Current State Of Demand For IT Services
One thing that has always amazed me over the past few years running an agency here is the inability of so many online marketers to see the big economic picture. Every time an economic slowdown or a recession hits social media feeds and slack groups are flooded with questions about why conversion rates have dropped, why traffic is down, why email open rates are down, and many other questions that point to a lack of awareness of one simple fact. On the other side of all those marketing metrics like click-through rates and conversion rates that we all tend to love are real people doing real things in their lives.
Since we are all viewing the actions of what those real people are doing on the other side via software programs, it can be easy to forget, and it leads marketers to search desperately for overly technical answers within the configuration settings of their advertising or marketing platform of choice. There’s usually a much simpler answer for a drop in these metrics. People just don’t wanna buy sh*t right now.
Ok, so now that we’ve established that on the other side of our dashboards there are real people making purchasing decisions and it’s not just all some big game of configure the ad account, let’s look at a couple of examples of how we can more objectively assess the current state of demand for IT services using search engine query data.
Using Search Data To Understand The Current State Of Demand For IT Services
As an agency serving the IT industry, we have the privilege of being able to see the industry from a different angle than most MSP owners, and one of those angles is via search engine traffic. If you really want to get to know an industry, get to know its search engine data. One of the best ways to do this is by launching an MSP SEO program, but another great way to is to use Google Trends to analyze search demand.
What Is Google Trends?
Google trends is a tool to analyze relative search popularity of specific queries by converting their search volume into a 0-100 point scale of relative volume, with 0 being low volume relative to average and 100 being high volume relative to the average.
Select Queries To Assess Current State Of Demand For IT Services
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s take a quick look at some select Google Trends data that can help us assess the current state of demand for IT services.
Please note that the embedded charts below will not show on browsers with 3rd party cookies blocked (like safari does by default). You can click the links to view the charts directly on Google Trends.
“Managed IT Company” – Last 5 years
“Managed IT Company” – Last 12 Months
“IT Support Company” – Last 5 Years
“IT Support Company” – Last 12 Months
“Network Support Company” – Last 5 Years
“Network Support Company” – Past 12 Months
Seasonality In IT Services Demand
There’s been a lot of panic recently about an upcoming recession and current trend data points to a drop in demand for IT services. (July 2022) If we look at the historical data for the select queries above and aggregate them we can see that a drop in IT services demand during the summer is nothing unusual. In fact, if you analyze historical query data for IT services related volume you see a pretty clear correlation between when the kids are out of school and when people are shopping for IT support services.
There are seasonal slumps almost every year between late May and late August, when summer vacation is in session and families are more likely to be out vacationing. There are also seasonal slumps over the holidays when people are traveling and kids are out of school for Christmas break.
We can see that the long-term trends, despite a seasonal rhythm currently having a negative effect, point to increasing demand overall for IT services.
Conclusion
Sometimes when there’s a drop in lead volume, the answer is as simple as a drop in demand for IT services. Your website may not be at fault, your sales guy might not be at fault, however, the time of year may definitely be at fault. A recession may or may not be on the horizon, but the long-term outlook for IT services is still very strong.
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