Another in a long line of great internet marketing tools from Google is Insights for Search.

It allows you to see search trends for keywords across the globe. You can filter results by country and search term and it has an indicator of news related to chosen keywords, so you can see the effect the media had on search volume.

This is the kind of toy that digital marketers and webmasters play around with for hours, but is it of any use to the small business owner?

Almost certainly. It can help you identify large areas of traffic and see if the number of people looking for what you offer is growing or shrinking.

Pretend you run a magazine and website that reviews cars but you don’t really know where to best spend your time. Using the Google Insights for Search tool will allow you to see the kind of cars that people are interested in exploring further, and therefore the ones you should dedicate more space to. For example, search on “BMW” and add “Mercedes” as a second search term, filter the results to the UK in the past 12 months. The figures show that a lot more people in the UK search for information on BMW models than they do on Mercedes. You now know that, everything else being equal, reviewing BMWs would make your site appeal to a larger audience that one that reviews Mercedes.

You can use this tool to get an idea of where a market is heading and can see if your business is keeping up. Keywords surrounding Payday loans have risen almost 300% in the past 12 months. If your business offers other types of loan then is this an area that you should consider expanding into? If your business already offers Payday loans but your enquiry levels haven’t risen then shouldn’t you fire your marketing team?

One word of caution though. As the tool is still in BETA testing phase I’d take the figures with a pinch of salt and not bet my entire marketing budget on the results shown.

The number of people in the world that use the internet has surpassed 1,000,000,000. According to Comscore, a company that tracks web usage, December 2008 was the first time that one billion internet users went online within a single month. It could be as soon as 2015 that this figure exceeds two billion.

There are a number of predictions regarding the implications that this growing user base has in store for businesses. It might be worth bearing these in mind when looking at your digital marketing strategy:

E-commerce will carry on growing. It typically takes people a few years from their first internet experience to when they are confident enough to start spending online. With this in mind sales are expected to more than double from where they currently stand, as more and more users start to shop online. Many of the early adopters thought nothing of spending money on websites, no matter how they looked or worked, but the same isn’t true of the new users. To take advantage of the whole user base an e-commerce site must be user friendly, approachable and built with the needs of technophobes in mind. 

User demographics will change. In the 90’s the main internet users were people already in the world of technology, often referred to as geeks, and eager to embrace the web.  This isn’t so true these days. The number of older people browsing the internet is in the hundreds of millions and quickly growing, as is the number of younger users, with digital media a part of the curriculum in many primary schools. Another change is in the education of surfers. People without higher education and IT qualifications are becoming heavy internet users, and as services such as broadband continue getting cheaper and more widely used this will continue.

International usage shifts. It is believed that by 2015 over 85% of internet users will be from outside the US. China and India, in particular, have seen huge growth, and this doesn’t show any signs of slowing. English will start to be used less and less and foreign money will become more readily available online. Businesses that have separate websites, or pages, that target and attract people in various countries will flourish, and international sites that don’t match what local sites offer will not retain the interest, or receive the money, of surfers in that locality.

It was only a decade or so ago that in order to present and sell your products to someone from the other side of the world would have cost huge amounts of time and money. These days though you only need to find out what people are looking for and make sure your website comes up the next time they search for it. With the minimum amount of cost and fuss, technology can take care of all the time, currency and language differences that have previously plagued international trade. With a few clever tools, your website can act as a 24 hour, international salesman.

The beauty of the internet, and the reason why so many businesses use it as their main marketing avenue, is that any company, including yours, has the ability to sell to this gigantic market. Just make sure that you take the needs of the second billion users into account when trying to win the first.

There is a lot of talk in the online marketing world about how large a part digital marketing played in the success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He certainly embraced the internet, in particular the social networking platforms, and reportedly spent over $16 million on online advertising during the run up to voting day.

His digital campaigns included spending over $640,000 on Facebook, creating profiles on MySpace and Twitter, using search engine optimisation for his sites, blogging whilst on the road, and creating a YouTube channel.

Whilst most of those are fairly standard ways of raising awareness and promoting something on the web, the Obama team also came up with some original advertising. A clever tax calculator was placed on his site and links to it were spread around the web. The calculator shows just how much tax an individual could save under Obama’s proposed tax laws when compared to McCain’s and the number of direct links to it stands at over 6000, according to Yahoo!.

Obama’s marketing team also used the internet to communicate with hard to reach audiences. By putting billboard adverts inside the online version of the Xbox 360 game, Burnout Paradise, they took steps towards a demographic that McCain struggled to engage.

It is clear that the people advising the Obama administration knew the benefits that these digital marketing activates held. By having a presence on the social media networks Obama was opening himself up to his audience and coming across far more personable and  approachable than his competitors. By placing things like the tax calculator on his site he took advantage of viral linking, where people started broadcasting the message further on his behalf.

There is no doubt that these digital marketing campaigns helped Obama win the presidency. Future politicians will have taken note and the next time an election is looming it will be interesting to see the new and creative ways they use to web to get surfers to vote for them.