How To Use Google Trends For Your Marketing Strategy

Spoiler Alert: Remember in ‘Back To The Future 2’, when Marty McFly picks up a copy of the Sports Almanac from 2015? It contained a copy of all the sports results from 1950 – 2000, you know, to make a little money from the future.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to look into the future and know exactly what products or services you should offer to the public to make the most out of your business?

Welcome to Google Trends – the next best thing.

If you’ve never heard of Google Trends, you’re not alone, but you should definitely start investigating it. It’s a tool that lets you compare search terms and determine their popularity all across geographic locations across the world. Best of all, it can show you real time data that is very beneficial to your marketing.

Let’s take the fashion industry to start with. You’ve got yourself an online store full of ladies fashion; dresses, jeans, belts, bags, jewellery. If it’s part of an outfit, you sell it.

Do you throw your budget into the whole range and hope that you sell? That’s a slow way to losing your money. What you should do is check out Google Trends first.

You can use the popularity tool to compare brands of handbags to find which were the most popular throughout the previous year. Therefore helping you to forecast your sales, and know which brands to invest in. You might notice a huge jump in February for one brand; that’s it! You’re onto the winner, forget those other brands and sink your budget into this one set of handbags.

Google Trends again comes into play when you search for the brand name and base the search time on February and ‘News Headlines’; the search results will feature shows from global fashion week parades. You’ll be able to see any bad/positive press for that brand during Fashion Week.

Imagine if you had been ready to invest a large proportion of your marketing budget into a brand which only yesterday received bad press for being at the centre of an investigation around child labour?! Investigating Google Trends will potentially come to the rescue and save you and your business from a PR disaster! Equally distressing, you could have been waiting day after day for someone to click your ad and pick up your products, which would never happen since a boycott of the brand is now trending online.

Trends can have great importance on real time changes for your marketing.

Checking Google Trends for results relevant to your business could bring you a lot more customers. If you sell sports gear, and Google trends is showing that a large volume of people are searching for next week’s Australia vs New Zealand cricket match. Bam, special on Australian cricket jerseys, invest a bit more budget and watch the dollars roll in.

Maybe you’re a pool cleaner. Google Trends shows you the biggest search results are over the summer – pretty standard. You also notice though that August is when the searches really start to pick up, not December as most businesses might think. You invest a little earlier and bam! You take top position and build up your client base while your competitors are scratching their heads wondering which crystal ball you found.

Trends show you what everyone is searching for the Sunshine Coast today. That’s odd, why the sudden interest? Select the News Headlines – flights are now departing the Sunshine Coast for Sydney, and several of the major airlines have launched a 24-hour sale! Hang on, you run a Hotel on the Sunshine Coast! “Travelling To The Sunshine Coast From Sydney? Stay with Branded Hotels”. Relevant, and popular search results are more likely to build you the traffic you want.

So while trends can show you how popular the Broncos were versus the Cowboys in October last year, it should also be considered a powerful marketing tool that can provide great benefits to your business.

Want to learn more about how Google Trends can help you to make the most of online search growth? Get in touch with SponsoredLinX on 1300 859 600.

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