Entrepreneurs are encouraged to include publicly available Google Trends tool in their marketing strategy to gain competitive advantage as they start or grow their businesses in the next few years.

Gela Lopez, industry analytical head at Google Southeast Asia, said the tool for insights enables them to research market trends and opportunities even amid the challenges of the pandemic.

Lopez said it provides business insights about consumer behavior, industry trends, brands, and what are popular now and in the future.

“Brand insights help you unlock opportunities for individual brands or even competitor brands by focusing on questions about how people search for that brand. Was there opinion or perception of that brand?” she said in a webinar.

Lopez said businesses can visit trends.google.com to access the tool, then select the country they would like to perform searches and customize the time period of the results they are looking for.

She said they can compare their brand’s popularity with other brands and understand region performance and find new markets.

“For example, if you are planning to sell products online, it would be good to understand how your categories (are) being searched in Google shopping search. If you are in a YouTube channel or a form of YouTube content, you may want to look at people who are searching for videos on that specific product or service. You can then start to compare your brand versus another brand and see the interest overtime. You can also compare any other topic against the other, say one food trend versus the other…,” she added.

Lopez said through Google Trends tool, businesses can also quickly see how trends change regionality to influence where to focus their efforts and find new opportunities.

She cited as an example the huge opportunities to sell sports equipment directly to people online amid the worldwide shift towards in-home exercise.

Lopez said “step-change” shows a sustained rise in searches for a specific topic so “this is a signal that one must plan to capture this opportunity both in the short and in the long term.”

“Here, we see a step-in change behavior in online payments. Meaning, as businesses, we should be able to provide online payment options as a basic offering. Let’s say you are thinking of providing mobile payment transfer options, looking at the shape of the trend tells you that it’s (a) worthy effort,” she said.

“Lastly speed up. It makes sense to overhaul your business and digitize it. Looking at the shape of ecommerce searches tells you that this is the direction that it will continueÂ…,” she added.