Successful organizations know how to follow the most significant trends in the scope of their businesses. Some organizations create trends, and there are companies who understand the trends. Also, there are companies that create and understand trends. The rest are organizations that neither create nor follow trends. What would you want your company to be, follower or leader?
The first thing to consider is that timing is everything! This is a common phrase you can hear in just about any situation. For business and marketing, it is just as important as anywhere else. Staying on top of the trends in real-time is a key aspect for the success of your business. In order to be on top of the timing of trends in marketing, you need to constantly measure and monitor what is happening with your audience and your competition.
The media landscape is changing continuously, with technology advancing at the speed of light. Keeping on top of all this communication, including traditional television, radio, and print combined with digital channels, the web, and social media is the challenge.
How do you identify what’s trending?
Two great ways to know what’s trending is through Google and social media trends. Each platform has its own trending section:
- Google Trends
- Facebook trending
- Twitter trends
- LinkedIn Content Suggestions
By monitoring what’s trending in real-time you can better position your organization for success and allocate resources that will deliver the biggest ROI.
Build Social Buzz:
The media looks to social media for most of their stories because of the immediacy of the medium, so staying on top of social media trends through media monitoring will help you build on that social buzz. You can keep track of these media mentions when you use media monitoring tools, but also run with it when you have a story that is mentioned in the media. Building on top of these mentions is where you get the buzz from.
Connect with Your Audiences:
Do you know what your audiences like, what they are into, and on which channels they want to connect with you? All of these very important questions can help you gain a better understanding of your target audiences which, in turn, helps you connect with them on the channels they use.
Control Content Creation:
Real-time tracking allows you to see what type of content does best, where you need more content, and which channels help connect your content to your audience the most. You will always be able to see where you need content and know which type of content does well with your customers, readers, potential consumers, and the media.
As you can see, there are so many uses for real-time trend monitoring. It can be used in many more ways than you might have typically thought, using the robust set of tools and intelligence information that you gather with them. Real-time monitoring can help you stay on the trends, and even more importantly, understand which trends your audience is most interested in and connect with them using these trends. Media monitoring also helps you stay on trend with real-time data measurement and reporting, by building buzz on social media, content creation, and identifying influencers that will always help keep your brand in the forefront.
Following trends and implementing them in your company can make you a leader, not a follower. Maybe in the future, you and your business will be trend makers. This is important for your organization if you want always to be one step ahead of competitors. Because the leaders are those that create market conditions.
MVP
Megan Van Petten
Van Petten Group INC.