You would have seen brands like IKEA dominate social media timelines countless times by leveraging on current trends to churn out compelling content marketing pieces.

Getting into the mix of buzzing conversation helps to grab attention and increases the searchability of your content on search engines. Being able to identify trends also provides a fresh perspective to supercharge your content marketing efforts!

But how do these brands do it and with such regularity? In this post, we’ll explore ways which brands can identify trends and supercharge their content marketing efforts.

1) Search Trends

Tools like Google Trends shows you the top search results both locally and globally and you’ll also be able to key in specific search teams, analyse and compare its search volume. Such practices help to provide insights on the topics you could conjure up for content marketing purposes as well the search terms that you could optimise in your article.

To expound on search trends further, you can also subscribe to a premium search too like Keywordtool.io to analyze search trends up to one year ago. The following is an experiement I did by tapping on the popular search trend “Sing China”.

Search Experiment – Sing! China

A popular programme among Singaporeans, Sing! China was very likely to garner substantial search interest. As an experiment, I decided to tap on this topic to increase organic search visits to my site.

The search term “Sing China 2017” accounted for 10K – 30K monthly searches from July to Oct 2017 (Results extracted using Keywordtool.io)

Despite the high volume in the search term “Sing China 2017”, it was rarely used in existing article titles by various publishers. Leveraging this insight, I wrote an article to feature the Singaporeans in Sing! China, optimising the term Sing China 2017.

Results: My article titled “The Singaporeans in Sing China 2017” appeared on the first page for the search term “Sing China 2017” leading to a 500% increase in weekly organic search traffic to my site!

2) Popular Online Publishers

Popular online publishers like Mashable, Buzzfeed, and Mothership are usually the first ones to feature trending topics on their site. Following them closely on your social media feed would be a convenient way to be aligned with the latest trends.

3) Twitter Trends

Twitter Trends allows you to have a very holistic view of hashtags that are trending in your region as well as globally. Brands can tap into these trends and develop relevant content and use trending hashtags to garner increased organic reach.

4) Predict upcoming trends

Tapping on trends in real time might be very challenging and not realistic for brands without a social media setup or let alone a team. But planning your content in advance is definitely feasible even for companies with limited resources. Here are some ways to identify trends in advance.

Special Dates
Most major promotions on a brand’s marketing calendar are usually planned in accordance with public holidays like Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year etc. Similarly, there are many special dates which brands can leverage on to showcase and get into trending conversations. One of the most popular ones would be May the 4th as demonstrated successfully by brands like Mentos. For more interesting dates, visit Days of the Year.

Highly Anticipated Movies/TV series
Pop culture rarely fails to generate hype and you can be sure that highly anticipated movies/tv series like Spider-Man, Star Wars and Game of Thrones will most likely dominate social media feeds upon their release date. Here’s a post by Darlie that showcased their Marvel collectible mugs during the release of Captain America: Civil War.

A post shared by Darlie Singapore (@darliesg) on Apr 27, 2016 at 5:51pm PDT

Major Sporting Events
Highly anticipated events such as the Olympics, World Cup and even key matches are also very likely to dominate headlines. Start thinking of how your brand can tap on the next major sporting event. A meaningful example would be one developed by Changi Airport to celebrate Joseph Schooling’s Gold medal win (Singapore’s First) at the 2016 Olympics.

An elaborate content like this was probably prepared in advance when Schooling qualified for the 100m butterfly event finals.

Tech Product Launches and Major Announcements
With tech gadgets like mobile phones and tablets being an important part of our lives, new product launches or announcements from major tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon and Samsung will usually end up trending.

You might not be able to know the exact details of the product/announcement but there sure is enough time to figure out something cool to post on the release date.

But Please, Don’t Try Too Hard

Do it wrong, and you might have a potential PR disaster on hand. Besides the numerous real-time marketing success, there have also been a lot of epic failures.

U.S. based fashion outlet Celeb Boutique decided to use a ‘trending’ hashtag #Aurora to promote their #Aurora dress. And Aurora only started to trend because of a shooting incident – U.S. Aurora Massacre.

Brands should always ensure that such initiatives don’t come across as trying too hard. To end off, the same rules of content marketing apply – add value, not noise!