Strategic development with Google Trends.
One of our beliefs is that buying media doesn’t make sense for a whole variety of different businesses. Instead, the way to go is to exploit the fact that everyone in your audience is connected and “reach” them by giving them something to talk about. (Of course, we believe that the best way to do that is to actually do something worth talking about rather than saying something.) If you buy into it, this approach has quite large implications for how you go about developing and evaluating strategy: the chief one being how and where you look for customer insight.
In a model of buying media – it is (hopefully) a conversation between marketer and customer. In this case, the classic approach of identifying deep personal motivations that your audience hold seems reasonable.
However, in the alternate approach, it is no longer a conversation between marketer and customer. It is a discussion between customers in which the marketer wants to be included. In this case, a deep personal insight is probably the wrong thing to use, because people rarely talk about deep, personal things with lots of other people. Instead, the right approach is to find a conversation that’s already taking place and find a way to add something to it.
This is where Google Trends is invaluable. At a glance, you can see which “conversations” are more “interesting” than others. Plus you can also see the kinds of people who are engaging in the “conversations” and the context in which these “conversations” are happening.
The kicker is that Google provides this service for free. Combine that with not paying for media and the economics of this approach feel unbeatable.
