What happens offline drives online

Every event, be it global or local, creates its own spike online as millions of people head to the web to enter search queries - and understanding this behaviour is key for marketers tailoring their online campaigns.

Barometer

Looking back at what people were searching for is useful, but search is also like a barometer that can help forecast what people will search for in the future. Knowing that offline drives online allows us to be prepared for spikes around known events. For those events that aren't predictable, we have to be on our toes and be ready to act quickly.

Looking at an international example, by October 2008 the credit crunch in Britain had already begun to affect what consumers were searching for online. Some of Google's findings could have been predicted, with searches by worried Britons for redundancy insurance leaping 450%, and a fall in the number of searches for more expensive products. For example, fitted kitchen searches were down by 17%, and searches for homes in Spain down by 28%.

But there were also some surprising finds. As people lost confidence in banks, they started looking for alternative options for safekeeping their money: the number of searches for home safes were up by 150% and safe savings up by 900% compared to 2007.

Search query spikes

Closer to home, South Africa's load shedding policies in early 2008 resulted in a variety of new search query spikes between December 2007 and March 2008.

Google searches for Eskom rose by 2500%; simultaneously, searches for generators increased by 2000%, demonstrating that the public responded immediately by researching alternative energy sources. Meanwhile, searches for solar power rose by 800%. If you are a company selling generators, solar panels or any other kind of alternative energy, you simply can't ignore facts like these.

Looking at other local findings, let's take a look at the Cape Argus. It's the most popular cycling race in the country, with some 35 000 participants and 2000 international visitors descending upon Cape Town. The gruelling race requires huge preparation beforehand and many decisions need to be made: where to stay, how to transport your bike, where to have it serviced before the race, among other organisational and operational questions. And, of course, spectators want to know where the best viewing points are, and so on.

Take advantage of

It's hardly surprising that come February/March, we see a 55% increase in searches for Cape Argus. The Argus is thus another great example of an event that online marketers can take advantage of, because of the search traffic it generates.

If we turn to the new year and look at January 2009, we see a spike around searches for jobs and UNISA (among other educational institutions) as millions of people hit the job market and search for work, or search for what to study this year. It is well known that January is a boom time for job seekers and Google's search results bear this out. This highly predictable seasonal spike in online searches is the ideal opportunity for recruitment companies, book stores and tertiary education institutions to launch search marketing campaigns to capture a market specifically looking for more information.

This February we will likely see a spike in online searches for the results of Trevor Manuel's annual budget speech and, on a less serious note, Valentine's Day-related searches will also explode.

What other events in 2009 can we predict? Even if they are smaller, more specific events that pertain only to your industry, we will still see an equivalent spike in search traffic, which provides businesses with an opportunity to market their products to people searching the web.

2010

This brings us to the single biggest event on our horizon: the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The best known offline event happening in South Africa is less than 500 days away and searches for the world cup have already risen by 64% during January alone.

The event may only be in 2010 but hundreds of thousands of people who plan to attend have already started making plans. And the launch point for any plan is to hit the Internet and search for flights, accomodation, transport, restaurants, tickets, places of interest - the list goes on. These searches are happening right now and businesses need to take advantage of the massive increase in online interest to market their offerings.

Understanding that offline events drive online search, and being able to either predict or react quickly to offline events, is one of the key skills required to boost the results of your online search marketing efforts and capture new market share at astounding rates.

Any business can use free tools such as Insights for Search to do research and help them respond and predict trends in their industries. In turn, they can thus target consumers with relevant advertising.

Using Insights for Search to help you run your business:

1. First of all, Insights for Search is helpful in determining the seasonality of demand for your product. Notice the striking annual spike in search for jobs in January every year.
   
   
2. You can track the interest in the fuel price and the interest rates and the inflation by South Africans over the past 12 months. Notice how the news in the media will drive the search queries for all the terms.
   
   
3. Track on a daily and a weekly basis what the top searches are for the your category and who South Africans are searching for. You can see the trends for various print publications' peaks of interest as well as the interest in different phone manufactures, as well as which provinces the searches are arising from.

Having this knowledge available to anyone at their fingertips will allow your business to tailor their marketing spend and be more resilient in the current financial times, without having to spend money on conducting ad-hoc research.