How can marketers stay abreast with trends?

Marketers often find themselves lacking to cope with the ever-changing trends in marketing which can cause brands to fall behind and dull their moment in the spotlight. Whilst it’s important to keep up with trends, it’s critical to pick and choose what best works for your strategy, spreading yourself far too thin can heavily impact the creativity in your campaigns. In this article, we will be covering the common routes marketers take to stay ahead of the curve and keep themselves up to date with the ongoing trends.

1. Social Media

Social media is an avenue for many marketers to showcase their work, provide case studies, and share personal experiences. It is a great way to keep up with emerging trends and to see what is currently working for the digital audience. Consider factors like what kind of content is being viewed more, like short-form or long-form videos, carousels, or text-based posts. This can greatly help plan your next campaigns and ignite creativity. Pages like ADWEEK , Ad Age The Drum , Mad Over Marketing (M.O.M) , HubSpot , Canva are all growing pages that talk about the current trends in the industry and what’s working!

2. Competitive Analysis

There’s nothing that can boost your business like healthy competition, you as a brand owner or a marketer must stay in touch with what your competition is doing – in terms of SEO, their product benefits, their customers, their content on social media or any other form of content generated for particular channels and the interactions they receive on their social media or their ad campaigns, with their audiences. Tools that can help with this are competely.ai, Semrush , Sprout Social, Inc. , and many more.

3. Online Communities

Communities on Reddit, LinkedIn groups, Twitter groups, Facebook groups, and other websites and apps dedicated to community building for marketers are a great way to stay in touch with other marketers and understand what is working for them. You also get to learn more from people who post questions and other experts reverting, that back and forth is absolute gold in terms of learning what others are doing to stay updated. Moreover, if you revert with insights on posts, you receive more exposure to your peers and possibly propose business deals and gain awareness not just as a marketer but the product you are strategizing for. Some communities to follow are r/Marketing and r/AskMarketing on Reddit, Demand Generation Club which is an independent club, SEO groups on Twitter, marketing communities like The Marketing Meetup, and much more.

4. Newsletters

Yes, email marketing is still a thing. Almost all companies have a newsletter one can opt to stay subscribed to. We personally love sharing data-backed marketing info into your inboxes every Tuesday, but we’ve also come to enjoy many newsletters that keep us on our toes. AdAge, TheDrum, AdWeek, and Campaigns Breakfast Briefs are some of the top sources to get your insights from, some other independent marketer folks who have informative emails are @MarketingMax .

5. Blogs and Industry Research

Blogs are a quick read that aids marketers in keeping up with the trends of the year, many publications and businesses publish regular articles on what’s trending in their industry which is extremely valuable for marketers as it guides them. These could include journals, reports, e-books, data trends, case studies, and other analyses as well, benefiting those who would like to stay ahead of trends and strategize their plans for the year or month accordingly.

Industry research and advisory firms such as Gartner and Forrester , offer data-driven analyses and predictions on market trends through their reports and interactions.

6. Google Alerts

One of the most underrated Google tools is Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a free tool that allows anyone to track and monitor any phrase or keywords you set. This can particularly come in handy for marketers to see trends in what people are searching for, keep track of how their competitors are strategizing, aids marketers in reverting to any reviews left on their business pages and marketers can check how their brands are being mentioned or portrayed online. An extremely simple yet effective tool.

7. Your Team!

Your biggest cheerleaders are your team members; they can help you stay ahead of trends as they are also parallelly keeping up with the latest trends. Brainstorming new ideas and crafting compelling content while still being on trend can be achieved if regular team brainstorming sessions are facilitated, allowing even newcomers to display their creativity.

8. Thought Leaders on Social Media

Your LinkedIn feeds should be filled with posts related to your industry as this will help with your reach as well as facilitate the need to investigate more trends seen in marketing. Thought leaders in the space are a great way to keep up with trends that you may otherwise miss out on, they regularly update their followers, almost instantly! You can learn from their past experiences and pave your path, ask questions, and join their community, an all-encompassing learning curve for marketers, especially newcomers. A few thought leaders we find resourceful yet inspiring are – Kieran Flanagan , Anneli Hansson & Chris Do .

9. Webinars

Webinars are like a mini boot camp by thought leaders from the industry for marketers to stay on par with trends, in a short span of an hour or two, you get first-hand learnings from the top voices in the industry or even brands who invite guests onboard to talk about relevant topics. As AI and marketing have been a trendy topic in the past year or so, Incivus is hosting its first webinar with C5i in their Course5 Compass – GenAI series titled Digital Advertising Transformation Led by AI. In this session, Anees Merchant , EVP – Growth & IP at Course5 will be discussing the challenges faced by marketers in the digital advertising space in 2024 and how marketers can combat attention deprecation, rise in ad spend, and ad blindness in the digital audience. Tune in on the 9th of April at 11:30 am EST. Looking forward to seeing you all there! Register here.

10. Generative AI

In 2023, AI became extremely popular and even so in the digital advertising landscape. Marketers sought tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot to craft blogs and other marketing collaterals. With time, Generative AI tools became a news source for many marketers with trends they are seeing in the industry, keep up with their competitors, assess consumer trends, and test new product opportunities.

There you have it. Top ways 10 marketers can stay on par with trends. We’d love to know your thoughts, leave your feedback in the comments down below.

If you’re looking to launch effective ad creatives, Incivus is a good fit for your digital marketing teams. Try Incivus here.