Use Online Tools to Understand Offline Customers

Market research has always been an expensive proposition, and the results don’t always give you the direction that you’re looking for. After extensive research and taste testing, Coca-Cola changed its formula in 1985, and a consumer outcry led to a hasty return to the “Classic” flavor. Focus groups and surveyors (like the kind you see with clipboards in shopping malls) are also used frequently, but the data can be skewed by the fact that you’re only hearing the opinions of people who are willing to take a survey. The interview subject can even be swayed by the survey taker’s personality, appearance, or the nature of the questions asked. If you’ve ever noticed the difference between opinion polls and election results, you may understand how the “margin of error” produces a different outcome than you might expect.

Over the past few years, tools from sites like Google have made it possible to understand the tastes of the general public. If you have a website, you can get insight into how people really react to it. If you don’t have a site, there are quite a few tools that can help you learn how many people are interested in any given topic, how they compare to other sets of people, and where to find the biggest group of potential customers. If you’re an ad agency and want to see how much saturation your message is getting, you can even use free tools to see how many people are taking the time to learn more. Best of all, you can determine seasonality (and relative demand) for just about any item or service that can be referenced as a search engine keyword. If you know who your competitors are, you can even see how they’re doing when it comes to getting clients to their websites.


Google Trends
The Google Trends tool is a great way to understand keyword demand and brand value over time. You can even compare multiple terms to find out if someone likes one item more than another. For instance, you can see that three times as many people are looking for “chocolates” versus “candies” which may be a big consideration if you’re a confectioner. Furthermore, demand peaks around Christmas and Valentine’s day, and a spike in April would appear to match Easter. You can also understand seasonality over a longer date range by comparing year-to-year results, which makes it possible to plan for cycles of higher or lower demand.




The Hot Trends feature lets you know what is popular over the last few hours in Google. Most of the time search results will be full of queries about celebrities and news events, but this tool could be useful for any major media campaign, since it shows whether people are interested enough to search for more information.

Google Keyword Tool
Aside from being a great way to find keywords for your website, the Google Keyword Tool is an insight into the minds of around 70% of the US population that uses search engines. You can see how many people are looking for specific terms, compare various phrases, and build lists of words that are likely to get results. Direct mail marketers can make use of the keyword tool to understand words that are more likely to provoke a response in the eyes of a customer. If you’re doing DIY market research, you can learn whether an item, phrase, or topic is popular in the mind of your audience, or too obscure to pursue.

Google Analytics
The Google Analytics tool is free for anyone who has a website, and is one of the top third party web analytics platforms. Aside from helping you understand how people use your site (which is vital) you can also learn which keywords are leading people to spend more time on the site, and which ones aren’t creating a response. For your offline marketing, high volume keywords that keep people on the site longer (or result in a conversion) could be included in collateral materials, ads, mail pieces, and even radio commercials. If you’re had your analytics running for a long enough amount of time, you can mine actionable data which has an impact on your whole marketing strategy.

Compete.com
The ability to understand the competitive marketplace of your business is vital for any form of benchmarking. Compete.com offers a snapshot of how your website compares to those of your competitors over time. Aside from the obvious comparative element, you are also able to understand how much growth potential you have compared to people with similar sites or audiences. Mind share and brand recognition drive a lot of traffic to major websites, so you can use this information to see how you stack up to other people in your sector, and how many potential customers you can divert.



The availability of free online marketing tools has revolutionized the world of advertising and customer research. The advent of search engines has also made customers more specific about what they’re looking for, which can be a real boon to people who want to understand the tastes of consumers. Even though people are still influenced by advertising, the demand driven nature of searches allows marketers to tailor messages directly to people who are more likely to become buyers. Therefore, an improved understanding of online consumer search patterns can energize traditional marketing initiatives by creating a better response rate. In this fashion, companies that came to the internet to improve their online customer base can now use net-based tools to carve out new market share in the brick-and-mortar world.