Be Prepared For Ongoing Consumer Shifts By Understanding Trend Analysis
Do you have a clear understanding of your target audience’s search behavior? As marketers, it is essential to build a window into user intent, behavior, and trends over time. As the world and economy continue to ride the waves of unrest, there has never been a more critical time to latch on to data to understand your audience, how they make decisions, and how to leverage their choices to benefit your brand.
Trend analysis is all about understanding how and why changes occur in users’ searches and mapping a strategy to account for these changes over time. Throughout the pandemic, behavior has shifted massively. The difference can be observed in search volume data by honing-in a specific keyword or event, held in comparison to “normal” user behavior. To outline the latter, it helps to create a search audience profile or a series of personas of your target audience to establish a baseline: who is seeking you out, what motivates them, and how can you convert them? Once you have a baseline, you can start to observe deviations from the usual behaviors.
Google Trends is a free tool that can help you understand how search interest shifts over time. From home entertainment to clothing, various industries have seen unusual user behavior throughout 2020 due to the lifestyle changes imposed under quarantine. Be aware that Google Trends charts interest in a given topic relative to a selected period. Give yourself a wide enough berth to understand what might motivate real spikes and declines in search activity. So, a study of behavior during quarantine should keep in mind different timescales of shutdowns that have occurred between March 2020 and today.
While the pandemic is a significant disruption to life and human behavior, we can expect disruptions large and small to continue to occur well beyond the COVID era. Marketers will benefit from identifying search trends and using them as predictive models to get ahead of future search trends.
If you’re looking to improve your understanding of search engine trends, ASTRALCOM can help. Check out my prior writings on user behavior to learn more about our successful approach to trend analysis and strategic implementation.
