Reveal Consumer’s Needs With Search Intelligence.

Forget about social media: search intelligence is the true gateway to your consumers

What’s the main problem with social media? Only a fraction of consumers are actually giving their opinion or engaging with brands. Thus, brands can only connect to a very small percentage of their potential customers. You know them, you hear about them everyday: haters or brand lovers.

Can we consider these people as true representatives for the voice of the customer? What about all the others, people like you and me?

Think about it: 99% of us, as Internet users, are browsing the Web from search engines – through this tiny search bar. Our little inner voice – without any social desirability bias – is expressing itself through this search engine.

This empty space we fill up on a daily basis with search queries is actually the key to strategy. It is also the key to sell more in these tough and uncertain times. Did you know that the act of buying begins 8 out of 10 times with Google search*.

Whether planning vacation, or looking to buy the last iphone, or understanding why red pimples appeared on our body, we use Google to express our needs, our fears and desires. In the end, we all search for the same things: quick & clear answers to satisfy our curiosity and release us with a solution.

What if you would be the one offering the best answers to your customers ?

To be visible and appealing to your future buyers, you need to talk the same language than your customers.

Discover all answers consumers need from you with search data

As a category manager, you need to answer your customer’s questions to become visible and gain online authority.

Internet users buy from websites providing solutions to their problems. If your website, your offer and your communication support do not include these answers and solutions, why your visitors should trust you ?

As an example, as a potential hybrid car buyer, I recently searched for “best hybrid cars”, term which has been searched more than 150.000 times in the UK over the last 12 months.

Here’s one of the top results from Google.

When clicking on that Google result, consumers can land on pure online car seller website, acknowledging they were looking for a business answer to their initial question – but also on media website like comparison websites. Meaning their search intent is about making a future purchase – while not being already fully convinced about buying a hybrid.

As a category manager, analyzing that kind of data definitely helps you to understand where your prospects are in your marketing funnel when landing on your website.

Don’t think as a category manager, think as your customer to attract them better. (Have look at our case study on hybrid cars)

To define your strategy based on your consumers expectation, you need to get an easy and constant access to these search data.

Search data is usually seen as a tool to find topics for your content. It’s actually also way much bigger than SEO. With search data properly analyzed, you can start :

• Building the best product innovation strategy by identifying new products and services people are looking for
• Building the best offer and messaging by detecting needs and fears to address
• Building the best product launch strategy by identifying places with highest affinity
• Building most efficient marketing campaigns, by identifying the best opportunities to secure a higher return on investment (identifying seasonality and local trends to run your marketing campaigns with a higher ROI)

How to find topics your customers care about

All you need is a Search listening platform! These tools are designed to help you map all keywords searched by consumers.

Example with the European “hybrid cars” market

We mapped all search queries related to hybrid car models and generic search requests revealing consumers to learn more about the hybrid car markets (‘best hybrid cars’, ‘hybrid car grant’ …).

Another great feature is the search intent filter — that allows you to identify keywords that are set as ‘transactional’. Filtering on our Price/transactional filter you can optimize your catalogue identifying high-demanded products.

With Trajaan, category managers can also discover new market segments to invest in or competitor brands to monitor. As an example, our social intelligence platform detected that the second-hand segment is a rising star in the hybrid market.

Search data reveal that you need to act global and think local! Consumers expectations are not the exact same everywhere. There are multiple local trends you could benefit from, if you manage to detect them. Once you have a list of keywords, it is worth narrowing it down.

Choose keywords revealing your local audience

Knowing your audience is a necessity before choosing topics to invest.

For example, if you are a car seller, you would need to isolate keywords revealing that consumers are considering buying an hybrid or electric car.

Look at local affinity

Search volume tells you how many people search for that keyword every month. You may sometimes consider territories with less demand but a higher affinity – as consumers are more mature & willing to buying products there.

While being small markets in terms of volume, Finland & Norway have the highest affinity in Europe for hybrid cars from Toyota. Our platform detected these figures by comparing search volume with population figures.

Launch your product & service in the right place, at the right time

Think yourself as a category manager working for an hybrid or electric seller. You already know that demand is growing, but you’re not sure about what value proposition you should promote in every country or region in which you’re selling.

With our Trajaan platform, you can identify what segments from your category have the highest business potential, in every territory, every month.