Brand marketing has evolved with time, and in the current landscape, it mostly depends on media impression. This means it is the result of the number of people who have seen or heard about your brand within a specific period that decides how relevant and popular it becomes.
Marketing now needs to be creative, catchy, and brief. But it also needs to clearly showcase how a particular product of your brand fits in the picture. In a world that is constantly online, social media trends have become the sweet spot of brand awareness campaigns – and that’s exactly what trendjacking is.
In this article, we will be discussing what trendjacking really is, what makes it work, and what benefits you can expect from it.
What is trendjacking?
Trendjacking is the method of noticing something gaining traction and using it to increase the visibility and value of the brand and gain profit. Brands use trendjacking to capitalize on exposure by participating in a current conversation or trend.
It is an efficient marketing strategy to gain followers and attention. Trendjacking works just as the term suggests — it hijacks an existing trend and exploits it to strengthen the brand’s connection with its core target audience.
Trendjacking vs. newsjacking: Is there a difference?
While they sound pretty similar, newsjacking and trendjacking have very different approaches and platforms. The goal is the same, i.e. brand marketing and exposure, but the methods are different.
Newsjacking is a technique where marketers insert their ideas or brands into a breaking or sensational news story to gain recognition in the media and increase product popularity.
Let us look at an example: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced that they are stepping back from the positions of senior members of the British Royal Family. Shortly after that, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum also made headlines by removing Harry and Megan from a wax display of the royal family.
This method of grabbing headlines can be considered newsjacking.
The primary difference between newsjacking and trendjacking is that while the former jumps on stories that have already hit the news, the latter takes advantage of already existing trends to gain traction.
Here is one of the most notable trendjacking examples: We all remember the black/blue or white/gold dress that caused an explosion on the internet. While netizens were in a frenzy debating over the original colour of the dress, Dunkin’ Donuts jumped in on the trend, decorating two donuts with the now-iconic colours. They tweeted the picture with the caption, “Doesn’t matter if it’s blue/black or white/gold, they still taste delicious. #thedress.”
The use of hashtags allowed the users to interact better with the tweet.
The aforementioned example embodies everything your trendjacking approach should be – lighthearted, adaptable, and the center of internet frenzy.
What are the benefits of trendjacking?
In the world of the internet and social media, many PR campaigns fall flat on their face due to the lack of relevancy at that moment. But trendjacking is actually producing impressive results for brand marketing campaigns for many businesses.
It is arguably the most potent moment marketing method, giving platforms to creative and innovative ideas and attracting the audience’s attention to your products. But what exactly are the benefits of trendjacking?
Let us take a look.
1. Better brand visibility
The primary goal of moment marketing is boosting your brand’s visibility among your target audience. Trendjacking uses upper-funnel marketing techniques and campaigns that reach users before they know about your brand, product, or service.
If your brand is new, leveraging an already existing trend leaves a memorable impression on the audience’s mind, ensuring your campaigns are not just a fluke. Trendjacking makes the awareness stage, which is the most volatile in the marketing funnel, efficient and easy.
In this stage, you only have a few seconds to grab attention. Joining in on the trend and curating innovative posts is the fast-track way to build better brand visibility.
2. A quick win
Unlike other PR campaign methods, trendjacking does not deal with jargon-laden language. It offers brands an easy, simple, but catchy way to publish content. Jumping on existing trends eliminates the need to drum up netizens’ interest in the topic, as there is already enough traction for them.
An elaborate marketing campaign takes hours to craft. On the other hand, trendjacking only leverages the right time to put something out and choose the perfect response to the trend, grabbing the attention of your target market quickly.
3. Drives conversions
The whole point of boosting brand visibility is to bring increased conversion rates. Trendjacking grabs the attention of the audience who are interacting with a particular trend and drives more traffic to your site. This helps in gathering leads, and if you take the right approach to these new visitors, you can eventually turn them into customers. This way, trendjacking increases sales conversions.
4. Humanizes your brand
One of the biggest perks of trendjacking is that it makes your brand relatable to the population. Usual PR campaign solely focuses on promoting the brand and its services and lacks personalization. Trendjacking, on the other hand, talks to the audience about the brand but bases the conversation on something they are already interested in. This way, it allows your potential customers to identify with your brand on a human level.
How to get started with trendjacking?
Here are 8 simple steps that can help you get started with trendjacking:
1. Leverage social listening
To optimize the ongoing trends, you need to be aware of them in the first place. Leveraging trendy topics will only work if you jump on with a trend as soon as it gets traction. But the internet is a vast space, and keeping up with every trending topic seems almost impossible.
Every week or month, Google Trends dedicates an entire page to analyzing a popular search trend, whereas Twitter regularly updates the trending topics to the side of the page’s timeline on a desktop view.
Getting notifications as soon as a new trend starts to turn up gives you a better position to react and keeps your brand on top of your game. That is where a proper social listening tool can help your moment marketing strategy. Keeping up with every relevant trend is the best way to leverage social listening. With Radarr’s AI-powered solutions, you can listen, monitor, and track online conversations across all channels.
2. Define your goals and objectives
Before jumping on the bandwagon of moment marketing, you need to point out what exactly you want to achieve via a trendjacking campaign and how it would help you. You can focus your approach on building your brand name or promoting a particular service or product.
Identifying the objective will help you filter through numerous trending topics and target those that align with your brand. However intricate your goal is, a clear idea about it is crucial for trendjacking to work in your favour.
3. Understand the trend
Using trends without knowing the relevance or the topic properly is a recipe for a marketing disaster. Without a clear understanding of the root of the trend, the reason for its popularity, or the meaning behind specific hashtags, your responses and interactions may seem kitsch, desperate or tone-deaf.
Lack of comprehension of the popular topics when it comes to trendjacking has two likely outcomes. At best, the audience just dismisses or ignores your brand’s attempt at joining it. At worst, it can spark a controversy encircling your company, putting off people in your target audience and even your existing customers.
Thorough research into a trend also helps you to gauge when it is time to get involved. The timing needs to be perfect – too early, and it will not be understood by enough people, but too late, and you will be considered cringe old news.
4. Evaluate if it suits you
Just because a trend is gaining maximum traction does not mean it will work for you. You need to evaluate if an emerging trend is in alignment with the goods and services your brand is offering. Topics do not have to be from your exact industry, but the hashtags must serve some relevance linked to your brand.
Your brand’s participation in a totally unrelated or poorly linked conversation will confuse your audience about your image. So, make sure you examine the potential of every trend you pick before settling on the ones you intend to use.
5. Put your own spin on it
A repeated joke does not sound funny, no matter how loud you yell. Similarly, no matter how robust your trendjacking strategy is, if you are not bringing something new and unique from your competitors, it will not work with your audience. You may even get called out for it on the internet.
While understanding the root of a trend is vital for such moment marketing, you must put creativity that is unique to your brand. Trendjacking posts need to be witty and catchy – giving you a lot of room to be bold with them.
You need to remember that trendjacking is only a marketing strategy for brands to get exposure, and everyone knows this. So, make it a point to ensure your addition is actually interesting.
6. Don’t sell
Like usual marketing methods, a content marketing approach like trendjacking does not straight away focus on only promoting a product or service of your brand. The whole point is to make marketing relatable to your target audience, and boring campaigns do not cut the chase anymore.
That is where you need to focus while mapping out your trendjacking strategy. The best course of action here is throwing the spotlight on the conversation while subtly hinting at your product or services.
Trying too hard diminishes the cool factor of trendjacking. Your audience will be able to see through it if your posts are too sales-y. This makes the campaign seem inauthentic and thus loses all of the potential benefits.
7. Make it worthwhile
While exposure is the primary goal, your brand’s trendjacking process does not necessarily need to be only about that. If you have managed to grab someone’s attention, you need to maintain their interest in your content to convert them into clients and customers.
Adding links to specific landing pages of your website in your social account bio or a quick link at the end of the conversation can keep your audience engaged with your page. Dedicated pages that are set up and optimized to target keywords relating to the trend can also drive increased interaction from viewers. You can hire SEO experts who will guide you to the best way to increase conversion rate with on-page keyword optimization.
The bottom line is – when a person spends time on your page and interacts with your posts, make your content worthwhile for them.
8. Encourage action
Study the trends properly and find out points that would link your brand to the topic. Your trendjacking posts should drive your audience to not only interact but also take action by opting for your services.
Never leave your trendjacking posts open-ended. Be it the graphic, the video itself, or the caption, always include calls to action.
Conclusion
Trendjacking can be an effective way to connect with followers and be a fun part of the conversation. But that does not mean that it would suit every type of business. The outcomes depend on your brand’s goal, objective, and the crowd you are targeting.
If you carry it out well, trendjacking can prove to be a powerful tool, allowing you increased brand visibility, more lead generation, and secure placements for your clients.
But, like everything else, it is not immune to potential problems and roadblocks you may face. This is why a proper social media guide is important to enable the quick-thinking trendjacking requires.
Keeping track of every emerging trend is not humanly possible. And that is what technology can help you with. Radarr’s cutting-edge AI technology will enable you to experience the best possible social media intelligence services. This AI-powered social media solution tracks and monitors every emerging trend, provides a sentiment API that is capable of measuring human emotions behind online conversations and redefines your approach to trendjacking.
For a better presence on social media and improved profits, choose Radarr as your personal trendjacking buddy.
