Why We Don't Chase Marketing Trends

We'd love to hear from you! Join us on our social media platforms. 👇
LinkedIn:   / antidote-71     
Instagram:   / antidote_71     
Facebook:   / antidote71agency     
-
Host: Rich Mackey 
Producer: Zac Hazen

About Antidote 71: 
Think of us as your very own offsite, highly effective team of local marketing growth experts, from digital marketing to traditional (who you’d also happily grab a beer with). Antidote 71 is equal parts skill and personality. We’re super fun to hang out with (in our opinion) and exceptionally good at what we do. We love our work and care about the people we work with. 

Learn more about us. 👉 https://antidote71.com/

Transcript

Opening And Today’s Focus

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In this episode, we're breaking down how we evaluate what trends truly matter and how to stay focused without falling behind. All right. So we are back. If you are paying close attention, you notice we're wearing the same clothes and in pretty much the exact same positions we were. We're recording these back to back. So last week and this week are being recorded back to back. And we are on a time crunch, so we got to make this quick. And we didn't have time to change clothes. So a lot we have to make it quick and I ramble on about our clothes. That's great. So a lot of businesses, like yes, your problem isn't that you're behind on trends. Like catching a trend isn't going to like make or break your business, usually. But the struggle is sometimes because you're chasing too many trends. It's the like you're quite literally chasing your tail. So we're going to talk about how to talk, look at trends, see whether it's worth testing, why you need to be more disciplined about it, and be ready to pivot. Like be ready to dump that trend if you're into it and it's not right. So we'll get there, but first we're going to talk about a Rosita.

Zac 1:09

Yes, the Rosita is a tequila forward classic, often described as a Mexican-inspired Negroni. Built with tequila, campari, and both sweet and dry vermouth. It delivers a bold and bittersweet profile. So this thing traces back to the 1970s and has become a favorite among bartenders who want something more spirit forward than a margarita, but still agave driven. Sorry to interrupt.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Yeah, no, it's good. I was just gonna say, like, unlike last week, which was you know rye-based, which is fine. Like a lot of people like rye, I don't. Um, this one, like Kampari, tequila, vermouth, bitters, like sign me up. Like, this sounds fantastic. So, yeah, so 1970s again, like all good things came out of the 70s. You know, no offense to to people born in the 90s, um, or the 2000s now. Like, people born in what is it, 2005 can drink this year? Like, it's so crazy. That's um that's insane. So, uh ingredients one and a half ounces of tequila. Uh, I mean, measure that with your soul, honestly. A half ounce of sweet vermouth, a half ounce of dry vermouth, a half ounce of Kampari. So you're not getting a ton of those, but combined, they're gonna balance the tequila and be pretty much equal to it. You got one and a half ounces of those extras. Um, those uh what are they, aperitifs? Is that what they would be, I guess, sort of. Anyway, a dash of angosta bitters, or angostura bitters, excuse me. Um, and you garnish with a lemon twist. So everything goes into the glass filled with ice except your twist. Stir it smoothly for 15 to 20 seconds. So this one's super easy, no shaking, just stir it, and then strain it into a rock rocks glass over fresh ice or a large cube or a large ball of ice because our refrigerator, we upgraded to the LG that makes the cocktail balls.

Zac 2:58

Oh, that sounds cool.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

So good. Uh, then use your lemon twist to garnish with it. So you just literally twist that over to the top, get a little bit of the oil out, throw it in the drink, and you're good to go. So this comes from liquor.com. Um, I like this. It's probably gonna be a little reddish or pinkish with the compari. Um, when I first read it, I was thinking of like tequila rose, like that creamy tequila you can buy. That is, I'm like, ooh, let's not. I have we have a couple friends who just love that stuff, but this is different. So I like it. I would make this uh all day long in the summer.

Why Most Trends Don’t Matter

Zac 3:31

Yeah, it sounds like a good one. Well, I think that means we can probably get straight into the next part of our episode. So after we take a little break, we're gonna talk about trends.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

All right, we are back. So welcome, welcome. Uh I'm Rich, that's Zach. Um, as you probably know, uh, unless you're brand new. And if you are brand new, thank you for finding us and please go listen to all of our past episodes or just download them because that gives us the metrics. Like you don't have to actually listen to them. Um, listen to them, seriously. All right. So um, biggest thing here is not every trend deserves your attention. So definitely not.

Zac 4:11

So 100%.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

And we're not going to be able to do that as a content marketer.

Risks Of Chasing Everything

Zac 4:14

Yeah, and as a content marketer, I feel this episode a lot, especially. Um I help manage our socials along with a few other team members, and figuring out what trends to pursue on there, it's always quite a challenge. Just because there's so many trends you could jump on, but what ones are actually what ones actually make sense to your business, right? Because there's a lot of pressure on marketers, especially to keep up with different trends, but not all trends are actually worth your time. And most of them have a pretty short shelf life. And if you're a bigger company or a company that has a pretty uh like disciplined uh approval process, it can be really hard to jump on a trend at the correct time in a way that works for your company and your brand.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Because I think a lot of that though is you've got to empower the team to like jump on stuff quickly. But I think before you do that, you've got to really define what makes sense and what doesn't make sense and give them the tools to evaluate that trend coming in. You know, for us, like, does a fashion trend make sense? We're a pretty casual agency, we're not a high fashion agency. Like I know we did, I think you did your fit of the day or outfit of the day from uh um we did something for inbound. From inbound, and that was just sort of a like because you had stepped up your your outfit game as you sit there at a hoodie today. But you're not going anywhere, right? We're just on the podcast.

Zac 5:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Um, but there's other stuff that does, and sometimes it can be tangential, but you can make it make sense. And sometimes it can it can take away your business. So, like um, you know, the trend of like, you know, listicles and restaurant reviews. We did a great blog post, you did a great blog post on that for Omaha, and it became our number one blog post. And then we were showing up in restaurant searches, and people were using us to find restaurants, and it's like, right, but they're not gonna hire us to do their marketing, they just want to know where to eat in Omaha in the middle of the night because that's what the thing was about. And it was like by far like the biggest blog post we'd ever had. So it was fine and it's good, but we pulled back on food content a little bit, even though we're big on food, because we were just we were migrating into the wrong SEO searches.

Zac 6:22

Yeah, it was a nice experiment, but it was a good lesson, you know, what to pursue and like what to not pursue. Yep. Um what do you think? How do you I mean, I don't know, like what do you think the real risk is of keeping up with like everything or trying to keep up with everything? I think for me personally, if I tried to keep up with every trend that comes out, one, I would be exhausted. But two, I think uh I think our social and our content would be all over the place.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

Yeah, I think the the two biggest things there are um you're going to be scattered. Um, you know, you're gonna be trying to keep up with everything. And it's I had brought this up the other day on a call, but like you're trying to boil the ocean, like you've really got to boil one cup of water at a time. Like that's you know, you you can't do everything all at once. Um, you know, great movie, everything everywhere all at once, um, but not a great concept when it comes to uh marketing. So I think that's one, and then I think you're exactly right is no one's gonna know what you're actually about because you're just chasing trends left and right, and those trends won't always connect to each other. You're also just gonna miss more than you hit if you're chasing everything. Um, and you're gonna have, you're gonna lose audience. They're gonna be like, I don't know what you're about. Like, this is so weird. Or you're gonna gain audience that just wants to see the latest trend, and that's it. And they're not gonna be related to your business. So I think that that's um, those are kind of the biggest risks. But like you said, if you chase every trend, we're gonna have a conversation about why you're not actually doing your day job. Like, you know, this doesn't work for us.

Building A Process For Trends

Zac 7:58

Yeah. And I think maybe a lot of people that are listening are probably asking themselves, well, uh, trends are an important part of social media strategy, and completely ignoring them isn't like an option. Like you to really effectively get uh good reach and impressions, sometimes you have to follow some of those trends. So, how do you do that without creating scattered execution? Well, um, for one, you make a consistent and well thought out content strategy and social strategy so that when these trends come up, you have a process in place to pursue them. And you can pursue them quickly and efficiently and in a way that makes sense for your business. So uh just a little quick little shout out. I have a webinar coming up in March. March uh let me check, double check the date to make sure I start.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Which is like in a few weeks.

Zac 8:50

Yeah, so March 18th, uh, I'm doing a webinar over how to create an effective and impactful content strategy, mostly talking about how to avoid being reactive with your content and making sure that your content tells a story, has narratives, and all connects back into your own funnel and pipeline so that your content is working together to create leads and deals for you. And uh so yeah, I just wanted to shout that out. You can definitely register. I'll probably share the link in the description. All right. But if you want to learn how to create a strategy so that you can follow trends, definitely check that out.

Webinar Invite: Content Strategy

SPEAKER_01 9:28

All right, your ad is over. Yeah. Good, good, good plug. Um, so I think one of the things when you talk about like what, how do you filter it? What do you, what do you think you should do? How should you do it? So I highly recommend, and you should actually read this book too. I've got a copy probably somewhere I can loan you. Um, though it's probably cheaper for you to just buy it from Amazon or me to buy it for you because otherwise I'd have to ship you a copy. But anyway, uh Contagious by Jonah Berger, Why Things Catch On. So I've used this in a class that I taught at a community college. Um, and it's really about like he he purposely doesn't use the word viral, getting things to go viral. And he talks about why things catch on. And he's got some filters that you can go through to figure it out. But one of them is is your brand tied to the trend? Can your brand be indistinguishably tied to the story you tell with that trend? So, like if I can tell the story and leave your brand out because your brand is irrelevant, probably not for you. If when I'm telling somebody about what I saw, your brand has to be in the middle of it, then I think that's probably good. And I think about like the um the old spice guy and the, you know, I'm on a horse, I'm on a boat. Like that was so entrenched with Old Spice and with what they were saying, like, you know, I'm the man your man wants to smell like and all that stuff. Like it made sense for them. Um, but there's other things he goes through some failures too in there. So that's one of them that's a really good one. And we've talked about that before. Like, does it just make sense for your brand? Is your brand tied to it? Um so that's a big one. And then business goals. Can you actually achieve what you want to achieve with this? Or are you just and if if you want to achieve likes, you're not that's not a business goal. Likes are not a business goal. Um, it's really, you know, does this actually get you in front of a bigger audience that matters to you? Um, you know, does it tie back to your core offering or something uh related to your um to um you know, your business and everything? I need to mute my watch when I'm doing this. Like it vibrates and I'm like always tempted to like look at it, which is like distract. So anyway.

Filters: Brand Fit And Business Goals

Zac 11:36

So yeah, I think there's a lot of signals too that can tell you when a strategy the trend is worth pursuing, if it's really relevant to your target audience, if it's something you can do that's fun without making you look stupid to be blunt. Like there's a lot of trends that if you followed them and like I don't know, you could definitely embarrass yourself. Uh a lot of companies, I've seen companies in the past try a little too hard to follow a trend, and they just end up looking like, you know, like, oh hey, we're cool too. We're trendy, look at us. You know?

SPEAKER_01 12:08

I saw I saw a company, they were trying to do the ice bucket challenge like literally like two weeks ago, and I was like, oh, that's kind of played out. It's a little late. Really, like, I don't think you're gonna bring that back, but okay, good job. Um, all right, so you've got a little scenario for us. We're gonna play like a little like how does this work? So um hit that.

Zac 12:30

All right, so imagine a B2B services company that decides to launch a Discord community because they heard a community-led growth is the future, and Discord is becoming really popular for interacting with different communities. Their buyers are only senior operations leaders who usually who rarely use Discord.

Avoiding Try-Hard Trend Fails

SPEAKER_01 12:51

So Yeah, so Discord, um, I think the biggest thing here is Discord launched as a gaming chat platform, basically. It was a lot of gamers um were using it, and it still is, like, it's still huge. Now, there's also like I follow a podcast that has a Discord channel, um, but their audience is mostly younger people. Like, I'm actually probably a little bit old for their audience, but um, and their core definitely uses Discords. So I think one of the biggest things here is when I hear um senior operations leaders, I'm thinking like Gen X and older Gen Y, and maybe even some boomers. You're not gonna get them to Discord. Like, um, and so that's I think this is a great one because it's like, do I do we do a Discord? So community-led growth is what they want, right? And so I think you step back to that. That's a great goal, and that can really help your business. But Discord, a Facebook group, a Slack channel that you invite people to. So HubSpot has group Slack channels for different things, like um their hugs have channels, they've got one for partners, they've got one for HubSpot certified trainers, like all of those things. And if your, you know, if your core audience is using a tool already and you can build community in that tool, much, much better than trying to get them to do something else. So here in your scenario, this company is trying to change behavior, like hardcore change behavior of their core uh group. I mean, that's like me saying, like, you know, we're only launching this game for um, you know, the the the old Nintendo Switch, nowhere else. And it's like, no, like that's not how it works today, because you're not gonna get people to buy it just for that. Although people did buy it, like for Animal Crossing, they did buy the Switch, and that was a whole thing during COVID. But, you know, you're locked into your PS5 or your Xbox or your Switch or your PC or your Mac. And so the more places you can go to build that, the better. So I think this one is like it's definitely a take a step back and figure out where your audience is and meet them there and gather them there.

Scenario: Discord For B2B Leaders

Zac 15:02

Yeah, 100%. All right, so for this next uh point on the front doc, I think I forgot to update some of the bullet points under this one, but that's okay because I remember what I was intending. Uh so it was kind of what I was covering earlier on the second point. Durable systems and plans beat one-hit wonder trends. So basically, um having a plan in praise to handle these trends is super important, as I was saying, but what's better than pursuing a trend is creating a system that allows you to pursue these trends in a cre in a meaningful way. Because uh at the end of the day, like more often than not, a good plan and strategy will do more for you and your content and social media than following a trend and being reactive with your content. A lot of the times, if you're reactive with your content, it gets back into what we were saying with scattered execution, unclear path forward where you're not exactly sure why you're doing something, you're just doing it because everyone else is doing it, and that doesn't help you stand out. That just buries you and blends you into everything else that's happening. So a hundred percent, I think uh a lot of the times it's easy for organizations to really overweigh short-term spikes in traffic, like, oh, this one post got a lot of impressions and likes. We need to do more like that. That's not necessarily true. Just because something worked once for you or works for somebody else, it doesn't mean it's gonna work for you. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah, it could just be right time, right place, right content. And you're not gonna line those three things up again in the same way. Um, I want to roll back to something you just said and talked about, but the um the idea that a good content strategy and content plan can help you because it can help you focus on what trends to hit, but it also can give you more time to hit those. Cause if you've got some of your evergreen content and those holiday posts and anniversary posts and some of those things that do really well, like about your people and whatnot, planned out and scheduled out. Like you can honestly schedule those at the beginning of the month for the whole month. You've got stuff going on so that if a trend happens or something comes in the moment, you've got actually got time to analyze it, think about it, pursue it, and launch it in, you know, a day or two. Um, also, your plan is going to tell you what you should go after and what you shouldn't. So there's that as well. So I think that the strong content plan is great. So definitely put that link to the webinar in the chat, like um, or not in the chat. We're not on Zoom, I guess. Put it in. I guess we could put it in the chat, but it's just you and streaming in the notes. Yeah, we're not live streaming this one. Um, so yeah, that's a big one. I think um it's just planning allows you to take advantage of the of the moment things so much better.

Meet Your Audience Where They Are

Zac 18:00

And I think it gives you a healthy balance between experimentation and consistency, right? Because if you have good themes and good content and good keywords figured out to where everything's working together and you understand the why behind your doing things, um, you'll be able to kind of know what's worth experimenting and what's worth not. And then you'll be as consistent as you need to be. And I think that'll create a healthy testing culture, right? Like you can try new things without going too far outside of what you should be doing, and you'll know exactly what will work for you and what not work for you.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

I think that um one of the big things about a healthy testing culture um for me, and I uh I spoke to some graduates, it was like five years after I'd graduated or something. I was in Chicago working for a big agency. So the college had me come back and talk to a group of like um people who had gotten the same scholarship I did, basically. So um it was a just little group of people. And um kind of the theme was kind of like, what's most important? What have you learned, you know, five years out from being, you know, out of college? And my biggest thing is in a healthy testing culture, you need to be ready to fail. And you need to be ready to fail spectacularly, but you need to be able to gather that data and learn from it. And that was my thing is I said, you know, if you're going to fail or if you're going to hit a brick wall, hit it at 100 miles per hour. Like give it everything you've got, but then be ready to step back and learn why that failure happened and what you could do differently, what you could do better, what you could do, you know, what you did wrong, or all of that. And sometimes you didn't do anything wrong. The situation just failed you. But if you're going to have a good testing culture where you're scared of failure, you're done. Don't chase trends. Like just go do the safe stuff because you're you're out of the game already. Um, be ready to have that post that gets five likes and you're like, wow, what the heck happened there? And take a look at it. Look at your timing, look at your audience, look at the content, like try to figure it out. Cause that's a lot of content planning as well, right? Like what worked really well, we want to do more of that. Yeah, usually. But what failed, you can learn so much more from failure than from success.

Zac 20:12

And make sure you have good reporting too, just so that you know what's going on and you're not looking at vanity metrics, too. Because if you have a standard that you're trying to hit and you know what metrics you want to be good and what to just not look at, then you'll have a better idea of what to pursue as well.

Durable Systems Beat One-Off Spikes

SPEAKER_01 20:30

So Yep. 100%. Like, and you'll have a sustainable system, right? You'll be able to jump into the trends that make sense and I'd ideally ride that wave and benefit from it. Um, and then um, you know, come out of there. I think the other thing we didn't cover though is like don't be tone deaf with your trends. Like if a trend is understand why the trend is spiking. It may look like it fits your uh your brand, but it may be like actually taking off for a whole other reason, and you could look really, really stupid or even damage your brand by trying to participate in it. And we've seen that before too. Oh, yeah. We've seen that a bit a bunch of times. You can Google that, and it's there's a whole bunch of examples out there. All right. I think that's a great episode for I guess we're in the second week of March now.

Zac 21:17

Yep. As always, you can find our agency at anti71.com and all of our socials are there as well. If you have a question you'd like to send our way, head to CTApodcast.live to shoot us an email, or even better, leave us a voice message on our hotline at 402 718 9971. Your question will make it into a future episode.