Part IV – The virus and the shift in behavior goes on. We have gotten some questions as to what to do with this information. In general, we use it to help inform planning and strategy with our clients. As trends go, some are leading indicators and some are lagging. Said another way the data may be telling you where the puck is going to be or it may be telling you the puck is already there. Just like timing a stock purchase, it is hard to pivot on one point in time but the trend lines allow you to make smarter decisions.
We leverage other data points in our assessments and audits but search volume data is always a good place to start as every person in the world goes to Google when they need an answer.
Enterprise Trends
Starting out with the SalesForce. A company that is synonymous with enterprise projects. The search volume in Google is down but not close to all-time lows. The volume is actually inline with 2019 search volume.
Digital transformation has turned into a leaf in a consultant’s word salad of jargon. But none the less lots of companies are in dire need of “digitizing” their companies or they will be left for dead at some point. Coming off all-time highs recently the search volume for this term has returned to summer 2019 levels. One can imagine that some enterprises will move to offense in the coming weeks and will start executing projects to give them the upper hand on the inevitable bounce back.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is down but not to record lows. I actually would have guessed this would have been performing slightly better as businesses scramble to maintain and track the relationships with their customers. Curious to see if this or other enterprise terms are leading indicators to a bounce back.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is coming off all-time highs in search volume. The recent drop is not to historic lows but is fairly substantial. Many enterprise clients put the brakes on all spending the past couple of weeks as they take a step back to reassess their next steps. Again a sideways or upward move could be a tell.
Manufacturing is probably misleading as many of these searches are probably related to manufacturing medical supplies and previous to the recent weeks was probably related to the issues with Chinese manufacturing. Curious to see if more manufacturing moves back to the US or North America at least post covid. One can imagine the US government incentivizing certain products to be manufactured onshore.
I take the upward trend of these next two to mean companies are scrambling to understand how to manage their supply chains during a global pandemic.
Foster Pets
This is another one of those happy accidents that have occurred during Covid. More people are looking to foster pets. I actually saw a headline that NYC was running low on pets to foster, which is a great thing. Now the big question is which has been more popular to foster, dogs or cats. It is not really even a race, “foster dog” searches are lapping “foster cats”.
Next, we will take a look at education, outdoor home improvement and more.
