How to Find People with Google for Market Research
I use Google quite a bit for finding and verifying contacts for the 400 or so target companies with private fleets and/or outbound warehouse operations that load pallets onto trucks. Currently my two favorite techniques are the Linked In x-ray search and advanced Google Search in Chrome, employing the Chrome “block sites” filter.
Linked In X-Ray Search
I don’t like the fact that Linked In charges a steep monthly fee for the privilege of searching for people by company name and title and seeing their first and last name. Now, if you search within Linkedin.com itself for people, you only get their first name, last initial. However if you use Google site search and add the phrase “powered by” Google will return first and last names of people on Linked In. You can then click on their Linked In profile and hopefully find a bio to shed light on the person’s role. You can also find their colleagues and boss with the handy sidebar that lists people in related searches.
In Google just type site:linked.com “title of target” “company name” “powered by”.
Google Advanced Search
- It helps to search for 2 or three word phrases within quote marks. For example “private fleet” AND “company name” and/or “possible title” (e.g., “transportation manager”).
- Use Chrome, and block every jobs site that ever comes up. Jobs sites wind up being 50% of the search results, so you want to filter them out. While you are at it, block all the content marketing sites that also return garbage. These are all the directory sites like Manta.com and article sites like ezinearticles.com
- Use other parameters like – before a word to tell google don’t return a page that has this word on it. For example if I am searching for tractor trailer rigs, I want to filter out -monster for “monster trucks” and -Ford -Chevy -dodge -pickup to filter out pickup trucks.
