Customers And New Year’s Resolutions
Monday, January 12th, 2009
It’s the New Year and a lot of people make New Year’s resolutions. Some time ago Google released a very valuable market research tool that allows you to see the search trends that show what people are searching for, when and where. The graph at the top shows the search trend for one of the common New Year’s resolutions (weight loss). The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (starting from some time in 2004), and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches. It’s funny how it spikes as every New Year shown comes around and then slowly dies off until next year.
So how can this be valuable to you? Here are a few examples:
- You can see when your customers are more interested in your products/services and plan to market yourself more aggressively during that time. A lot of them are obvious. In the example I showed it is evident that a lot of people want to lose weight around the New Year’s. A lot of people search for “summer camps” before the end of the school year. Others are not so obvious and it may be very valuable for you to check out when your customers are interested in your products and services.
- If you’re starting a new business you can check if demand for your product or service is going up or down. For example interest in software development has been on a steady decline since 2004.
- You can check which geographical market is most interested in your product or service.
- You can compare different markets. For example did you know that dogs are more popular than cats or any other house pets?
- If you’re in retail you can check when holiday shopping really starts.
These are just some of the uses, but the possibilities are mind blowing.