7 Trends That Most Brands Haven’t Caught Up With Yet
and some examples. By Shannon Gallagher
1. Social Listening
Social listening has evolved. Your brand should be listening to authentic conversations, measuring costumer sentiment, discovering ‘underground’ trending content, and staying up to date with competitors.
Example: Anonymous Brand
A beverage manufacturer leveraged listening to uncover a serious product flaw. After creating a topic on brand awareness, the company noticed “glass” coming up in their conversation word cloud. It turned out that customers were finding glass in their drink bottles. When the brand made this discovery, they were then able to narrow the time frame of these conversations and find specifically which shipments were affected. The brand was then able to address the issue head on and make things right with the customers.
2. TikTok
It’s the organic reach for us. Plus, brand saturation is fairly low, allowing space for creativity, and opportunities for massive organic reach and TikTok influencer partnerships. If your brand isn’t ready to hop on the bandwagon, consider IG Reels as an alternate option.
Example: Chipotle
Just ahead of National Avocado Day on July 31, Chipotle launched its #GuacDance challenge, which asked guacamole fans to film themselves dancing to a popular, avocado-centric meme-song created by children’s musician Dr. Jean. The campaign was TikTok’s highest-performing branded challenge in the U.S., resulting in 250,000 video submissions during the six-day challenge and Chipotle’s biggest guacamole day ever, with more than 800,000 sides of free guac served. Since then, Chipotle has also run a Halloween #Boorito challenge, and more campaigns are coming down the pipeline.
3. Video
While not new, video continues to reign supreme. More than 50% of consumers want to see more video from brands, and we’re seeing a surge in remote production and in-house creativity as a result.
Example: Lonely Planet
A strong narrative is an essential part of most marketing campaigns, but there’s always more than one way to skin a cat and Lonely Planet presents a great alternative. They’ve released a series of YouTube videos that are each dedicated to a specific place, but they take a purely visual approach and champion the natural beauty of locales. You won’t find an omnipresent narrative in the videos, but you will get a sense of how fascinating a particular area is — and why you’ll definitely want to make it a priority to visit.
4. Social Shopping
Instagram launched Shops earlier this year where all purchases can be made directly within Instagram. 85% of Gen Z discovers a new product through social media.
Example: Ring Concierge
Ring Concierge is a popular woman-owned fine diamond jewelry brand. Their feed is creative and beautiful, but what really stands out is the brand’s emphasis on Instagram’s shopping features. Ring Concierge tags every available product on nearly every photo they share on Instagram. This makes it incredibly easy for her followers to see something they like and quickly buy it. Not only that, but if you tag a product multiple times, users can click on the product in a photo and are able to access every photo that product is in so they can see it in use in many different ways.
5. Goodbye, Likes
Since the removal of likes in 2019, we’ve found new ways to measure success. Focus is on quality over quantity and comments and brand-conversations are becoming key to tracking engagement. A spin-off result of this change could also be that paid social, with its easy-to-track ROI, increases in popularity for brands.
Example: National Geographic
“Through @NatGeo we help people experience the planet and cultures as seen by our photographers — a special, unfiltered view.” By giving its photographers a level of creative control, National Geographic’s content is both unique and authentic. This is also heightened by the fact that captions are written by photographers, allowing each post to come from a different perspective.
6. Authentic Influencer Marketing
We‘ve been seeing a heightened need for brand ‘realness’ and less-polished content is reigning supreme. Nano-influencers (influencers with 1K-5K followers)are here to fuel change by delivering skills, knowledge, expertise and intimate relationships with their audience. As many as 78% of brands surveyed by Influencer Intelligence say they’ll be working with nano influencers in the future.
Example: IKEA
IKEA decided to fuel the awareness for their 2019 catalog. They picked 390 interior-enthusiastic female micro-influencers from Denmark who then shared a photo with the IKEA catalog inspiring their followers to grab a copy with the new collection. 390 posts by 390 micro-influencers were accepted by IKEA and posted on Instagram with the campaign hashtag #IKEADenmark & #MakeRoomForYourself.
7. Privacy
As people grow more and more concerned with online privacy, closed communities have become more important than ever. Private spaces like Facebook Groups offer great opportunities for brands to connect with customers. With the right content and approach, brands can make meaningful contributions to customer conversations — or even set the stage for them to take place by setting up their own Group
Example: Instant Pot
While the Instant Pot Facebook Page has a follower count of about 267,000, their Group — Instant Pot Community — has a whopping 2.5 million members. The Group sees about 10,000 posts every 30 days. The popular electric cooker brand uses its group to create a space where the international community of Instant Pot users can ask questions, post unique recipes, and share the joy of cooking with their products.
Shannon is a Social Media Strategist with VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
