• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 1, 2020

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.