Google Trends is an awesome tool that businesses can use to understand consumer behaviour. We can use it to discover trends that are beginning to boom, peaking or exploding.
Google trends can also help us to understand and predict consumer behaviour post pandemic. And businesses can leverage this in their marketing, product positioning and overall business strategies.
And yes, people are searching for other topics apart from N95 masks! (In fact, N95 searches have dropped quite significantly in recent weeks). One topic that has exploded in popularity is Self Care. In this article, we dig deeper into product trends that relate to self-care and how you can take advantage of it as a business or brand.
Before you continue, Self Care
At first glance, you wouldn’t think that people are interested in beauty topics during this time.
However, beauty is still important in the iso age as there is still a need to scrub up for Zoom (at least above the waist!). Google trends show that consumers want to know “how to look good on Zoom” and this exact phrase has skyrocketed (in Google searches) from 0 to 100 beginning from March 14th.
Although consumers are in isolation, it’s still important to look good in teleconferences when speaking with their colleagues or clients. That’s why we’re seeing a surge in queries about self-care and certain beauty products. We list some of these products below.Face Masks
Phrases such as “Peel Masks” have seen a 58% increase over the past few weeks as shown below.
Skincare and Footcare
Searches for skincare and footcare have also surged. Consumers often rely on salons to find the resources that they need. With most being stuck at home, they are now turning to the internet for this information.
Hand Moisturiser
Interestingly, queries for hand moisturisers have seen an even larger increase, jumping up 156% since February (April 5-11th vs Feb 16th-22). This is probably because of the skin cracking effects that frequent handwashing has had on people's hands.
Leisurewear
Right now, everyone is wearing leisurewear throughout their day. And we have seen an abnormal increase in demand for sweatpants and track pants over the last month. With more consumers browsing for clothing on their mobile devices, apparel companies should take advantage of this rise in demand and shift their marketing to reach more customers.
How to Take Advantage of the Self Care Trend
Content Marketing
If you are in any kind of health and wellness business, focus your content marketing around self-care. Give tutorials, tips and educational information on how users can practise self-care at home. By doing so, you will likely get higher engagement on your content and more traffic to your site.
In your product descriptions, add more instructional information than usual. For example, add more instructions about how to self-apply “XYZ product” so consumers can know how to use your product before they buy it. With everyone at home right now, consumers need to do everything themselves and will appreciate the extra advice.Also, in a time where returning products is not easy, and consumers want to minimise contact with the outside world, any content that guides users to the right product selections is valuable. So publish content like product guides, reviews and self-care tips with recommendations of products that will help your readers.SEO
If you are fast enough, there is a massive opportunity right now to make sure your website or page shows up in the rankings for new popular keywords. If writing an educational article or page, remember to:- Use the “Google Search Keyword Tool” and “Google Trends Tool” to find the best keywords to target (E.g. "How to" keyword phrases are good phrases to target right now).
- Include your chosen keywords in your copy, URL and title tags (choose 1-2 keywords to focus on per page/article so you don’t dilute your ranking strategy).
Doing the above gives you a better chance to obtain high SEO search rankings for your chosen keywords and as a result, bring you quality website traffic.
As an example of a business that has done this well, "Vaseline" wrote an article about how to deal with dry cracked hands and they are now ranking for a total of 1,100 keywords thanks to this article. That’s a lot of organic traffic that they are now driving to the site because they were smart and fast enough to take advantage of this trend.
By using Google Trends and other similar tools, you can get a head start and take advantage of new consumer trends.
CLICK HERE to download our Free Consumer Behaviour & Trends April 2020 Report (created by Google)
CLICK HERE to stay up to date with the latest COVID marketing trends (including advertising grants)
Zion is a 40 under 40 winner and the co-founder of Alyka, a 3-time AFR Fast 100 Data-Driven Marketing Agency, Telstra Award Finalist and BNIQ Rising Star. Zion and his team won the global Kentico Site of the Year Award for building the Miss Maud E-commerce Website. www.alyka.com.au
By Zion Ong
