Introduction

Market research is of paramount importance to each and every business. Traditional marketing research includes techniques based on sampling and focused group discussions. But generally they take a lot of time and lags by a period of one month. Google Trend is a right tool that can be used in conjunction with it. Tool helps in understanding the popularity of the search keywords on a real time basis. Many times in business, the decisions are made based on instincts which involves lot of subjectivity. This tool acts as the first step and helps businesses in making an informed decision. The tool offers a wide variety of application and can be used by businesses to understand the customer sentiments towards the brand. While making your business plan it can answer multiple questions such as –

• What is my industry trend? Is it growing, declining or remaining flat?
• Where is my target audience located?
• What are people/customers searching for my brand/industry?
• How am I performing as compared to competitors?
• How is my company’s search varying across different mediums (web vs news vs YouTube videos)?

Understanding through an example

Let us understand it by taking example of Flipkart, an e-commerce website operating in India. The below charts depict the trends for keyword “Flipkart”

Keyword trend Analysis

The chart is for India and represents last 5 years of search trend. We can observe that there is a seasonal trend in October month every year. We can further deep dive and identify the reasons for this seasonal trend. It also shows that customer’s search has grown over time, thereby indicating that business has done fairly well. An important point to note over here is that the chart depicts the trend and not the volume of search. Also, the tool provides the flexibility to look at the result across different countries and time-period.

Target Market/Location

We can determine the regions/states that has shown the maximum interest for our chosen brand. This information can be used to understand where the target audience is located. Based on it, we can tweak our marketing strategy and focus on the key areas. This chart can be further sliced & diced and studied at the city level. Above data is normalized and should be kept in mind while analyzing it. It means that in a region, search interest for a particular keyword is determined by proportioning the search for that particular keyword to the total number of searches in that region. Else the regions with higher population will always rank higher. For instance, search interest score of 56 for Goa has been determined by considering it against all the searches happening in that region.

Related searches

The related keyword search queries helps in identifying the other keywords which are going in popularity. In this case it indicates that people who are searching for Flipkart are also searching for keywords like redmi, flipkart moto g etc. It reflects that these keywords has high association with the Flipkart. As many of mobile phone brands are coming up in the related queries table, we can develop a hypotheses that cellphones drive a lot of traffic on Flipkart’s website. It can be extended to infer that it is the key growth driver for the brand. It can be further validated by the other sources of internal and external data reports/sources.

Competitor Analysis

Google Trend enables to compare your brand with your competitor’s brand(Amazon). In the above case, monitoring the competitor’s trend help us to derive a key observation. It shows that the competitor brand’s popularity has increased. And it has taken over our brand’s popularity in the recent period. This is a sign of caution and need to be evaluated in detail to identify the underlying reasons. Also, the seasonality looks more like a industry/market trend than being a company controlled trend. Similarly, the region level charts and related query table of the competitor brand Amazon can be compared with the Flipkart. This information can be used to identify pockets of opportunity for Flipkart. For instance, Flipkart identified that consumers are searching for best customer experience or say large variety for competitor’s brand. Using it, Flipkart can highlight that it provides world class customer experience on its website.

Product Portfolio Analysis

Flipkart can use the tool to understand which product has more popularity within the same category. For example, we found out that Samsung cellphones have more popularity than Nokia cellphones. Flipkart can acquire and on-board more sellers who sell Samsung cellphones. Or they can run a promotion to push the sales of Nokia cellphones (in case they are getting higher revenues from it).

Content Generation

Leveraging google trend to know what consumers are currently searching for, what they are talking about and what they are interested in, helps marketeers to generate and develop content around it. This information can also be used to develop promotion strategies in line with the current happenings around the world.

Google trends is free and can be used to generate valuable insights for the business. It takes lesser amount of time than the traditional sources. Hence don’t take decisions blindly. Take the advantage of it to do some adequate research on the business and the target audience.

The post Market Research using Google Trends appeared first on IntelliAssist.