Target Marketing with Google Trends

by Scott on March 02, 2007

In an earlier post I talked about leveraging traditional marketing efforts, even when engaged in internet marketing activities. If you have an online company, traditional media can be used for awareness campaigns. Though many marketing principles are the same online as offline, traditional media (e.g. print, postcards, magazines) often has an added restriction of local or regional scope that you do not usually find online. Traditional media also has more strict time boundaries than online promotion (SEO, etc). So where and when to market becomes a bigger question offline than with Internet marketing. Google Trends can help.

For example, run a Google Trends report to see in what US cities and what time of year are people using Google to search for pool toys.

In this example, the cities and times of year are not surprising (except maybe for St. Louis and Newark – who knew?). The demand fluctuations in the pool toy market are clearly shown in the time graph. If you run an online pool toy store and want to place local advertisements or partner with local pool stores to drive traffic to your site, these cities could be good starting points.

Try Google Trends with your product or common search terms and see if there are any surprises there.

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Computer Worlds Top 5 Technologies for 2007

by Scott on March 01, 2007

Computer World’s Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in ‘07 includes Ruby on Rails as one of the “core technologies that may have the greatest effect on the world of computing over the next 12 months”. In his overview of Rails, the author includes shorter development timelines as one advantage of the framework.

Using Ruby on Rails has meant we can deliver new products and changes to existing products more quickly than we ever did before making the move. To users, this development speed manifests as responsive customer service.

I predict Ruby on Rails adoption will grow at an even faster rate in 2007 so am happy to say “stay tuned” for more details and an official announcement of a new Ruby on Rails training class we will be offering in partnership with another Rails firm starting this fall.

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