What people search for in marketing: the demand map
We measured US monthly search volume for every topic a marketing reference site might cover. Three findings. Film titles are the largest entries by a wide margin, concept names beat author names by roughly two hundred to one, and two categories we had planned barely exist as searches. Our own data, fetched 14 September 2026.
Method
Source. Ubersuggest, US locale, English. Monthly search volume and SEO difficulty. Fetched. 14 September 2026. Scope. Every planned section and entry for the Hive, plus close variants. Verdict rule, applied consistently. Searched means 500 or more a month. Thin means 50 to 490. Dead means under 50. Limit. The daily cap of 150 keyword reports was reached. Eight keywords returned HTTP 403 and are recorded as no data, not as zero.
Volumes are modelled estimates. Relative size is the signal.
Finding 1. The films are bigger than the marketing
| Entry | Keyword | US monthly volume |
|---|---|---|
| The Founder | the founder movie | 74,000 |
| Thank You for Smoking | thank you for smoking | 22,200 |
| Marketing mix | marketing mix | 14,800 |
| The 4 Ps of marketing | 4 ps of marketing | 12,100 |
| Market segmentation | market segmentation | 9,900 |
| Positioning in marketing | positioning in marketing | 9,900 |
| Loss aversion | loss aversion | 8,100 |
| How to Get Ahead in Advertising | how to get ahead in advertising | 1,900 |
| Movies about advertising | movies about advertising | 1,300 |
| Marketing terms | marketing terms | 1,000 |
The Founder at 74,000 a month against the marketing mix at 14,800. The demand is not where a marketing reference would assume it is.
Show the data
| Entry | searches per month |
|---|---|
| The Founder | 74,000 |
| Thank You for Smoking | 22,200 |
| Marketing mix | 14,800 |
| The 4 Ps of marketing | 12,100 |
| Market segmentation | 9,900 |
| Positioning in marketing | 9,900 |
| Loss aversion | 8,100 |
| How to Get Ahead in Advertising | 1,900 |
| Movies about advertising | 1,300 |
| Marketing terms | 1,000 |
One film title carries more search volume than the entire marketing theory section combined. That does not mean we should become a film site. It means the section name “movies about advertising” at 1,300 a month is the realistic target, because competing for “the founder movie” against the studios and the film databases is not a contest we would win.
Finding 2. Concept names beat author names, overwhelmingly
Positioning in marketing: 9,900 a month. Positioning, Ries and Trout, phrased as “positioning ries trout”: 50 a month. “Positioning the battle for your mind”, the actual book title: 480.
A ratio of roughly two hundred to one between the idea and the men who named it.
This is the single most actionable finding in the study and it decided how every entry on the site is titled. People search for what a thing is, not for who said it. An entry called “Positioning in marketing” gets found. An entry called “Ries and Trout” does not, however much more scholarly it feels.
The same pattern held everywhere we checked it.
Finding 3. Two planned sections have almost no demand
Songs. “Songs about marketing” returns 70 a month. “Songs about advertising” returns 30, which is below our dead threshold. “Songs about consumerism” 110, “songs about capitalism” 170.
The adjacent demand is real and we are not serving it: songs about money 4,400, songs about greed 1,900.
Neuromarketing deep cuts. The head term “neuromarketing” is healthy at 1,900. Everything under it collapses: neuromarketing meaning 140, examples 90, career 90, techniques 40.
70 a month is thin and 30 is dead by the thresholds the study sets. The section exists because nobody owns the topic, not because anyone is searching for it.
Show the data
| Keyword | searches per month |
|---|---|
| songs about marketing | 70 |
| songs about advertising | 30 |
We are keeping both sections. It is worth being explicit about why, because the numbers say not to.
Songs exists because nobody owns the topic, because the citation study found that no page anywhere answers that question properly, and because a reference site assembled purely from search volume reads like it was built by a machine. It will not bring traffic and it is not resourced as though it will.
What this changed
- Every section renamed to the searched phrasing. History of marketing (210) became history of advertising (720). Movies about marketing (590) became movies about advertising (1,300).
- Every entry titled by concept rather than by author.
- Songs and the thinner neuromarketing entries kept, but deliberately deprioritised rather than resourced equally.
- No section built on a term with no demand without a stated non-traffic reason for keeping it.
If you run the company rather than the marketing
The transferable finding here has nothing to do with marketing reference sites.
It is that your customers search for the problem, and your company names things after the solution. Those are different vocabularies and the gap between them is usually invisible from inside, because everyone internally has learned the internal words.
The two hundred to one ratio between “positioning in marketing” and the names of the men who invented it is an extreme version of something that is true of nearly every business. Your proprietary framework name, your service line name, your product name: nobody is searching for any of them. They are searching for the thing that is wrong.
A cheap test. Take the five page titles on your website that matter most and check the monthly search volume for each exact phrase. If they are all under fifty, your site is organised around your own vocabulary rather than your buyers’ questions.
That is fixable in an afternoon of retitling and it is usually the highest return hour available.
Sources
Our own data. Ubersuggest, US locale, English, fetched 14 September 2026. Supplementary short-form social data from Virlo on the same date. Eight keywords were blocked by the daily report cap and are excluded rather than estimated.