Unexpected SaaS and marketing trends in 2020 (according to Google Trends)

Most of the marketing-trends-related articles I read are just a bunch of generic, non-actionable, and kind-of-obvious stuff.

Take a look at the blog posts that rank first for “Marketing trends” on Google, as for June 2020.

According to Forbes—whose 2020 prediction was written in October 2019—, some marketing trends are content marketing, Google Ads Smart Bidding, and video content.

No way.

It’s not Pitchground’s opinion but mine: I would only read or share an article from Forbes if I get featured on it. As for insightful content, they’re never my go-to source.

Just for the record, Video has been a marketing trend since I work in digital marketing. Its relevance, to me, exploded when leading social media platforms adopted and prioritized Video in their algorithms and created short formats (aka stories).

Let’s give Google a 2nd chance.

SingleGrain mentions 42 trends like AI (generic), chatbots, conversational marketing (I agree), video marketing (again), stories, and shoppable posts.

I’d say, yes, chatbots, to me, are an untapped marketing channel with a lot of potential, and the fact that consumers may buy directly on Facebook will be a big deal.

Yet, I think those who wrote these posts just wanted to fill a list of generic stuff to have a long-form content to rank on Google. And they did it, good job.

So I wanted to play with Google Trends to find out which topics are companies are growing or declining—and I was surprised by the findings (especially with the last one).

I won’t explicitly talk about COVID-19—we’re all done with it—but my not-surprising guess is that such a happening will boost digitalization and the growth of SaaS more than anything else more than the adoption of cloud computing.

Cloud computing transformed software business models from expensive licenses to flexible subscription models; at Pitch Ground, we go even further by offering lifetime one-payment deals at a month-like rate.

In this article, we will explore some of the trending specific topics and products around Software as a Service and marketing, based on Google Trends queries.

Before further reading, please consider that:

  • Most of the items are compared in their search category (topic, search term or company)
  • Google Searches are a good proxy for demand, but searches are not always a function of market share, user base, or business value.
  • Google Trends doesn’t offer absolute but relative search data, going from 1 to 100.
  • Bias is implicit as the topics visualized on Google Trends were chosen on personal judgment, meaning that I may obviate or omit topics that should have been listed.

Microsoft, collaboration, and Cloud market

One of my first approaches to SaaS was collaboration software.

While in the SaaS community, we know and use tools like Asana and Slack. They represent a few features in the collaboration ecosystem, which makes it challenging to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

Asana is for projects; Slack is asynchronous communication; GSuite is a document management and corporate email. Now, with Google Meet (before Google Hangouts), it’s also a videoconferencing app.

The leading provider in the collaboration software market is Microsoft Sharepoint that is genuinely all-in-one, which leverages hundreds or thousands of users that got started with omnipresent solutions like Excel and Word.

Unlike GSuite, Microsoft Sharepoint offers an actual entire digital workplace, bundling workflows, intranets, chats, video (with Teams), and document management.

Interestingly, Sharepoint’s popularity has been decaying (at least as shown in Google Trends).

Though Microsoft’s product strategy is pushing on other products like Microsoft Azure, which is leading the cloud market along with Amazon Web Services, leaving behind Google Cloud, despite that, the whole category is growing, and COVID-19 seems to represent an additional spike in demand. 

In terms of market share as per revenue, AWS and Azure are the market leaders; in terms of searches in comparable categories, Google Cloud Platform and AWS have a similar performance.

Messenger chatbots market

I’ve been a Manychat user since 2017.

If you don’t know it, Manychat is a Messenger chatbot drag-and-drop builder. We actually have some articles about Manychat on our blog:

When I attended one of their events in Austin, Texas, I learned that the instant messaging market is now bigger than social media platforms, and Messenger offers one of the best development ecosystems for startups to build products around it.

The two default players in this niche are Chatfuel and Manychat.

I witnessed the impressive improvements Manychat has made in its product, their flow builder that I notice some other companies are stealing shamelessly—along with significant decisions and marketing that led the company to take over Chatfuel, as search data suggests.

I showcase Manychat—not just because I urge you to follow them if you want to see a company executing brilliantly and that is set to grow even more—but because, as far as I can tell, Instant messaging and conversational marketing will be more relevant as a marketing channel.

I’d say that messaging apps will be a must for an actual “omnichannel” approach, which is currently associated with email, SMS, mobile, and re-targeting.

Video chat market and the pandemic: a sharp but short spike

Everyone is talking about Zoom (mainly due to security concerns).

I wanted to see if demand would actually spike. And yes, it did!

All major video conferencing apps presented a spike in demand when the quarantine just rolled out, followed by a fast drop just a few weeks later.


I didn’t expect that Google Meet would overtake Skype as its rebranding from Google Hangouts is being adopted.


I didn’t expect either that such spike would last so short, and I wouldn’t expect that such demand will go down to a pre-pandemic behavior.


While momentum is eroding, I’d say many companies will start adopting more these kinds of solutions.

Business Intelligence: Power BI is taking the lead

Business Intelligence is a fast-growing software category.

Such popularity was followed by major acquisitions performed almost simultaneously:

So, how Google Search behavior looks like for leading Business Intelligence providers?

Surprisingly (to me), Microsoft Power Bi is taking over Tableau; Qlik is declining; and Google Data Studio (Google’s free BI solution) is growing decently fast, despite being new.

E-commerce: the pandemic boosts Shopify adoption—and stock price

Before the pandemic, this was the forecast for e-commerce total retail sales share:

The projection was that e-commerce would represent 22% of total retail sales as of 2023.

Due to the novel COVID-19 outbreak, E-commerce sales spiked more than expected, and such a change in buying behavior was reflected in the two leading platform providers: Shopify and WooCommerce.

Such behavior was also reflected in Shopify’s stock price, reaching all-time highs.

Marketing automation: Hubspot domination

Thousands of solutions fit in the marketing technology and automation bucket.

According to ChiefMartec, about 8,000 providers.

This time, I will define marketing automation solutions as those who offer an integral automation marketing suite and not just isolated features.

Based on such criteria, I selected, Marketo, Keap (aka InfusionSoft), Ontraport, and Hubspot, being the last one the leading and fastest-growing provider by far.

I knew Hubspot was growing, but I didn’t realize it has been growing consistently for over a decade, and dominating demand. We can also tell that the pandemic will affect Hubspot positively.

Email marketing: Active Campaign and Sendinblue grow fast; Mailchimp remains unbeatable

In 2020, ActiveCampaign raised $100 million to become a truly all-in-one marketing automation platform. Hubspot’s exponential growth is showing that the Total Addressable Market is far to be reached.

When I added Mailchimp and Constant Contact to the query, all other providers became barely noticeable.

Yet, I wouldn’t say Mailchimp is trending; it reached maturity since 2014 and hasn’t grown since then (at least in Google searches).

Low-code development platforms

I recently started to read about no-code or low-code development, which bundles platforms like Zapier, Airtable, PowerApps, and others.

I didn’t know such a thing had a name.

As a marketer, I agree that the possibilities these tools offer are endless, and I wouldn’t hesitate to build MVPs or decently functional products with them.

I know many legacy developers who would spend too much time and money building something that I can build with this kind of tool.

A personal example is that I knew of a development team that took months to build Messenger chat flows to respond to common customer queries.

They didn’t even bother to search solutions like Manychat that cost a few dollars each month. These tools are so powerful that I could connect Manychat to DialogFlow to leverage Google’s NLP to build a “smart” chatbot.

Yet, we need to define the limits of no-code tools; low-code is not for every use case; you’d be reliant on a 3rd party that wouldn’t suffice your needs—especially when your services cannot afford to be shut down or slow.

As you can see, both the Low-code development platform topic is growing fast in popularity, just as the tools that leverage it, like Zapier.

Types of marketing: influencer marketing on the rise

What are the most popular types of marketing?

It turns out that influencer marketing is the fastest-growing, along with social media marketing.

Interestingly, influencer marketing is about to outperform MLM popularity (which I celebrate).

You can notice a spike in demand of affiliate marketing during the COVID-19 outbreak.

I hope it is not due to the increasing unemployment rates, causing many people to search about becoming rich fast to then be targeted by fake gurus.

I excluded SEO from this search as I thought it could be biased due to the nature of Google Trends.

Business chat: Microsoft Teams is hitting hard Slack

Once, Slack paid a full-page ad on a newspaper to welcome Microsoft Teams. The war had just begun.

I never thought Microsoft could outperform such a great product like Slack. I always thought of Microsoft products as rigid, expensive, and not user-friendly.

Over time, Microsoft has changed my mind and, in fact, as for July 2019, Teams overtook Slack with over 13 million daily users.

I’d guess such growth was leveraged by Microsoft’s current user base and by making it free.

As you can see, Slack had more searches than Microsoft Teams while it reportedly had fewer users.

And it seems such a difference will be more remarkable after the pandemic.

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Udit Goenka
Udit Goenka
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