What my wife can teach you about search marketing

We don’t change our bath towels every year like fashionable folks, but this was getting ridiculous—they were eight years old and they were plain wearing out. But my wife admitted that she has always wanted large bath towels—much larger than what we had. Being a crack searcher-shopper, she was determined to figure out what to buy. What she looked for and what she found should be a lesson to every search marketer.

Linda was Googling her way around the Internet trying to find the towels she wanted. She told me, “After much searching, I started wondering if there’s any standard for the size of a bath towel. I wanted a big bath towel. In exasperation, I asked these keywords, ‘What size are bath towels?'”
And what did Google tell her in response? Bed, Bath, and Beyond had the definitive answer on towel size.
When she found this answer, she learned that she probably didn’t want a bath towel at all, but rather a bath sheet, which she had never heard of before. Bath sheets were very large–just the size she was looking for. And guess who she bought our bath sheets from? Right you are: Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
What can search marketers learn from this story? They must answer customers’ questions to make sales. My wife didn’t know what to call what she wanted, which makes it hard to find with search. But the moment she got her question answered, she was ready to buy.

Image by Walsh via Flickr

If you sell bath sheets and you expect everyone to know the name, well, you didn’t make this sale.
If you’re interested in more tips on search marketing, including the latest trends, register for my 90-minute search marketing seminar for Wednesday January 21st. Use the code MM20 when you check out and get 20% off the regular $99 price.