There is almost an endless supply of trending topics available on social media. Anything from annual days celebrating doughnuts, pets or authors, as well as industry and media trends, it can be difficult as a marketing team to decide which topic to capatlise on.
Understanding your audience is key when you are creating Thought Leadership and can be the difference between increasing traffic or totally failing on all levels to engage.
"35% of C-Suite Execs decided NOT to award a piece of business to a company because of what they read online / poor thought leadership." - Edelman/LinkedIn report on The Impact of Thought Leadership on Demand Generation
Your core business narrative needs to be the main objective within your messaging, if you loose sight of who you are as a business and get too caught up in the trend, no body will read your content. In fact there is a chance you'll put people off reading further articles.
There are four main factors at play when you are attempting to use trending topics which can help you get your content just right.
Understand these, and you'll be on point with your trending topics:
Who are your audience
What issues do they face
How can you inform them
And, is this trending topic actually relevant to your business
I'm the first inline to incorporate trending content, it's another fantastic way to engage with your audience and bring them into your business journey, but there is a skill to getting that trending content spot on.
Be creative (and appear to be spontaneous)
As digital marketing teams, we plan, plan, plan and are hopefully ready for most situations. Being creative is what social and digital trends are all about, don't take too long, or the window of opportunity will pass you by.
Ensure your brand the Trending topic actually work together
This is the hard part, finding the link between your brand and the trending topic, don't force it, and if you have to search to hard to find the link, it's probably not there in the first place. Just move on to the next trend.
Sometimes it doesn't work
Every trend is different, in fact if it worked last year, there's a chance it may not work again the follow year. Trends come and go, continue testing and innovating, but remember to keep the core of your business values at the heart of what your trying to achieve.
Businesses have produced some absolutely epic fails over the years, with loosely tying in their subject or products to a trending topic. Just because it's trending, doesn't mean you need to jump on the bandwagon. Content should absolutely always be relevant to your business.
