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Using Google Trends Creating Personas

In this episode, we introduce you to Google Trends and show you some examples of what you might want to search for and discover for your market.

Transcript

The second tool that I want to talk about is Google Trends. This tool is very easy to use. Compared to Facebook Ads, it's like night and day, for the ability just to understand. Facebook Ads is very targeted, it is a tool to actually run ads, and we're using it as a data assessment. Google Trends is literally for you to understand trends, things that are going on, and whatnot. This is really key. If you think about your market, how big is that market? Is it big enough that there should be a product for that market, based on what Google Trends says? It's something interesting.

I have a product Moodzer. Moodzer is designed to make mood boards. So for example, if we go in here and type in mood boards, now, when I type in mood boards, these are going to be based on the people who have typed in mood boards into Google or something similar to it. This is that search term, mood boards. This is a chart that shows us over the last 12 months of interest over time here. You can see from some of these searches, there's not that much interest in mood boards. You can also see it by regions, so search interests by individual States in the United States. In New York, it seems to be a very popular thing, but in California, not so popular.

They also give you idea of related topics. Here's a related query, "How to make mood boards." If I click on that, now I can get a sense of this as well, what is that general interest? It doesn't give me too much. If I jump back over mood boards over topic, it's these search terms that I'm going to sort of see general data. Now all of this doesn't give me too much. You'll see some kind of relationship when I type in "mood board" to some of these things and some related queries. Mood board generator, note that mood board is one word, two words. That's going to be a different sort of trend. Mood board app is up 50%. How to create a mood board is up 60%.

But if I search for something like cats, for example, you can start to see that trend of cats and to see in December of last year, right around Christmas, people were like obsessed with cats. You can see the dates in which they're the most obsessed. In New Hampshire, probably a lot of cat lovers in there. Then we can get this further down into this area and make a sense of, based on these locations and based on these keywords, what people are interested in. Does that match up? This really plays to that point that I made in an earlier video of "Does a market exist already for your product? And there's competition already? Or do you need to establish a market? Where is that search happening? And how are you facilitating that?"

If I look at that, I'll go back to mood boards, for example. I need to do something like create mood board. I'm going to search, "Create mood board." It didn't bring us back anything, I don't know why that's... Oh, because I'm in this specific, in New Hampshire. Okay, I'm going to go all the way to the United States here. So I say, create mood boards. We have mood board as a topic, I think that's the most general, so we'll go into that, and you can see into this space.

If I go into California, and in California, I have these areas or segments. It looks like there's a lot of interest in Los Angeles. I click in Los Angeles and get a sense, so really popular in Los Angeles in the sense of mood boards. I can know that based on a specific location that people are already interested in that search term, and that I know if I market specifically to Los Angeles, there's value there. People want it in Los Angeles. Versus if I market in a state where people aren't searching for this, for example, it's not going to be as useful of data for me to get information from this.

Think about that for some of the search terms. These are topics, these are things that you need to think about, like what does your product fit into this? If there's preexisting competitors, maybe searching those competitors and better understanding their market as well, on that information. Now, of course you have these drop-downs that you can break down that information further. So, categories, your months and your web search values here. So image search, for example, if I do image search for mood boards, I can get a real sense. We're not getting it down to the city information here, but I can get a general idea of the impact that people are looking for mood boards in that specific area.

You also have the ability to compare. I would say that's a little bit more advanced, but in general, try to think about your keywords, where your product fits in, and based on how your product fits into that, make a list of all those keywords, and then use Google Trends to assess that. Is that a valuable set of keywords for your product? Or do you need to be broader? Or do you need to be more specific? Because you have a big market, but maybe not all those people want to buy it. I think using these two tools together really helps you define that space.

Definitely take a look at Google Trends and try to make some interesting assessments about some of the keywords where your product matches up. Hopefully, the insights that you can get from Facebook Ads and Google Trends, as well as the research of actually sitting with your users and talking to them, can help you make really effective personas.