Haircuts, Zoom,Australia and Google Trends Understands…

As the World deals with this unprecedented pandemic and businesses are planning how they will emerge when the green shoots finally arrive, data can be a powerful tool to help you understand what your customers are thinking, saying and doing and the obvious data source is Google Trends.

Google understands that data will help you make better-informed business decisions 

Your business has changed. For most, it’s no longer business as usual. It may never get back to normal as we knew it and we should be planning for the new normal. 

What if you could track what subjects your customers are searching? And how their demands are changing and how that affects market dynamics? You could be making plans to take advantage of the new opportunities that will undoubtedly present themselves. 

But how can you start creating your new normal?

Well, now you can with a free tool from our friends at Google called Google Trends (find out more here). 

Google Trends has been around some time, but many small to medium-size businesses don’t use it. Here are a few things you can do with it.

Using Google Trends to compare search terms 

Homeworking has become the norm for many of us during lockdown with people using video calls to keep in touch with customers, their teams as well as friends and family. I thought it would be interesting to find out what video software is the most popular.

As you can see, search for video took a massive jump when we were all thrust into lockdown in March and Zoom has come out the clear winner. For the marketers amongst us, this presents excellent opportunities to provide useful content to our customers about the best way to use zoom. Hmmmn maybe I’ll cover that in the next email I send you!

View Google Trends latest stories 

In the dropdown menu in the top left-hand corner of Google Trends, you can select Trending Searches to find the latest stories and insights, to explore curated content about trending topics and how people are searching for this theme e.g. Coronavirus Search Trends.

How to cut hair at home 

No surprise that the search term ‘How to cut hair at home’ has, like our hair, increased since the lockdown! 

If you are like me and you desperately need a haircut but don’t entirely trust your partner with a pair of scissors, it’s nice to know we are not alone! 

This situation presents an opportunity for hairdressers and barbers to keep close to their customers by providing useful content with advice how to cut your hair successfully at home on social channels such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram . It also offers valuable information about the pent-up demand for when they finally open their doors for business again.

Narrow your search by time 

To make sure you are catching up-to-minute breakthrough trends or longer-term trends you can narrow your time search by clicking on the 12 month dropdown above the graph and select options from 2004 – present to 1 hour previous. 

See how this changes the video conferencing software trends. Still shows zoom outstripping the rest but also shows some insight to how it is being used, highlighting a peak of searches at the last weekend in May 2020 indicating it is probably being used to contact family and friends.

Or expand geographically 

You can expand your search to Worldwide and even search on cities with the most searches globally. The video conferencing software comparison example below shows the city with the most searches in the last 30 days as being Canberra Australia.

Data isn’t just for big business 

It’s also invaluable for the small to medium-size business, and Google Trends puts insightful data in your hands. 

You can do more with this tool than I can share with you in this email so check it out. Google provides lots of information that will enlighten you further.

Bounce Forward Campaign 

If you need help planning and creating your Bounce Forward Advertising Campaign to bring you back in the market and entice your customers to start spending again please call me on 01491 575057 or send me an email at info@breathe4u.com and we will be delighted to help. 

But don’t leave it too late or your competitors could steal the show! 

Stay smart and stay safe.

Geoff