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Speed Dial: 60-Second Marketing Insight Newsletter
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Want to find information faster and with less
frustration?
Searching the Web for useful information can be exasperating. Type in a search with parameters that
are too broad, and you can get hundreds of thousands of results. Too narrow, and you come up
empty-handed.
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These Simple Strategies Can Save You Time and Hassle
With a few quick tricks and techniques, you’re more likely to be able to find exactly what you’re
looking for. Here are some of my favorites:
1) First, the basics: are you using addition & subtraction to your
advantage?
- Many of you do this already, but it’s worth a reminder. Type your search
terms in using quotations and then separate them with the plus sign (for words you want to add) or minus sign (for
words you want to exclude).
Example: “Marie Elwood” +“marketing” -“Nova Scotia” returns a number of results related to yours truly
as opposed to Dr. Marie Elwood, a distinguished elderly Canadian professor who is also apparently a world-class
ceramics expert.
2) Dig out useful reports and presentations using "filetype:"
-
There is a treasure trove of information hidden away in reports and presentations, and if you just do a basic
Google search like the one above, you'll be less likely to find this valuable data. Instead, type in
your search terms along with filetype:pdf, filetype:doc, or filetype:ppt to discover some real
gems.
Example: if you go to www.google.com and do a search on
“toothpaste” +”trends” filetype:pdf, you’ll find some fascinating goodies. Try it again with filetype:doc and
filetype:ppt. You'll get different-- but still very relevant- - results.
3) Use finance.yahoo.com as a springboard for current corporate information.
-
Sites like Hoovers.com can sell you detailed corporate reports. If you’re just looking for a good overview,
however, you’ll find it for free at www.finance.yahoo.com.
Example: Enter “General Mills Inc” to get a sense of the useful data that Yahoo can retrieve for you.
(Of course, you’ll also want to go to a company’s actual website to look at its annual reports, press
releases, & communication priorities).
4) Read highly-detailed industry information in free articles and
archives.
- When was the last time you sat down and read ‘Chain Drug Review’ cover to
cover? How about the Cincinnati ‘Business Courier’? They may or may not be especially useful to you on a regular
basis, but when you need specific information, trade magazines and local business journals can be indispensible.
Www.findarticles.com and www.bizjournals.com/search are my favorite sites for finding pertinent
industry data.
Build On This: If you find a periodical that’s especially useful to you, you can search its online
archives super-quickly. Let’s say you’ve discovered that ‘Progressive Grocer’ is extremely helpful to you as a
packaged goods marketer, and you’re interested in learning about the dog food market. Just go to www.google.com and then type in “dog food” site:www.progressivegrocer.com.
You’ll get everything that has the words “dog food” on the entire www.progressivegrocer.com website- - 295 results.
5) Tag-team LinkedIn & Google to find just who you’re looking for:
- Most
of you have a free profile on www.LinkedIn.com, but have you noticed that
the website is now obscuring the names of the people you might like to meet if they're outside your '3rd-degree' of
separation? You can pay LinkedIn to reveal those hidden names, or you can find them yourself on Google for
free.
Example: Let’s say I’d like to meet a marketing director at Newell Rubbermaid. In LinkedIn’s ‘search’
box, I type in marketing director, Newell Rubbermaid- - and I get 101 results. I scroll down, and I decide that
Kelly W. is the person I really want. But what’s Kelly’s last name? I only have a free account, so LinkedIn won’t
tell me. No problem. I see Kelly’s title is “Marketing Research Leader”, so I just go to www.google.com and type in what I've already found out: “kelly” +“marketing research
leader” +“newell rubbermaid” +“linkedin”. Google links me right back to Kelly’s LinkedIn profile, and "Kelly W." is
now revealed as Kelly Ware.
6) Use www.whitepages.com to find addresses or discover
who called you (reverse telephone number searches).
7) Name drop to find sales figures by industry, category, and brands- - especially for grocery store
items.
- It can be extremely difficult to find annual sales figures for a
particular category or brand sold in a grocery store, but you can sometimes dig it out if you patiently combine
several of the techniques above. Detailed data is collected by store scanning machines and sold to
large firms by companies like SymphonyIRI (formerly Information Resources Inc.), Nielsen, Datamonitor,
and Mintel. Now that you know this, try using "your search term" +"sales" + "Information Resources" (or one of the
other names mentioned above).
Example: If I go to www.google.com and type in "Swiffer",
"Information Resources", "52", "2010", I get a New York Times article telling me that the brand
sold $325.4 million in the 52 weeks (scanner data is measured weekly increments) that ended January 24, 2010.
Note the use of "52"- - it's key for finding annual sales data, and unless you've worked in brand
management, it's not a search term you would think to use, but it's an extremely powerful secret
ingredient.
Putting Search Data in Its Place - A Stepping Stone for Better Primary Research
There you have
it, my top seven web search techniques. As a marketing strategist who uses first-hand research to help companies
identify, evaluate, and pursue new business opportunities, this sort of secondary research helps me ask smarter
questions and get more useful answers for my clients. Better information, better results.
Thanks for joining me today, and I’ll see you on May 24th with more practical marketing insights…
- Marie
P.S. If this article was useful to you, pass it along... who can you help
today?
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