Organic Search Is An Invaluable Business Intelligence Tool

Businesses have had to make drastic changes this year to accommodate the new normal. Likewise, consumer needs and concerns have also zig and zagged this year. This dynamic is quickly creating new market realities and navigating them requires businesses to put a greater focus in their agility. They need to know what the customers care about, how their environment is impacting their intentions and where opportunities are to meet their needs and create meaningful interactions. This will require re-imagining how they gain market and business intelligence to be faster, more accurate and actionable in new environments.

At Share 2020, a key theme we hit on is the convergence of search data and business intelligence. How consumers search and how search engines are serving up trillions of historical search results reveal a rich portrait of what consumers want, how they want to consume it and what messages are resonating with them. For many marketers, the challenge is turning what we see in search results into macro trends that can serve as an input into your broader marketing and omnichannel strategies.

Using a combination of AI and trending billions of searches, BrightEdge provides digital marketers with the technologies to elevate search data into macro consumer insights with Market Insights. We built this platform because we believe when organized and positioned correctly, search represents the most accurate and agile representation of consumer behavior.

There are three key aspects of macro consumer behavior that search data can help your organization uncover:

1. Who is changing purchase and discovery patterns?
2. What are your opportunities?
3. How should you realize these opportunities?

Who is changing purchase and discovery patterns? 

Let’s say you’re a business with an e-commerce component selling thousands of products online. You need to understand across your categories what trends are emerging across those consumers looking for your products and be able to answers to these questions:

• What product attributes are becoming more important?
• Are they becoming more price sensitive?
• Do they have strong brand preferences that inform purchase?

With over 75% of shoppers doing a search before making a purchase, your search data is the perfect consumer measurement. Market Insights aggregates granular search data into consumer categories that empower you to answer these questions. Beyond the search and content value, you are now armed to:

• Inform product strategy for what inventory needs to be prioritized
• Help shopper marketing and retail teams understand where price sensitivity is on the rise
• Inform branding and omnichannel teams on how consumer brand preferences are changing faster than any focus group or lookback data with real time search data. 

What are your opportunities?

Core to the convergence of search and business intelligence is the chance to become even more agile in opportunity identification. Granular search data reveals a lot about what consumers care about and how they think. Market Insights consolidates granular search data into meaningful macro trends. Insights revealed in this data can help businesses:

• Determine what represents an actual trending change in consumer preferences vs. an anomaly. Move quickly on emerging ones and avoid costly investments chasing the wrong ones. 
• Identify blue ocean trends—where are net new behaviors emerging that your brand has a right to win?
• Determine how macro trends are impacting existing sales. Correlate negative conditions or consumer attitudes to impacts on sales. 

Armed with this data, marketers have an agile way of observing the market that is fresh and reactive to current events and conditions. Using search in this way helps brands:

• Make strategic omnichannel decisions faster and determine what opportunities are significant enough to warrant an orchestrated omnichannel approach. 
• Get ahead of new market opportunities faster than competitors and organize your branding, messaging and product teams.
• React faster with your branding, content and media teams to prevailing macro trending needs and frustrations.

How should you realize those opportunities? 

Once we understand what the opportunities are with our consumers, Market Insights also tells us how we need to orchestrate content and build our omnichannel strategies to realize the opportunity. One of the benefits of search is that we are marketing with the most powerful arbiter of intent the world has ever known. Search engines like Google use powerful search algorithms to receive trillions of results, reflecting on what users really want.

Market Insights harnesses the real-time search results from search engines to help businesses better plan their macro strategies. This help you to:

• Prioritize what pain points being expressed with search behavior warrant broad communication. Anticipate market opportunities fast. 
• Determine what content is resonating with consumers across multiple screens.
• Identify the formats and content delivery methods that align to how consumers prefer to engage.

Demo Instant For Real-Time Insights And Results

Armed with this data, marketers have a near-real time method for measuring what consumers want when they engage. Beyond search, this data helps brands: 

• Build their macro communication strategies across channels through their content teams.
• Address new consumer trends by enhancing your content team’s ability to be agile and pivot messaging when needed.
• Define the formats they need to create in order for that content to resonate with the intended audiences. 

When we start thinking of search as both a channel and a real-time audience listening platform and scale the insights across our business, we make decisions faster and more accurately.