Times have changed, haven’t they? Doing business now is not the same as it was doing business 10, or 5, or even just 2 years ago. The whole saying around, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” in this digital age is now a total recipe for failure because without reinventing and adapting to the digital trends, your business will be left behind.

At the 2018 eWomenNetwork Conference and Business Expo, we brought in the Google Director of Google Marketing Solutions in the US, Meghan Yuhasz, to talk about the shifts in consumers expectations and how it is impacting our bottom line.

Her content was SO rich that we decided that we couldn’t just keep it to ourselves. We are on a mission to help one million women each achieve one million dollars in annual revenue after all, which is exactly why we have partnered up with Google to bring Life Transformation Expert, Sandra Yancey, for our 10th Annual Women’s Success Summit along with the Grow with Google experts to share live in action how you can grow big through influence and succeed in this new digital age.

Let’s take a look at just a few of the ways that Meghan has seen a shift in the marketplace in this micro-moments world and how your business can keep up with the joneses with Google solutions.

So, how have consumer behaviors changed?

The statistics show a definite trend in consumer behavior. Today’s fast paced and easy access environment has resulted in consumers becoming more curious, more demanding, and more impatient. When I look at myself, I definitely believe that’s the case, and it’s not just because I’m a millennial.

Consumer curiosity is at a high because they can instantaneously and easily find almost any answer to any question in just a few taps on their phone or a few clicks on the computer. Did you know that “15% of all searches that happen on Google each year are brand new searches?”

It just shows how curious people are becoming… “because we know we CAN know everything, we must know everything.” So, given the number of decisions consumers have to make these days, each decision needs to be an informed one.

Consumer demands are stronger than ever because of the ease of which we are able to find exactly what it is that we want. Did you know that “in the past 2 years, videos with review in the title had more than 50,000 years’ worth of watch time on mobile alone?” And we’re just talking about video reviews!

Besides the access to over a lifetime worth of information around products and services to ensure that they meet our demands, we are also able to hone in on our search more niched down than ever. “Over the past 2 years, searches from the term ‘best’ grew over 80%,” and I’m sure we have ALL done it.

Do you ever recall searching for the ‘best’ tourist attractions in any given city, or the ‘best’ restaurants? Why settle for just Italian when you can easily access the ‘best’ Italian? That’s the consumer mindset today and the need to keep up with the demand is not only important, it’s a must!

Lastly, the final big shift we’ve seen in consumers today is that they are more impatient than ever. That’s right, consumers know what they want and when they want it, and with so many options available at their fingertips, there isn’t a reason they can’t have it. “Search interest in “open now” has grown 3X in the past 2 years.” The newly empowered consumer is expecting immediate, personal, helpful assistance at the right place at the right time.

Now here’s what you as a business can do:

YouTube

YouTube is the number one video site for influencing purchase decisions. “Did you know that YouTube has 1.8 billion unique monthly visitors to their site and that each hour people are watching one billion hours of content?” The reach is enormous and YouTube has numerous ways for small business owners to potentially triple their sales through ads that can be as short as 6 seconds!

Surprisingly the effectiveness of these 6 second “bumper” ads is huge as a study shows that 90% of people can recall a 6 second ad on YouTube. The catch is, what Google found when working with these small & medium businesses was that they either had zero video content for these ads or if they did, the quality was poor.

As a solution, Google launched a product called YouTube Director Onsite. What this does is YouTube actually sends a video director to you to help you with everything from conceptualizing your ad, writing your script, filming of the video, and editing of the video. The beautiful thing about this is not only does it create incredible quality content, but this product is completely free with a $350 ad spend commitment.

Search & Shopping

This is a popular product done through Google AdWords that allows your product to be seen by your customer at the right place and the right time. This allows your customer to come into contact with your product not only at the point of purchase, but to follow them all along that journey while they’re researching.

Remarketing

This product is exactly what it sounds like. This allows us to retarget our ads so that you can remind customers that “hey you bought this from me, you may want to check this out,” or “hey, you were considering this, you may want to re-look at it again.” There are so many opportunities and ways to customize what you need from Search & Shopping.

Google My Business

This allows us to be there in moments of need… you know, meet that high demand and highly impatient consumer who wants what they want now. Google My Business helps create connections using Search and Maps to provide key information about local businesses like reviews, store hours, and directions on how to get there.

Google Analytics

This free service helps you understand your consumer demographics, as well as analyze data from touchpoints to better understand your user experience. You are able to maximize your understanding of your consumers based on where your website traffic is coming from and even where your customers are exiting your site. This is particularly important so that you can recognize if there are any trends in where or why you are losing customers to your site.

Google Trends

This is another free service that allows you to see quick and useful insights on what people are searching for. For instance, if you seasonally sell Halloween décor you can find out when in the year do people begin searching for and shopping for that specific season. It takes the guessing out of when to bring out that merchandise and allows you to be able to service the needs of your customer when they want it. Besides the time of year specific searches become popular, you can also analyze trends like what areas are a specific search most popular. This is great in determining what cities you want to expand or host your own event.

Speed

Finally, let’s address the consumers need for speed. I think it’s safe to say we have all gotten irritated at least once in our life because a webpage was taking “too long” to load. Can you recall a time when you were so frustrated that you decided to just forget it and try a different site or page? I am feeling the virtual sea of hands right now. So Google’s free Test My Site feature allows us to analyze our website's loading time along with the industry standard, how we are comparing to our competitors, how much business we are potentially losing as a result, and what fixes Google suggests to speed up our loading time. Amazing right??

Using Google to grow your business is something you practically can’t afford NOT to do. With all of the changes in consumer trends and all of the smart solutions to get seen in this crowded digital space, we are beyond proud to be bringing Google Experts into our community to help us accomplish our mission to help you generate a million dollars annually.

Let us know in the comments which of these products you are most excited to try in your business or if you have any success stories with any specific tools we shared above! We’d love to hear how you’re using Google to grow your business AND would love to connect you with a Google expert live at one of our Success Summit events featuring Sandra Yancey!