In an earlier post I talked about leveraging traditional marketing efforts, even when engaged in internet marketing activities. If you have an online company, traditional media can be used for awareness campaigns. Though many marketing principles are the same online as offline, traditional media (e.g. print, postcards, magazines) often has an added restriction of local or regional scope that you do not usually find online. Traditional media also has more strict time boundaries than online promotion (SEO, etc). So where and when to market becomes a bigger question offline than with Internet marketing. Google Trends can help.
For example, run a Google Trends report to see in what US cities and what time of year are people using Google to search for pool toys.
In this example, the cities and times of year are not surprising (except maybe for St. Louis and Newark – who knew?). The demand fluctuations in the pool toy market are clearly shown in the time graph. If you run an online pool toy store and want to place local advertisements or partner with local pool stores to drive traffic to your site, these cities could be good starting points.
Try Google Trends with your product or common search terms and see if there are any surprises there.
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