The Trending Report
January Edition, by Cassey Deveau
It’s time for your monthly round up of what was #trending in January. From “born days”, to creative uses of AR and voice search-optimized content, we’re sharing the news that got us talking, thinking, and creating this month.
Social
The Year of Colour site let us see what shades we capture most on Instagram by analyzing your 2018 posts on the platform. This is a fun tool to use for your personal instagram, but it’s also an interesting tool to use with your brand(s). Looking at the colours that were most used, and most liked on Instagram can be a fresh way to look at planning your content, and to see if the colours in your set tell a similar story to what your brand voice is trying to achieve. You can see mine above!
Snapchat’s predicted trends of 2019 showed us some things we expected, including gaming as a hot topic for 2019 with a focus on Minecraft, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption 2. Airpods will continue to gain attention on the platform, and my personal prediction is that they will continue to be the driving force behind the “weird flex but ok” phrase following us into this year. They are also telling us that today’s teens are putting internet personalities on top. Snap’s predictions showed us some things that we didn’t expect, like a strong connection to the exponential growth in the use of Cash App, a money transferring app, used increasingly by Gen Z. Slang words like YKTV aka “You know the vibes”, and born day — because apparently “birthday” is so 2018—will also be #trending.
Instagram’s most liked post is officially just a picture of an egg — and that’s no yolk. Seriously we aren’t kidding. The account has dubbed itself the Egg Gang, and you can even buy merch to show everyone you’re livin la vida yolk-a.
Pinterest created travel personas to help marketers drive conversions on the platform. 250 million people use the site each month, and travel is one of the most active categories. Pinterest says 76% of those people make their purchase decisions — about where to go, how to get there, where to stay and what to do in-destination — based on travel content they see from brands on the site. To help brands fine-tune their marketing messages on the platform, Pinterest has categorized these “travel pinners” into five personas: the Group Vacationer, the Culture Chaser, the Spa Sojourner, the Adventure Lover and the Eating Explorer. Pinterest has also identified keywords to target each of these personas.
TRILL launched an AI-powered travel platform curated by global content creators. TRILL’s platform features ‘Instagrammable’ travel experiences powered by user-generated content. It allows users to search by destination, hashtag, and experience, build actionable itineraries and book hotels, activities and restaurants directly from its 1000+ creators’ Instagram content.
Buffer released their 2019 report, the State of Social. An incredibly detailed and insightful report on the world of social media marketing. It told us how marketer’s across the globe are thinking about social media, what’s working, how the industry is changing, and more.
Technology
We saw brands taking the plunge and getting innovative with augmented reality (AR). Target launched Target Beauty Studio, an AR experience for users to “try on makeup” to help ease hesitation in purchasing makeup online. Nike used the technology to fight back against auto-buying tools in 2017, and they’ve returned to use AR to sell limited edition sneakers through the Facebook messenger app. Lego has created an AR playgrounds app to put digital Lego characters and blocks in real world environments where users can play with friends.
Spotify is letting us mute artists now. To engage the feature, you simply have to click the “Don’t play this artist” button located in the menu are for every artist. If you change your mind, you just go back to the same place and hit “Remove.”
Google announced a lot of things at CES 2019 many of which revolved around their Google Assistant. Here’s a few highlights:
- Google says that Assistant, will be on 1 billion devices around the world by the end of this month.
- Google is also rolling out an update today that brings Google Assistant into Google Maps on both iOS and Android.
- 2019 Samsung TVs will get Google Assistant compatibility later this year.
- Google Assistant will soon be able to check you into flights (United only at first, with other airlines on the way) when you say “Hey Google, check into my flight.” It can also now book hotels for you.
We discovered a free tool that quickly deletes the background from images, so you don’t have to use photoshop. This could be a big time saver for marketers who don’t have access to, or aren’t familiar with, the Adobe Photoshop software. It doesn’t have the robust capabilities that the Creative Cloud app does, but for a lightweight task of removing the background from an image of a person, it does the trick.
AI is an ever growing hot topic in the digital world, but what exactly is artificial intelligence and what are its future applications? If you want to get up to speed, check out Business Insider’s AI 101 report.
Reporting & Analytics
SEO is getting into the game — the voice search game at least. Voice search is becoming an interesting space for marketers as user base continues to grow. Going forward it’s important to consider matching your content to voice queries. One part of this is grouping together common questions in an FAQ format, in HTML, and housing them on topically relevant pages.
Google gave us a rare glimpse into how they manage their internal SEO strategy. Some points:
Small changes make a big impact. Google plotted the growth of one of the 7,000 websites, the Google My Business marketing site, showing how adding canonicals, hreflang to their XML sitemaps, and improving their metadata all resulted in gains in their organic traffic in search.
Embracing change. Google also recommended that webmasters do not fear making changes to their sites.They said they “found that the more we embrace them [change] and experiment with them, the better our SEO results.”
Consolidation. In one case study Google provided with the Google Retail site, they took six old websites and consolidated the content. They made “one great website” and it lead to them doubling the site’s call-to-action click-through rate and increased organic traffic by 64%.
We have also seen the SEM landscape changing year-over-year, and Google Ads expert Felix Wenzel shared the trends he predicts for 2019. These included the CPC is higher than ever before. Pay attention to the CPC of particular keywords, as costs for some have more than doubled in the last four years. There is also an increasing demand for quality, and campaigns that are well established will be rewarded with better rankings, ad lower CPCs. Another prediction from Wenzel was that keywords are changing due to the popularity of voice search. Marketers can take advantage of winning walk-in customers by using Local Google Ads campaigns to master online-to-offline tactics.
Reputation has become a major ranking factor in SEO. To stay on top today, you need to be diligent in assessing your site’s usability and the quality of its content. Google introduced Quality Rating Guidelines, and they’re becoming more influential in Google search rankings.
New research on customer satisfaction with web user experiences has made compelling points to keep your website up to date. A survey of 1,013 US-based respondents between the ages of 18–60 revealed that 81% think less of a brand if its website is not updated. Also, 39% would think twice about using a product or service if the website isn’t fresh and current.
Content Marketing
Wondering whether it’s time for you to explore content optimization? Skyword answered this for us this month. Having a background of older content can be useful, but not if it has become disconnected from the rest of your recent content output. If your brand had a shift in messaging strategy, or a recent Google algorithm update left you feeling behind, you might need to decide to optimize, or say goodbye to older content. Consider whether you should leverage these existing assets and optimize, or leave them behind in favor of net new content. A simple test to see which way you should lean? Try answering these questions about your existing content:
Do I have a significant amount of content?
Is my content still relevant?
Are my priorities as a marketer still in line with what I was trying to achieve when I started creating content?
If you answered yes to most or all of these questions, then you likely have content that is worth saving and improving.
A new year means new opportunities, like some innovative content marketing resolutions! Some great examples:
- Create ways for the whole team to participate — get other departments that aren’t normally the go-tos for content creation involved in the process, even if it’s just in the brainstorming stage.
- Be consistent in the story you’re telling — keep your brand story clear, and keep your narrative on track, making sure all content reinforces your messages.
- Unite SEO and content marketing — even if you’re brand doesn’t have a dedicated SEO department, it’s important to keep in mind when creating content, and you can use tools like the Google Keyword Planner to help generate some jumping-off points for content topics.
Have we mentioned voice search enough yet? No? Ok Google, one more time: voice search is becoming a major player, not to be ignored. It’s going to change the way we consume content, so it should guide changes in how marketers create content. Make voice a part of your content strategy in the coming months.
Does your industrial content marketing need a unicorn? Unicorn Marketing focuses on leveraging the power of your company’s best content to drive the entirety of your content marketing efforts. We’ve learned that not every piece of content is a winner, and that’s ok. To evaluate existing content and dig out those unicorns you have to look for four key elements: highly shareable, high engagement, ranks high in search, performs well conversion-wise. This unicorn content can be leveraged by increasing promotion behind it, and by repurposing it into other content types.
Inclusive Brand Marketing… how can we do that well? We spent a lot of this month looking at brands that are making a push to position themselves as accepting, diverse, and in tune with current advocacy issues. One of the biggest comments from the team, was “Where is the authenticity?” (I like to sing that in my head as Fergie, but you don’t have to). Today’s brands are paying close attention to how they portray inclusivity in their messaging, but what happens when the message falls flat because it’s all talk and no action? People don’t fall for it. Our advice? Get real about who your brand is, be honest about where you are and where you want to be and spend an equal amount of time and energy building more diverse teams as you do to advertising about diversity. It’s time to walk the walk.
Travel
The New York Times announced that more and more airlines are turning their attention to their youngest travelers, both to appease their parents, and to keep other passengers happy on long flights. Many airlines have recently introduced a kit that young passengers receive as soon as they board. It’s stocked with items to keep them entertained on flight. Some have age-appropriate toys, and kids food menu items.
We saw the rise of our true hero Marie Kondo, and after binging every episode wondered, how will we fill this void? And then Kondo gave us the travelling tip of our dreams, a how-to video showing us that you can pack a suitcase that sparks joy — KonMari style.
Google’s Assistant will be launching voice bookings for hotels, in yet another sign pointing to the need to get on board with voice search. Along with the upcoming ability to check-in to flights, the Google Assistant is positioning itself as the voice search platform you’ll want as a travel companion.
Skift gave us the Travel Megatrends for 2019. One big theme? Throughout the hospitality industry in recent years — from vacation rentals and private accommodations to luxury hotels, timeshares, and hostels — the traditional differences between lodging categories are all starting to blur. All different types of hospitality are becoming one, and the consumer is making purchase decisions based on their requirements rather than in a particular category. Most people don’t even know what they are booking, whether it’s a serviced apartment rental or a hotel.
And that’s all for now. Until next month, stay #trending folks!
Cassey is a Content and Paid Social Media Coordinator with VERB Interactive a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
