Google Keyword Tool and Google Insight provide insight similar to language coding in focus groups

Written By: Nicole Finkbeiner

Finding out the words and phrases that your customers use to talk about your product is and integral part of your overall marketing strategy. Knowing this helps you in a variety of ways, including: learning the associations they make between your brand and other phrases, and what words you should and shouldn’t use in your brochures, websites, advertisements, etc. when trying to speak to a particular target market.

In the past, the most effective tool in the market research toolbox for determining how your customers talk about you and your competitors was focus groups. By organizing effective market research focus groups, a marketer can listen and understand the words and phrases as well as the brand associations that consumers use. However, although the use of focus groups can be used in this way and are still an exceptional tool, Google has created two tools that can yield similar language coding results to focus groups. These are Google Insights for Search and Google Keyword Tool.

Google Insights for Search allows you to see what the top search phrases of the day are, track search interest on a word, name, title, etc., track the seasonality and geography of search terms, and review search levels for a product, brand, name, etc. There are a variety of ways to use this tool, but one way to do so is to track the seasonality of search terms. So, for example, you can type in the search terms “college” and “community college” to see if interest for either of these terms spikes during certain times of the year. As you can see from the graph below, interest in the phrase “community college” stays about the same throughout the year, and interest in the “college” slows down in the summer and peaks in September. As a marketer for a college, this data could be used to make a case for a media buying strategy that consisted of a constant stream of communication throughout the year with a pulse in late August/early September.

Google Keyword Tool is another great tool to determine how your customers or potential customers talk about your brand, your competition, etc. It allows you to “discover global and local monthly search volumes on words and phrases related to your brand and category, assess competition on specific queries and enter a URL to see data on keywords related to the content of that page” (Google Insights). So, for example, if you are a martial arts instructor who has a blog that you want people to find or you want to find out what keywords would be best to include in your advertising copy, you could type in “karate” as your word or phrase. The results show that the key words used most within the local area are the keyword “karate,” the name of a particular style, and “mixed martial arts,” “martial arts school,” and “martial arts academy.”

In the absence of the necessary funding and time needed for focus group research, Google Insight and Google Keyword Tool can help a marketer with the latest information about how customers or potential customers talk about, search for, and associate a brand, product, name, or service. These incredible tools are an excellent addition to any marketer’s toolbox.