:
In my final post about Google Trends, I’ll look at how it can be an indicator of campaign impact, looking at which of the 2019 contenders is winning the Christmas advertising battle.