Zoom Zoom: Video Conferencing Dominates Search During COVID-19, Merkle Says
Zoom Zoom: Video Conferencing Dominates Search During COVID-19, Merkle Says
Maybe it shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the number of people working at home. But video conferencing dominated Google search in the B2B tech sector, pulling 78% of total volume from January to April, according to the B2B Trend Report: Technology, a study by Merkle. Email is slumping behind in-person events.
And guess who is winning this race?
Zoom drew 52% of the Google brand searches for video conferencing from February to April. Microsoft was a distant second, with 13%.
Moreover, Zoom generated over half of the total intent, with 44 million searches in April. The brand saw a total YoY increase of 1215% in that month and an even more staggering 2,381% hike in March, YoY.
This was accompanied by relative stability in other B2B areas.
In Merkle’s last report, AWS was leading in search growth. “Now, Cisco is surging 9 percentage points ahead and IBM remains 1 point behind,” the study notes.
In addition, numbers for unique companies are showing a strong recovery from February to April, with a 58% increase MOM.
The audience has driven spikes in search in these B2B technology solutions:
- Virtual meetings — 97%
- Collaboration & Remote Working — 71%
- DataCenter & Infrastructure — 34%
- Security — 27%
- Storage — 24%
- Cloud — 18%
- Networking — 18%
- Digital Transformation — 15%
- Data — 12%
- Chips & Processors — 12%
- Solutions & Apps — 2%
According to Merkle, the market tactics now working include:
- Search & paid social
- Video
- Podcast
- Top & middle-funnel display advertising
- Content syndication with a clear and differentiated POV, and without a hard conversion expectation
- Webinars
- Video streaming
- ABM targeting
- New partnerships & innovation
Watch out, email specialists — here are the tactics that are not rated as working so well:
- In-person events
- Standard email
- OOH
- Telesales at scale
- Sports partnerships
- COVID-19 specific materials — the appetite is now more future focused
The study also shows that B2B brands experienced surges in brand-related content topics from February to April:
- AWS — 600%
- Dell — 303%
- Adobe — 173%
- Salesforce —145%
- Cisco— 132%
- Intel — 112%
- Slack — 62%
- Cisco Webex — 51%
- IBM — 38%
Brands saw the following associated search teams focused on internal business priorities in April:
- Major server vendors
- Cloud growth
- Covid
- Power reliability
- Colocation
- Bandwidth
- Customers
- Networking
- Flash storage
- Adoption
- Cloud global colocation
- Power
- APAC
When it comes to personnel, clients are focusing efforts toward IT, Security and operations titles and away from other specialties:
- IT: +75%
- Security: +68%
- Operations: +36%
- Marketing: +33
- Product: -78%
- Facilities: -75%
- HR: -36%
- Procurement: -22%
- Finance: -17%
Finally, brands are shifting their targeting toward larger organizations and away from smaller ones.
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