When it comes to starting a dropshipping business, the first step is usually the hardest. However, if you know how to use Google Trends, you can will be able to be decisive about a plan and ultimately put your worries and fears to rest.
So you run an eCommerce store, and you’ve been hunting for ways to keep your operating costs down.
You have considered dropshipping, a business model that lets you order products from manufacturers and have them delivered to your consumer without having to stock them up in a warehouse. Some say it’s a brilliant cost-cutting measure and even a brilliant way to raise revenue streams. Others think the profit margins are so small that it’s just not worth trying out.
Maybe you’re not sure whether to give this drop shipping thing a go or steer clear from potentially wasting your precious time with it.
Whatever your thoughts are about dropshipping as a means of eliminating inventory storage costs or making extra bucks, it’s not as simple as many claim.
If you’re not selling products that are in high demand, any cumulative gains you realize may not be worth your while.
For one thing, it’s a very competitive niche. There are lots of people jostling for ever-shrinking bits of the eCommerce market. As players in this space continue to search for an advantage over their rivals, they continue to drop their prices to new levels of low. The manufacturers aren’t doing any favors with their prices either. They are in business to make money, just like every dropshipping outfit.
Let’s put this plainly: there are opportunities with this business model, but they aren’t lying around for the average Joe. It’s up to you to find them wherever they might be hidden.
Thankfully, there is at least one easy way to uncover these opportunities. It’s Google Trends, a tool which lets you know what people in your locality or around the world are looking for with its search engines.
It displays the most popular search queries of the moment, as well as over different periods from the past. A lot of this information is depicted in charts that are easy to understand.
Here’s why this concerns you: when a lot of people are looking for particular products, their searches will turn up in Google Trends. And if you use it, you’ll be able to tell the most-searched-for merchandise within any given period.
If you know anything about SEO, you’ll probably realize straight away the potential gold mine this resource could be for you or for any other dropshipping venture, eCommerce store, or businesses in general.
Source: Google Trends
But if this isn’t clicking for you yet, here’s a rundown of some of the reasons why Google Trends could be the sweetener for your dropshipping business.
Some trends chart the use of specific search terms over long periods. With this, you’re able to tell how the levels of interest in certain products have increased or reduced in any given length of time.
You can view these products (or whatever trends you’re investigating) in categories, and find out the level of interest in various products and services segmented by industries.
You can see how queries for different sorts of things spike or drop off in particular seasons. In many cases, this helps you stay on top of seasonal demands.
In certain cases, you may be able to see how frequently your competition gets searched by potential customers. Other insights, such as locations in which your rivals may be doing better than you are, can be gotten as well.
In summary, we’re not just talking about Google Trends finding products that are in demand. It’s also about collecting vital insights about where your markets are, who your closest competitors are, and what the prospects might be for selling certain kinds of merchandise.
Before we get into how Google Trends can help you make more money via dropshipping, let’s take a look at its most important features and how they work.
The Google Trends app has options for viewing search terms by interest over time, interest by region, interest by related topics, and related queries. It also charts the most-searched-for (or top) topics in real-time.
Interest over time
Interest by region / subregion
Related Queries & breakout topics
Also worth mentioning are the breakout topics. These are topics garnering serious attention and pulling a lot of search traffic. If there’s a product within your reach that’s a breakout, you might want to look into it quickly before it tapers off.
But this sort of ‘hit’ rarely happens. If you are only just getting serious about dropshipping or working to change the range of products you sell via this method, you’re much better off comparing longer-term trends of viable products and finding out which ones have performed best over time.
When you compare, watch for items that show slow and steady growth. They typically have trend lines that aren’t very steep but tilting upwards on the average. Also look out for growth that’s steep and sudden, like in a chart where the trend line has shot up and forward closer to the present. It’s usually a sign that something has spiked demand for that product or interest in that brand.
You should also have an eye on the regional trends displayed by the app. This feature could give you clues about what sort of products are in high demand in various regions. Such information can help you tailor your shipping offerings to meet the unique needs of people living in these locations.
With Google Trends, dropshipping becomes about delivering stuff that people are looking for. When there is a large audience looking for a product via Google search, it’s a good indication that the product has a sizeable pool of potential customers you can market to.
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You already know that the demand for any given product varies over different regions.
What Google Trends does is to give you a glimpse into what those differences are. For instance, if you’re going to reach potential customers in two locales with ads, you’ll want to know how to allocate ad spend for the different campaigns.
While Google Trends won’t help you with exact sharing formulas, it will let you know the difference between the levels of interest in both towns for the product you intend to offer. This will, in turn, inform your decision on how effort you should expend in reaching target audiences in each locale.
Also, the tips gotten from this tool can be used to drive more targeted digital marketing initiatives. You can mine trending keywords from Google Trends and plug them into your online content. When combined with other SEO strategies, this could help your content get more clicks and score higher search result rankings.
Google Trends deliver accurate insights that are integral to the success of your region-specific marketing campaigns.
Deals are usually designed to get more people interested in the things you’re selling from manufacturers, and ultimately, raise sales and revenues. But unless you’re offering deals for things that people in the areas you’re targeting actually want, you may not achieve the result you hope for.
Leveraging Google Trends can help bring you closer to your goal.
The trend lines you see are not just summaries of droll statistics. They represent the stories of real people: their problems, hopes and dreams, expectations, their search for a solution, and their painstaking review of answers they think are viable.
These lines and charts deliver real-time insights into the major concerns and pain points of your target audience, as well as tidbits into the viability of a product and inside scoops about their preferences that you could exploit in your brand messaging to draw them to your products and services.
With Google Trends, finding products and niches for dropshipping is much easier. One really nice thing about this tool is that it’s free to use. That’s a whole wealth box of analytics available to you at no cost whatsoever.
Now that you’ve been introduced to the joys of this app, go on and deploy it to devastating effect. But don’t just build your eCommerce venture on its trends. If you can, compare them with data from actual research, and talk to the people on the ground as much as possible.
