The pandemic has changed the way businesses work now and in the future. Post-crisis management has become the key focus for most industries.
The impact has been unprecedented. The sweeping changes the virus has heralded globally are set to last far longer than this year.
Business plans for 2021 have had to be shelved, with dramatic adaptations to working models being brought in overnight.
The transition has not been smooth across all sectors. But we are settling in.
And some industries are beginning to find new ways to reduce customer churn and improve retention.
As an online design platform, Venngage is constantly looking at search trends ”we need to know the hot topics of the moment to create suitable design content.
This dive into the search trends gave us some new insights once the lockdown for the virus came into effect.
Using these trends, we were able to rally our SEO content marketing efforts to design popular content and maintain our revenue generation models.
In this article, I will share how businesses can analyze search trends and use that data to pivot their growth strategies.
Making Google Trends Your Friend
When the COVID-19 crisis arrived, Levi Olmstead, Director of Marketing at 2ndKitchen, doubled down on Google trends.
With so many more people online ”and for longer periods of time ”search volumes have been increasing, resulting in tons of data just waiting to be mined by content marketers.
“It’s a great opportunity for smaller brands to drive awareness and lockdown very relevant keywords and topics for their brand, explained Olmstead.
Using the data available to them, 2ndKitchen realized that they needed to help their clients find new ways to reach their customers.
It wasn’t possible for the breweries and restaurants they were working with to continue as if it was business as usual.
If customers couldn’t come to their premises, they couldn’t make sales. The lack of revenue would sink the business.
But with the help of search trend data, the company managed to create content that taught its primary audience how to pivot their business to become more delivery-focused:
Small businesses that might have gone under during the crisis were able to use 2ndKitchen’s advice to continue sales to their customers.
What does this example tell us? That people are increasingly online ”not just individual customers but fellow businesses and marketers, as well.
People are also desperate for information and data ”not just about the virus, but about keeping themselves safe, getting groceries, and bringing in the next paycheck.
What we can also learn here is that the kind of information people are looking for right now can change in the blink of an eye.
The current crisis is like no other ”the levels of anxiety and tension are extremely high.
As a result, people are acting on their emotions more than usual. Understanding what makes people feel the way they do is now imperative for making marketing decisions.
Here’s a whimsical graph that shows the changing priorities of the world since the start of the year:
If these changes can occur so rapidly, businesses need to be on the ball if they are to make any headway in their brand awareness efforts.
Make Old Content New Again
Mark Lindquist, Mailshake‘s Marketing Strategist, found a new way to reach audiences without having to make massive changes to the company’s content generation model.
The company updated high-traffic content to include more natural opt-ins and CTAs . These pages were already getting views, but they were no longer relevant to a pandemic audience.
Having been updated to reflect the current environment, these popular pieces were able to give audiences the resources they were looking for in the crisis.
With so many industries being negatively impacted by the pandemic, it is imperative that businesses look for new avenues to reach their audience.
For instance, the travel industry was massively impacted by global lockdowns. Travel-related searches fell in 2020 during the same period that they were rising in 2019:
People can’t travel so they aren’t looking for flights. But they also aren’t looking for travel-related content about hotels, luggage, tourism, or the best places to eat.
In a similar vein, local and community-led search words aren’t getting much traction either.
People aren’t searching for restaurants nearby’, coffee shops nearby’, or live events’ because they can’t go out.
Businesses optimizing for these keywords will also see declines in their traffic:
If people aren’t heading out to their nearest coffee shops to get their morning cuppa, what else are they doing?
With SEO keyword research you can find out what terms are on the rise in specific industries. And then you can find patterns that can then be used to determine new growth strategies.
Since people can’t go anywhere, altering your content to remove terms like near me’ or nearby’ might just be enough to reach a wider audience.
An important inference can be made here ”people don’t really want to change the lifestyle they’re used to but they want to maintain safety restrictions while enjoying coffee at home.
And we can learn yet another thing by tweaking these search terms ”consumers are still engaged in industries.
But how they are engaging has changed ”life is different and consumer needs have adapted accordingly.
If we look at the travel industry, we can see that because people can no longer visit places either near or far, tourism-focused areas are losing traction across the board:
But as we saw with the coffee example, people don’t want to stop living their lives. They may be at home but they still want to experience the world.
This is where your old content can be given new life.
Instead of leaving written pieces about the best places to eat in a country or which museum to visit, tourism companies can update that content to appeal to the online audience.
Repurpose written content as videos, virtual tours, or fun facts to share on social media.
You can also use survey questions to ask your audience what kind of information they are looking for.
It’s important to remember that the keyword volume averages that you’ve been relying on to create content may no longer be relevant.
Adjust what you have to the needs of the hour ”update your ranking content for what your customers want now.
Pivot to New Content
Updating existing pieces is a great way to make old content feel new again. But that doesn’t mean you stop creating new content altogether.
But when the situation is so volatile, how do you design content that reaches your audience and actively improves sales?
According to Amanda Milligan, Marketing Director at Fractl, now is the time to make changes to content marketing strategies.
Fractl pivoted whichever projects could be altered and assessed if new content could be created with a COVID-19 angle based on their industry.
As we mentioned above, search trend data proves that interest within industries is changing. Marketers need to analyze these changes to find new niches to develop content.
But you can’t pivot to new strategies unless you have the right data. While we have explained what data you can look for, what you need to also know is what to infer from that data.
If we look at the tourism industry again, we can see some massive changes in the popularity of the search term museums’.
If people can’t go to museums, they won’t be searching for them online.
But being at home and cut off from art and culture has been a struggle for everyone ”people want to be able to keep in touch with the artistic side of themselves.
So, if people can’t visit museums but still want to enjoy the beauty of museums from their homes, what can your tourism company or museum marketing team do about it?
Look for what else people are searching for instead.
For example, we compared the search term museums’ with virtual tour’, and look at what we found:
While museums’ saw a massive drop in search trends, at the same time, virtual tour’ saw a significant increase.
What this shows us is that the goal for growth marketing strategies in the near future has to be focused on finding alternatives to search terms that worked in the past.
A mind map is an excellent resource for outlining these new search terms and finding more connections between them.
Relying on strategies from 2019 ”or even early-2020 ”will no longer work. The world has changed too drastically for that.
Marketers need to examine the search trends within their industry to find gaps where their products and services can now make a difference in people’s lives.
Solve Problems, Don’t Sell Products
Victoria Taylor, Marketing Generalist at Wishpond, found that the pandemic had changed people’s priorities across the board.
We realized that people need problems to be solved, not products to be sold, explains Taylor.
But they went one step further by revisiting their sales team training so they were aware of what type of ad campaigns and marketing tips would be useful in the current climate.
This fits in with the Jobs to be Done framework, which can be summarized this way: People don’t buy products. They hire them to get a job done.
If we look back at the virtual tour example from above, we can infer a few things from the search term and how it relates to customers:
-
People aren’t using to being at home for such long periods of time
-
Everyone is looking for entertainment to take their minds off the crisis
-
The world is more online now than ever before
With just these three points, we can understand why virtual tour’ would be a trending search term during a crisis period.
Products do specific jobs for customers ”museums give people enjoyment, and give students a space to learn and grow.
While that job hasn’t changed, the way people engage with those jobs have.
This impacts the use cases for not just the product, but also for the industry as a whole.
Pre-pandemic, both jobs to be done and use cases would have been fairly similar ”museums were geared towards tourists and students.
Now that circumstances have changed, those buyer personas can no longer be the sole focus.
Marketers need to look at the new use cases that are appearing and tailor their content to those needs ”about being able to access virtual tours but also about being entertained regularly.
And remember, people are online almost throughout the day, which means that they need more content to consume.
Create more content around the new use cases that you are discovering, about the industry, about changes that are appearing, and about what to expect in the future.
Be Where the People Are
With more people spending time online, creating more content is the need of the hour.
Ross Simmonds, Founder, and CEO at Foundationinc.co, explains how his company changed its strategies to answer the call of the people.
Since the pandemic kicked in, we shifted our strategy to focus on creating more of everything. More video. More podcasts. More landing pages. More blog posts. Rather than scaling back, we ramped up.
It’s helpful to know that your audience is almost entirely in one place ”though it is prudent to remember that the internet is vast so you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket.
If people are online, businesses need to be online, as often as possible and on as many channels as their customers are.
We’ve shared examples from the travel and tourism industry, as well as the food and beverage industry to demonstrate how there are new search terms coming to the fore.
When you look through these search terms, you will begin to see patterns.
That is when you can start working on cross-over content that provides solutions to customers. You can do this by communicating new jobs that your products and services can now do.
This requires a bit of creativity, but it all rises from search trend data.
As we can see, searches for museums have fallen more than 50% since the start of the pandemic, but virtual tours have seen an increase:
Using that data, you can brainstorm cross-over content keywords that can be used to develop content for the new audiences coming into the industry.
Once you generate ideas for these pieces, you can begin looking at content formats that will have the most impact.
Aside from creating the virtual tours for your website and YouTube pages, listicles about the best virtual tours available would also make for good content.
You can also create a timeline about your museum or tourism company, or even about tourism in a particular geographical area.
And you can push into newer arenas by developing content on how to create a virtual tour. Look at the number of options for how to ¦ virtual tour’ on YouTube:
You now have the tools to open your content up to both B2C and B2B consumers.
Develop more content and for more channels, and you will be able to reach audiences that you may not have thought of targeting before.
Conclusion
Analyzing SEO keyword data not only tells you what trends are emerging in your market but also shows you how you can create or tailor content for that market.
Far from scaling down efforts, the pandemic period has displayed how reaching out can actually help you grow.
Align your content marketing strategies with the needs of the world as it stands now and you will be able to make inroads into new areas.
This will, in turn, boost your traffic, reach, and generate sales from new avenues.