My teenage daughter and her younger brother were kidding around, when he had an idea for something silly. Dwight removed the stick-on name tag from his shirt and adhered it to his sister’s knee. She showed herself to her mom and said, “Look, mom! What do you think my knee’s name is?” My wife laughed and said, “Dwight.” And my daughter said, “No Mom, I mean the other knee.”
It made me laugh the first time I heard it, because her response was so unexpected. You know it’s goofy that she has a name tag on her knee, so you assume that you know what she is talking about, but you actually don’t. It’s very human to analyze a situation and make assumptions about communication—it saves us lots of time, except when it throws off totally off the scent.
We have this same situation with our customers. Sometimes we think we know what is on a customer’s mind, but we actually don’t. We can craft all the survey questions in the world, but if we fail to provide the choice that fits a customer’s mindset, we might not truly find out what they are thinking. Or we can offer open-ended survey questions, but they take a lot more time and money to aggregate the results, and they can sometimes be misinterpreted if categorized improperly.
That’s one of the reasons that I love search marketing. You can think of the search box on your site as a “fill in the blank” customer survey. You get unfiltered insight into what customers are really interested in.
You don’t have to know ahead of time what to ask about—they just tell you. You don’t need to make any assumptions about which choices should be offered. You don’t need to go through the pain and the expense and the waiting associated with fill-in-the blank surveys.
You can count the occurrences of search keywords to spot new customer interests that are beginning to crop up, or to note changes in the popularity of subjects that you have been tracking for some time. All without the unavoidable bias that multiple-choice survey answers introduce and without the expense of interpreting an open-ended survey.
If you’ve been used to taking a utilitarian view of your site’s search engine, treating it as just a tool to help customers find what they are looking for, step back and take a fresh look. Perhaps your site search engine is a free source of market research that you’ve overlooked all along.
