Tags
Creative Campaigns, Digital Marketing, Gillette, Google Adwords, Google Correlate, Google Insights for Search, Google Trends, Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing
People often use Google tools in order to improve their SEO (like keyword search). However, Google can also be used to create excellent content. By using Google, you can pinpoint what’s popular in a certain region, within a certain time frame which can inspire creative, relevant content.
Google Tools that will Help with Content Creation
Here are a few tools that could help with your campaign:
Google Insights for Search – lets you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. It will show you top search results, top locations for that search term, and (what I find most interesting for marketers) rising search results.
The above example shows ‘recipe’ searches for Dallas. It also separates the top search locations (in surrounding areas). If you’re a food producer, you can use this information to develop recipes that people are looking for, then use Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to target specific regions with your content.
Google Correlate – shows you how search terms correlate with real life events. For example, could someone figure out what terms are often researched during the Olympics? Yes they can!
The example above shows that when people in Canada were searching for the term ‘Olympics’, they were also searching for the term ‘medals’ (r=0.9632, this means a strong correlation between the two terms). This type of data could be useful to figure out related keywords or content that people are looking for over a certain time period.
Google Trends – shows the search volume patterns over time for a specific search term. It also gives you which subregions and cities have the highest search volume for that term. This can help you determine in which area certain topics are most relevant/interesting, which can guide your marketing campaigns.
The above example shows ‘social media’ search volumes in Canada.
How Gillette used Google to Guide Their Content Creation
About a month ago, I went to the Atlantic Internet Marketing conference, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Collin Douma (@collindouma), Global Digital Planning Leader – Gillette BAL at BBDO gave a keynote about how to incorporate interests and demographics in the creative process of a marketing campaign.
BBDO did a search about shaving on Google (using some of the tools above). They noticed that almost all of the content that was created about shaving referenced shaving from the neck up. However, they concluded from their data that over 10 million search queries on Google in the US were for shaving from the neck down. Needless to say, Gillette jumped to the challenge, took this data, and created a marketing campaign that people were interested in. The campaign, which comprised of YouTube videos, focused on shaving everything bellow the neck. It worked! (Collin mentioned that sales increased significantly during this campaign). Here’s one of their HILARIOUS videos that they produced:
**Caution: This video might not be appropriate for all workplaces. That being said, it’s hilarious, so watch it anyways 😛 **
This campaign was so original that it got Perez Hilton‘s (@PerezHilton) stamp of approval! It also got a tweet out of Nicole Richie (@NicoleRichie)
Gillette has truly inspired me to buy one of there razors. Clearly they care about there customers http://www.youtube.com/user/gillette
— Nicole Richie (@nicolerichie) May 28, 2009
So what do you think about Gillettes’ creative idea? Pretty funny right? Would you use Google Tools to get similar data to develop creative content? Have you ever used the mentioned Google Tools before? How? Leave a comment bellow! 🙂
danielghebert 
Google can be a great tool to find content ideas, especially when you are drawing a blank. The keyword tool provides the best opportunity to me, because as I decide on a title Google will often times give me other title variations that might give me a whole new idea.
Although at this point I rarely ever use Google anymore to research topics. You should be able to find a wealth of great topics that your audience cares about just from your daily work. Is it the most creative or go viral? Not really, but I know it’s exactly what my audience cares about and that’s all I’m looking for.
Thanks for the comment Jay!
I’m similar to you on this one. I have used Google Tools to find topics of interests before, but I mostly just blog about my own experiences with social media, and what worked/ didn’t work for me. I find adding that personal touch to it fits with what my community wants.
This post was more intended for inspiring marketing campaigns (like Gillette) instead of inspiring blog posts :P. Google can be used in many different ways I guess, haha.
I’ve used many methods over the years to increase both the ease of writing and popularity of my blogging articles with some success but nothing that I’ve found makes it truly easy or fast to put out blogging articles.
But I can say that with everything I’ve tried I’ve not used Google for this purpose. However I will sure try it after this article and I can see how using it to help narrow down topics and key words could help.
I guess my biggest problem is that most of the topics and such that such Google searches would turn up would be outside of my main area of interest which is taxes and business consulting. Any good search will show that at any given time few people are searching for anything relating to those topics. But I’m sure that it would still show what those few terms would be and that’s still a good thing to know.
Anyway I’ll sure be testing this idea as an aid to my current outlining method. I can see how it can only aide and any help is welcome as anyone who writes blogs can understand all to readily.
So thanks for a very detailed and informative technical method to use Google in what I think is a really creative way.
Thanks for the comment Frank!
Google Insights for Search has a lot of different filters, so you might be able to find relevant topics. You could also do a location search for where you live, and then look at the trending topics for that location. Using this data, you could come up with creative ways to incorporate taxes, business consulting, and the trending search terms that Google gave you all within a blog post. This way you would stay true to your blog’s roots (taxes and consulting), while still have an element of interest for the people doing searches in that location (trending topics).
Remember, not everyone is searching for taxes or business consulting, but they might be searching for something else. If you can create a correlation between the topics they are most interested in and your services, you both end up winning, as they will find your content more interesting.
Interesting stuff, I have got to be honest I have never used Google for this as my posts are more experience based, at the moment. I must admit that I am struggling a little now so I may well use these tools, Really great insights thank you so much.
I have bookmarked this post (i promise I am not spam lol) to refer back to.
Thanks for the comment Paul!
I’m glad you found this post useful! I haven’t used Google much for this purpose either, but I know what to do if I ever get writer’s block, or if ever I want to develop a marketing campaign. Google has a lot of neat free tools to play with 🙂
Hi Daniel,
This is awesome. I have thought about doing something similar, and instead of writing what I want to write, I was thinking of finding what people actually want to read (by checking the Google stats). It’s a great way to get more attention, but I would think that it would be harder to write (maybe not if you’re a professional writer).
I usually write about my personal experiences and that makes it easy to write. But, reading your examples made me think of using the tools and stats and adding the personal experience to them. For instance, I have many personal experiences related to the olympics and it would be fairly easy to turn that into a blog post 🙂
Very useful.