By definition, viral tendencies are fleeting. However hopping on them at simply the fitting time can yield large, long-lasting success in advertising and marketing a product, model, or service.
With an estimated 328.77 million terabytes of information created every day, it may be troublesome for manufacturers to search out distinctive methods to achieve and be remembered by potential prospects. However manufacturers have a larger probability of constructing an enduring connection if they’ll meet prospects the place they’re and attraction to their pursuits.
Serious about and connecting with future prospects who may not but concentrate on your model may also help improve the probability that they’ll flip to you when prepared to purchase. That is the place leveraging media tendencies, popular culture, and different international subjects comes into play. By taking a trending subject or occasion and determining the way it turns into related to your model, prospects usually tend to keep in mind you the subsequent time they want an answer.
Whereas taking part in each development could appear tempting, model alignment is essential in growing a profitable advertising and marketing marketing campaign.
So how can manufacturers leverage tendencies to draw potential prospects?
Be artistic together with your content material. Begin by opening your thoughts to the potential methods your model’s options can be a part of the dialog and take it to the subsequent degree by leaning into your arsenal of belongings to discover tendencies with much less restriction than you might need to train with paid or earned media.
Google: Your All the time-on Focus Group
When mapping out a model’s viewers and wishes, Google is a invaluable asset in a marketer’s toolkit. It’s extremely correct in its potential to disclose the present calls for of actual individuals trying to find options at any given time, so Google serves as your always-on focus group.
Efficiently harvesting Google’s refined search information permits manufacturers to develop higher client habits insights, add depth to their buyer profiles, construct a extra participating buyer journey, and create genuine client connections. They’ll strengthen methods and drive significant enterprise outcomes when paired with different client analysis and insights.
Understanding client search information is a important step for manufacturers to realize the insights mandatory to construct relationships with shoppers by gaining their belief, constructing a connection, and establishing authenticity, which is able to assist convert prospects into prospects.
Determine Developments That Match Your Model
Manufacturers that efficiently establish what content material and subjects goal shoppers are studying about, trying to find, and discussing, can seize extra consideration in real-time. Nonetheless, it’s important to make use of information on this identification, not simply intestine emotions. Entrepreneurs threat permitting their methods to be based mostly on siloed private opinions with out actionable client insights. Google Developments, for instance, gives manufacturers with an evolving provide of natural search information, revealing an unfiltered panorama of their viewers’s ache factors, pursuits, and curiosities.
This assortment of correct information gives a real-time snapshot of present trending subjects. What would Google Developments reveal in a search right now? Two of the most well-liked ideas proper now: AI and Barbie.
Whereas manufacturers have managed to efficiently leverage one or the opposite, combining two trending ideas (when it’s related to your model, in fact) will create a extra important alternative for manufacturers to achieve bigger, extra various audiences.
By producing enjoyable, well timed content material that aligns with client pursuits, manufacturers can construct a big library of content material for use throughout a number of channels, together with their web sites, focused earned media alternatives, e mail newsletters, social posts, and natural searches to maximise the worth of every asset.
Let’s have a look at an instance.
It’s a Barbie and AI World
Data collected over the previous 5 years exhibits the time period “Barbie” peaked in search curiosity the week of Dec. 23, 2018, with simply over 1.9 million searches. This was across the similar time because the announcement of a same-sex Barbie couple and a video of actor Jason Mamoa studying out the “Barbie Lady” lyrics through the Aquaman press tour.
Forward of the Barbie movie’s launch in July 2023, Barbie-related Google searches peaked at 5.4 million from March 25 to April 21. Following the discharge of a teaser trailer on April 4, the time period “Barbie” yielded 2.2 million searches that week alone.
Fairly actually portray the world in numerous shades of pink, the advertising and marketing rollout behind the Barbie movie has left a mark in practically each business.
Whereas make-up, style, and decor align extra intently with the Barbie picture on the floor, trip leases, insurance coverage corporations, and online game console producers have discovered intelligent methods to attach with the movie and its viewers, organically persevering with the movie’s advertising and marketing momentum.
Barbie has even made its approach into the tech house. Wanting up the phrase ‘Barbie’ in Google generates a flash of starbursts and casts a pink tint over the search outcomes web page. Mixed with AI, one other trending subject, extra manufacturers and shoppers have discovered methods to affix within the enjoyable.
AI-powered artwork has led to large adoption of the know-how on social media. The favored Barbie selfie generator overlaid customers’ photos and personalised taglines over the film poster. TikTok customers took it a step additional by bringing a special third-party filter to the app that utterly transforms the consumer right into a Barbie character. AI additionally led to new, life like iterations of Barbie’s dreamhouse to point out what the dollhouse might look like in several states throughout the U.S. or when designed by well-known architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Zara Hadid.
Recognizing the recognition of each subjects is step one for manufacturers to affix a development. The following is determining if it is smart to your model to attach with each points and, if that’s the case, the best way to apply AI know-how to the mounting curiosity in Barbie. By utilizing generative AI so as to add Barbie’s contact to selfies and structure, manufacturers have been in a position to establish locations the place audiences might simply assimilate into the narrative, connecting them to shoppers whereas additionally constructing model consciousness.
Whereas becoming a member of in tendencies may not result in direct conversions, manufacturers change into extra memorable and visual by inserting themselves into present pursuits and producing associated content material. This connection invitations shoppers to construct belief together with your model earlier than becoming a member of the customer’s journey.
Attempt Out Completely different Developments
As soon as your model has recognized related tendencies, brainstorm alternatives for content material creation. Take into account subjects like record-high temperatures, the FIFA Ladies’s World Cup, and Meta’s launch of Threads. How can your model benefit from the curiosity surrounding these subjects?
First, create owned assets associated to this client curiosity information. This may embody a weblog put up discussing defending your merchandise in excessive warmth or producing photos of what it would seem like to host a world cup sport with star gamers in Barbie Land.
Subsequent, share this content material on social media, in advertisements, or e mail campaigns to develop your content material as managed belongings. Invite your followers to supply suggestions or insert their very own likenesses for added engagement. Lastly, work with influencers or information organizations to develop extra content material. Leveraging influencers and their followers can lead to a viral second that leads shoppers again to your model.
Whereas shoppers analysis manufacturers to search out extra details about merchandise, providers, and different choices they might want now or sooner or later; they place a larger emphasis on forming relationships with genuine manufacturers they’ll belief.
In case your model can change into part of their day by day lives by providing them participating content material that appeals to their pursuits every day—and exhibits that your model is engaged with the most recent tendencies — shoppers shall be extra more likely to construct a connection together with your model and look to you when they’re able to enter the customer’s journey.
Featured Picture Credit score: Anna Shvets; Pexels; Thanks!
