A couple of years ago I wrote about a Google tool called Life Events, which interprets people’s search activity to anticipate what they’re likely to do in the near future.
When you think about it, that’s a bit of a superhero power to own. Marketers love to know what people are doing right now. Knowing what they’ll do soon is like taking that ability and dialling it up by a factor of 10. It means you can get the jump on your competition by connecting with those customers before anyone else does, but without investing months or years of relationship building to make the sale.
In 2017, when Life Events was still in nappies, the range of life events (eg, moving home, buying a car) that it could predict from people’s online behaviour was limited. Since then, like any healthy child does, it’s grown bigger and more able.
In the process, it’s become especially useful to any marketer who sells into the home.
Life stages that Live Events can now alert you to include:
- Recently Renovated
- Renovating Home Soon
- Moving Soon
- Recently Moved
- Purchasing a Home Soon
- Recently purchased a Home
- Recently Retired
- Retiring Soon
- Adding a Cat to the Household Soon
- Adding a Dog to the household Soon
- Recently added a cat to the household
- Recently added a dog to the household
If you’re wondering how big a deal this is, the short answer is it’s a really big deal. Traditional marketing targets demographics – millennials, baby boomers, and so on. But that model’s becoming more outdated thanks to tools like Life Events, which use machine learning to predict what people will do in the near future based on what they’re doing now (or just did).
In the words of one blog writer, if you’re still targeting millennials, you might as well be targeting buyers by their star sign. “Consumers going through life events are much more likely to have similar purchase needs than consumers that are merely in the same age, gender or income demographic,” said research company Networked Insights.
Sonos, a company known for pretty cool home sound systems, saw these results from life events targeting:
- 50 percent lift in ad recall
- 35 percent lift in purchase intent
- 5x lift in people searching for Sonos on Google
If you market products for the home – anything from cat food to high-end electronics – and are considering spending money on search advertising, stop now. Your competitors are doing that already, and all you’ll achieve is being listed alongside them in search results. That’s not bad – but you may be able to do much better.
Talk to us about Life Events. It may be a great way to get a serious edge on your competition and boost sales by identifying people just before they’re ready to open their wallets – at a time when your competitors are still ignoring them, the poor fools.
