Exploring Consumer Insights: Beyond Surveys with SEO Data Analysis

Hey folks. I’m relatively new here. This looks like a great community so far. I’m not your traditional customer marketer. I come from the world of SEO and have moved into consumer insights after discovering how much we can learn about consumer behavior from search data. I’m curious about methodologies. Do most customer marketers primarily use surveys and interviews to gather insights? Or is there also a mix of data analysis from other sources? I’ve found that search data can be used like a focus group to gather insights. When aggregating thousands of keywords and volume together, and then segmenting them by customer need, we can learn a lot about various customer needs and how they self-organize into similar cohorts. For example, when I “asked” search data to reveal what consumers care most about when seeking business insurance, I found that coverage was by far the biggest concern. This is in stark contrast to people seeking auto insurance that tend to be much more influenced by cost than coverage. I know as marketers we love our traditional demographics, but I thought this was a unique approach to understanding consumer needs.