Google Trends doesn´t have to be your only option to create a winning marketing strategy. In fact, strategic marketing makes for smarter business.

But what if you don’t have a big budget? In a mastermind breakout session on InKnowVation Small Business Fridays, Keron Rose shared “search listening” as a key to step up your marketing strategy.

It’s no surprise that Google collects the most data of any company in the world. This also makes it a repository of business insights beyond Google Trends—if you know how to harness it.

“Search listening” is a strategy that reveals what search terms potential customers are using to find businesses like yours. Specifically, it can help you:

1) Understand your audience – The goal is to get a clear understanding of your prospects’ demographics, pain points, wants, desires, and behaviors, which can inform how you deploy your marketing efforts.

2) Keep an eye on your competition – Identifying what makes your competitors successful can work for you, too. How is their audience finding them? How are they getting traction?

3) Model the industry leaders – Use leaders in your space as a benchmark for what your industry wants. What trends are they taking advantage of? What’s driving their new offerings? How are they repositioning their legacy products and services? This gives you a better understanding of the needs and issues your industry and facing and how you can create offerings to meet them.

4) Create aligned content – Content marketing is key. Stop guessing and create content that attracts your ideal customers. Search listening makes that possible by revealing what problems they’re trying to solve. All you need to do is share how your solutions help.

Marketing strategies and search listening

So, how exactly do you “do” search listening? First, Keron recommends checking out four search listening tools:

• Google Trends: A free service delivering insights on trending topics.
• Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster: Pull data from top search engines.
• Ubersuggest: Analyzes websites and topics for content and demographic data.
• AnswerThePublic: Extracts data on Google search queries.

Getting more business insights

Then he suggests walking through these steps to uncover your own business insights:

1) Create a list of your products, services, industry keywords, and competitors’ names. Then run that list through Google Trends to help you guide brand and product development, discover new prospects, target your marketing efforts, and more.

2) Make a list of your competitors’ websites, put them into Ubersuggest, and find out their top-performing websites and keywords.

3) Set up your Google Business, enter your business information, and put your products into the catalog.

Don’t miss Keron’s entire presentation, including his live demo of Google Trends and AnswerThePublic, along with other tips and tricks to supercharge your marketing strategy and build your business!