The story of Share of Search - Catching the Pulse of a Market and its Consumers (no cookies required)
Measure and understand your market, Marketing Effectiveness and Trends
For decades it’s been near impossible for organisations to show what is actually creating and driving your share of market. Making it hard for marketers to prove the value of their work and business-leaders to know how much to invest in it.
Today, 81% of us use search when we are looking to buy something, it could be that car we dream of or it could be a certain dress or jacket. Share of Search has become an indicator for demand.
As proof to the pudding, Share of Search has been shown by Les Binet & James Hankins to predict market share development (for some categories, enough time to course-correct and invest in success or steer away from disaster).
By making the number of times people type a brand’s name into a search engine relative to its competitors, we are able to capture brand top-of-mind and remove bias from respondents forced responses, low response rates, overall category growth or seasonal fluctuations.
Why Share of Search is important: The voice of the customer
“The central concept of marketing is the concept of market orientation, of being able to understand the customer,”
“Our prime directive is not to do digital media or AI. Our prime directive is to bring the voice of the customer into the organisation. No one else does that except marketers.” Mark Ritson
Ritson recommends a ‘180 swivel’, whereby companies turn to look at themselves from the point of view of their customers.
“It sounds so basic, but most companies never do that,” he said. The process can show the market and perceived competitors in an entirely different context. It can also highlight a profound lack of understanding of what people outside the marketing industry bubble need or want. (source Mark Ritson)
Search Data, Catching the Pulse of a Market and its Consumers (no cookies required)
The benefits of search data go beyond SEO-focused keyword research. It is a valuable resource for both market and product research, too. In fact, it can even be integrated into all research types and intelligence analyses where listening to and decoding the consumer’s voice plays an important role. Finding ways to look closer at how consumers search for products online and which new search patterns are emerging could offer useful insights.
Moreover with increasing barriers in the tracking of user behaviour, any additional data sources that echo the consumer's voice, become highly useful.