Find Valuable Insights in People’s Online Searches
How do I find insights in people’s searches?
What can these insights tell me about my target audience?
How can these insights help my business and influence my marketing?
The moments people share online say a lot about them. Vacation photos, job updates, family posts...all help paint a picture of a person’s life and values.
But, there are other types of moments people share, like when they want to know something, go somewhere, do something, or buy something – so they search online.
These online searches can also give a lot of insight into who is doing the search and why they’re doing it.
Imagine, for example, a man does this search online: “How do I housetrain a puppy?”
We could make a few guesses about what’s going on in his life.
The housetraining example is pretty simple, but finding insights in searches actually takes a lot of research, educated guesswork, and testing.
Along the way, you’ll need to use online tools like Google Trends, Yelp Trends, BuzzSumo, or social media trending terms to find the information and data you’ll need to form insights.
The extra effort is worth it, though, because insights from searches can give you an incredibly valuable snapshot of your target audience and industry.
These insights can also help you change your approach to digital marketing and how you advertise so you can connect with your target audience better.
Let’s see how insights from searches helped Unilever engage their audience in a new way.
To prepare for the launch of a new hair care product, Unilever used Google data to analyze hair trends and searches 3 months before their product hit the market.
They learned that there were around 1 billion Google searches related to hair care each month – but no hair care brand had capitalized on this yet by creating YouTube hair tutorials.
Unilever seized the opportunity. For the first time ever, they united all their hair care brands together and created All Things Hair, a YouTube channel which featured styling tips and techniques from leading vloggers.
The insights Unilever pulled from search terms and trend predictions also helped ensure that the content in All Things Hair would stay relevant, useful, and authentic.
How did insights from searches help Unilever?
BUZZ
Within 10 weeks, All Things Hair was the #1 hair brand channel on YouTube.
REACH
All Things Hair is the most-subscribed hair brand channel worldwide.
Finding insights from online searches and being where your customers need you most doesn’t require a huge budget or team of researchers.
You should know your current customers pretty well, though. Who are they? What makes them tick? Knowing these things will help you define them and make sure you’re creating insights about the right potential customers.
After that, you can concentrate on uncovering insights from searches. It usually works like this: You get to know the current search environment, form a hypothesis, test and validate it, and then tweak your marketing as needed.
First let’s see how you can get to know the current search environment that’s relevant to your brand. We’ll use Google Trends for this example.
With Google Trends, explore the relative interest level in your brand by checking out Google Search stats. You’ll discover how interest levels change over time and in different geographic regions, and how you compare to other search terms.
You can also see searches that are related to your brand. These related searches can help you find potential customers you haven’t yet reached.
Let’s say you own a beauty company and discover that a search related to your brand is “trendy hairstyles.” You could create online ads that would appear when people searched that phrase, helping you reach a new set of consumers.
You could stop here and give yourself an awkward high five for finding a way to target some new potential customers. But if you go deeper, you can find more valuable insights.
This is when you start forming hypotheses – AKA educated guesses – about what your potential customers are searching for online.
What questions would they ask that are related to your business or industry? What search terms or keywords do they associate with your brand? What trends might influence their searches?
We’ll try this out by choosing some hypotheses for your imaginary beauty company.
Let’s say you found out that people searching for your products also searched for a specific trendy hair dye technique and style called ombré.
TIP
While you’re hypothesizing, you should also think about how a person’s searches are affected by location or any major events going on, like holidays or sports games.
Now it’s time to test and validate your hypotheses. Google Trends, Nielsen’s MyBestSegments, and other tools can help you do this.
Plug all of your hypotheses into these tools and see if your chosen questions, keywords, and trends actually relate to your brand.
If they don’t relate to your brand, it means your hypotheses are wrong... which is actually 100% okay. After all, the whole point of this process is to find that out sooner rather than “oh-no-we-already-blew-our-ad-budget” later.
The hypotheses that end up being correct or on the right track can help you find the search insights you need to make your marketing more effective.
These hypotheses tell you where you (and even your competitors) are missing new customers and which geographic locations have people who are more likely than others to use certain keywords or search questions.
With all these new insights, you can start defining which search questions, trends, events, and moments your digital marketing efforts should target.
DO THIS NOW
Explore how well you know your customers and see if you’re ready to gather insights from searches.
If you’re participating in the course, go to the next section to access your self assessment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Insights from searches can help your digital marketing connect with your target audience better.
To gather these insights, you need to know who your target audience is.
You should check current searches, make hypotheses, test and validate them, and then refine your marketing.