Insights on Google Market Finder!
Last Wednesday, The Google International Growth Team had come down to AstroLabs to present their new tool to our startups. To the ones who follow the journey of Google product/tool launches, you would know that almost all of them have massive capabilities for the everyday bootstrapped startup.
Enter Market Finder.
What Does Market Finder Do?
- Find new opportunities for business in other markets.
- Provide a comprehensive toolkit and resources on setting up operations in that new market.
- Develop a go-to-market strategy through guides and existing Google products.
Find New Opportunities
If you’re in a (very fortunate) position of looking to expand or curious enough to see if your product can serve other market needs, you’d probably have thought about market research firms or consultants. You probably made a couple of calls here and there, sent out feeler emails to those established market research firms who probably replied back with insane quotes and resorted to doing an aggressive Google search workout.
Well, this is the first important benefit of using Market Finder. You simply type in your website and let the tool to scrape and find marketplaces they think you should look into!
The site essentially screens your platform to first gage what exactly your product/service is. You will be able to tweak the categories of your business here before it recommends marketplaces. Once that’s done you see this!
The tool shortlists a couple of markets they suggest would be opportunistic for what your product/service is. They gage this based on 4 key metrics:
- Monthly Search Volume Across Categories
- Recommended Adwords Bid (Competitiveness)
- Ease of Doing Business
- Household Net Disposable Income (Spending Power)
Monthly Search Volume Across Categories:
The average number of monthly Google searches for terms related to your product based on the selected categories. This is a very strong indicator of market demand (through search) for your product. Through this metric, Founders can know the level of awareness and strength of interest in the product categories giving them a probable estimate of the volume of potential market opportunity.
Recommended Adwords Bid
The recommended bid gives the searcher a good idea of the relative competitiveness of the marketplace. This is learned through the approximate cost per click (CPC) for the keywords companies in your product categories are bidding on at the moment.
Ease of Doing Business
This metric lets you know how complicated of a regulatory environment you should expect when setting up. Countries are ranked from 1 to 190 with a higher ranking indicating a higher conduciveness environment and less red tape.
Household Net Disposable Income
Net Disposable Income indicates if there is a high enough spending power per household (after tax). It’s a great metric for founders to figure out the potential market “appetite” from a pricing and spending point of view.
The tool does offer much more though!
Step 2: Tools, Guides & Resources
The next step in the tool is a comprehensive collection of guides & resources to set up operations within the new markets.
Benefits
- Logistics resources explain the rules of international delivery and transportation
- Fit in with new markets with localization guides
- Payment guides explore mobile and global payments
The tools and resources are a huge benefit for companies who have to struggle with figuring out operational and logistical challenges in the new markets, often times hiring an expensive relocation agency to help! The helpful guides take (most) of the pain away from researching and allows you to find the answers you need when expanding.
Step 3: Marketing
As most readers would know, Google is the go-to engine for search and has become the go-to platform for search performance marketing so this aspect of Market Finder should not surprise you. It’s broken down into three components.
Search Performance: A generic overview of search performance for keywords that fall into your categories.
Marketing Strategy: A bundle of resources and guides that offer tips on marketing for expansion with a toolkit for benchmarking strategy (Google Trends & Consumer Barometer).
Resources & Toolkit Per Channel: Market Finder also makes sure to bundle up guides and tools for channels that can be used through the Google suite of products. These guides and tools are a great resource for anyone in my opinion as they condense the multiple opportunities that Google’s products provide and how they can be used.
So Verdict?
Big yes. Would recommend startups looking to expand to use the tool as it allows for product insights, marketing resources/guides, All the Google tools and it’s free!
Check it out at https://marketfinder.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en/
Originally published at The AstroLabs Navigator Blog.
