127 - Why We Don’t Chase Every Trend

Rich: 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’ll 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’ve got to make this quick. And we didn’t have time to change clothes. So now I’m rambling about our clothes. That’s great. A lot of businesses think the problem is that they’re behind on trends. But usually, catching a trend isn’t going to make or break your business. The real struggle is that sometimes you’re chasing too many trends. You’re quite literally chasing your tail. So we’re going to talk about how to look at trends, see whether they’re worth testing, why you need to be more disciplined about it, and how to be ready to pivot. Be ready to dump that trend if it’s not right. But first, we’re going to talk about a Rosita.

Zac: 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. This 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.

Rich: Yeah, no, it’s good. I was just gonna say, unlike last week, which was rye-based, which is fine—a lot of people like rye, I don’t—this one, like Campari, tequila, vermouth, bitters, sign me up. This sounds fantastic. So yeah, 1970s again. All good things came out of the 70s. No offense to people born in the 90s or the 2000s now. Like, people born in 2005 can drink this year? That’s insane. So, ingredients: one and a half ounces of tequila. Honestly, measure that with your soul. A half ounce of sweet vermouth, a half ounce of dry vermouth, a half ounce of Campari. So you’re not getting a ton of each of those, but combined they’re going to balance the tequila and be pretty much equal to it. A dash of Angostura bitters, and you garnish with a lemon twist. Everything goes into the glass filled with ice except your twist. Stir it smoothly for 15 to 20 seconds. This one’s super easy—no shaking, just stir it—and then strain it into a 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: Oh, that sounds cool.

Rich: So good. Then use your lemon twist to garnish it. You literally twist that over 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. I like this. It’s probably going to be a little reddish or pinkish with the Campari. When I first read it, I was thinking of tequila rose, like that creamy tequila you can buy, and I was like, ooh, let’s not. We have a couple friends who just love that stuff, but this is different. So I like it. I would make this all day long in the summer.

Zac: 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 going to talk about trends.

Rich: All right, we are back. So welcome, welcome. I’m Rich, that’s Zach, as you probably know, 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. You don’t have to actually listen to them. Listen to them, seriously. All right. Biggest thing here: not every trend deserves your attention. Definitely not.

Zac: 100%.

Rich: And as a content marketer, you’re not going to be able to chase all of them.

Zac: Yeah, and as a content marketer, I feel this episode a lot, especially. I help manage our socials along with a few other team members, and figuring out what trends to pursue on there is always quite a challenge. There are so many trends you could jump on, but which ones actually make sense for your business? There’s a lot of pressure on marketers to keep up with trends, but not all trends are actually worth your time. And most of them have a pretty short shelf life. If you’re a bigger company or a company that has a disciplined 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.

Rich: I think a lot of that comes down to empowering the team to jump on stuff quickly. But 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 a trend coming in. For us, for example, does a fashion trend make sense? We’re a pretty casual agency. We’re not a high-fashion agency. I know we did your fit of the day or outfit of the day from INBOUND, and that worked for that context because you had stepped up your outfit game, even though you’re sitting there in a hoodie today. But you’re not going anywhere, right? We’re just on the podcast. There are other things that do make sense, and sometimes they can be tangential and still work. But sometimes they can pull you away from your business. Like listicles and restaurant reviews. We did a great blog post—you did a great blog post—on Omaha restaurants, and it became our number one blog post. 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 going to hire us to do their marketing. They just want to know where to eat in Omaha in the middle of the night. It was by far the biggest blog post we’d ever had. So it was fine, it was good, but we pulled back on food content a little bit, even though we’re big on food, because we were migrating into the wrong SEO searches.

Zac: Yeah, it was a nice experiment, but it was a good lesson on what to pursue and what not to pursue. What do you think the real risk is of trying to keep up with everything? For me personally, if I tried to keep up with every trend that comes out, one, I would be exhausted. But two, I think our social and our content would be all over the place.

Rich: Yeah, I think the two biggest things there are that you’re going to be scattered, and no one’s going to know what you’re actually about. I brought this up the other day on a call: it’s like trying to boil the ocean. You’ve really got to boil one cup of water at a time. You can’t do everything all at once. Great movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, but not a great concept when it comes to marketing. So that’s one. And then I think you’re exactly right—if you’re chasing trends left and right, those trends won’t always connect to each other. You’re also just going to miss more than you hit if you’re chasing everything. You’re going to lose audience because people will be like, I don’t know what you’re about, this is weird. Or you’re going to gain the wrong audience—people who just want to see the latest trend and that’s it. They’re not going to be related to your business. Those are the biggest risks. And like you said, if you chase every trend, we’re going to have a conversation about why you’re not actually doing your day job. This doesn’t work for us.

Zac: Yeah. And I think maybe a lot of people listening are probably asking themselves, well, trends are an important part of social media strategy, and completely ignoring them isn’t really an option. If you want good reach and impressions, sometimes you do have to follow some of those trends. So how do you do that without creating scattered execution? 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. Just a little quick shoutout: I have a webinar coming up in March—March 18th. 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. So yeah, I just wanted to shout that out. You can definitely register. I’ll probably share the link in the description. But if you want to learn how to create a strategy so that you can follow trends, definitely check that out.

Rich: All right, your ad is over. Good plug. So I think one of the things when you talk about filtering trends—how do you do it, what should you do—I highly recommend Contagious by Jonah Berger, Why Things Catch On. You should actually read this book too. I’ve got a copy somewhere I can loan you, though it’s probably cheaper for you to just buy it from Amazon or for me to buy it for you because otherwise I’d have to ship you a copy. But anyway, I used this in a class I taught at a community college. He purposely doesn’t use the word “viral.” He talks about why things catch on. And he’s got some filters you can go through. 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? 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. I think about the old Old Spice guy—the “I’m on a horse, I’m on a boat” era. That was so entrenched with Old Spice and with what they were saying, like “I’m the man your man wants to smell like.” It made sense for them. There are other examples in the book that didn’t work too. So that’s one really good filter. And then business goals. Can you actually achieve what you want to achieve with this? Or are you just chasing something that looks good? If you want to achieve likes, that’s not a business goal. Likes are not a business goal. What matters is whether this gets you in front of a bigger audience that matters to you, and whether it ties back to your core offering or something related to your business. I need to mute my watch when I’m doing this. It vibrates and I’m always tempted to look at it, which is distracting.

Zac: Yeah, I think there are a lot of signals that can tell you when a 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. There are a lot of trends that, if you followed them, you could definitely embarrass yourself. I’ve seen companies in the past try a little too hard to follow a trend, and they just end up looking like, oh hey, we’re cool too, we’re trendy, look at us.

Rich: I saw a company trying to do the ice bucket challenge literally like two weeks ago, and I was like, that’s kind of played out. It’s a little late. I don’t think you’re going to bring that back, but okay, good job. All right, so you’ve got a little scenario for us. We’re going to do a little “how does this work?” So hit that.

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

Rich: Yeah, so Discord launched as a gaming chat platform, basically. It was a lot of gamers using it, and it still is huge. Now there are also other communities there. I follow a podcast that has a Discord channel, but their audience is mostly younger people. I’m probably a little bit old for their audience, but their core definitely uses Discord. So I think one of the biggest things here is when I hear senior operations leaders, I’m thinking Gen X and older Gen Y, maybe even some boomers. You’re not going to get them to Discord. So this is a great example because the goal—community-led growth—is a good goal. That can really help your business. But Discord? Maybe not. Maybe it’s a Facebook group. Maybe it’s a Slack channel that you invite people to. HubSpot has group Slack channels for different things—their HUGs have channels, they’ve got one for partners, one for HubSpot-certified trainers. If your core audience is already using a tool and you can build community in that tool, that’s much, much better than trying to force them into something else. In this scenario, the company is trying to change behavior in a hardcore way. That’s like me saying we’re only launching this game for the old Nintendo Switch and nowhere else. And it’s like, no, that’s not how it works today, because you’re not going to get people to buy it just for that. Although people did buy the Switch for Animal Crossing during COVID. But still, people are locked into their PS5 or Xbox or Switch or PC or Mac. The more places you can go to build that, the better. So this one is definitely a take-a-step-back-and-figure-out-where-your-audience-is kind of situation. Meet them there and gather them there.

Zac: Yeah, 100%. All right, so for this next point, I think I forgot to update some of the bullet points under it, but that’s okay because I remember what I was intending. It’s basically what I was covering earlier: durable systems and plans beat one-hit-wonder trends. Having a plan in place to handle trends is super important, but what’s better than pursuing a trend is creating a system that allows you to pursue trends in a meaningful way. At the end of the day, 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. A lot of the time, if you’re reactive with your content, it gets back into what we were saying about scattered execution and an 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. I think a lot of organizations 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, doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you.

Rich: Yeah, it could just be right time, right place, right content. And you’re not going to line those three things up again in the same way. I want to go back to something you just said though: 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 can also give you more time to hit them. If you’ve got your evergreen content and your holiday posts and anniversary posts and those things that do really well—like about your people and whatnot—planned out and scheduled out, 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 actually got time to analyze it, think about it, pursue it, and launch it in a day or two. Also, your plan is going to tell you what you should go after and what you shouldn’t. So a strong content plan is great. Definitely put that link to the webinar in the notes. We’re not live streaming this one, so not in the chat, but yeah, planning allows you to take advantage of the moment things so much better.

Zac: 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 so that everything’s working together and you understand the why behind what you’re doing, you’ll be able to know what’s worth experimenting with and what’s not. Then you’ll be as consistent as you need to be. And I think that creates a healthy testing culture. 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 won’t work for you.

Rich: I think one of the big things about a healthy testing culture, for me—I spoke to some graduates, it was like five years after I’d graduated. I was in Chicago working for a big agency, and the college had me come back and talk to a group of people who had gotten the same scholarship I did. It was kind of a little group, and the theme was basically, what’s most important? What have you learned five years out of college? My biggest thing was that 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. What I said was, if you’re going to fail or hit a brick wall, hit it at 100 miles per hour. 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 did wrong, 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. Just do the safe stuff because you’re already out of the game. 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, try to figure it out. That’s a lot of content planning too, right? What worked really well, we want to do more of that, usually. But what failed—you can learn so much more from failure than from success.

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

Rich: Yep, 100%. You’ll have a sustainable system, right? You’ll be able to jump into the trends that make sense and ideally ride that wave and benefit from it. And then come out of there. I think the other thing we didn’t cover though is: don’t be tone deaf with your trends. Understand why the trend is spiking. It may look like it fits your brand, but it may be 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. We’ve seen that before too. We’ve seen that a bunch of times. You can Google that and there are a whole bunch of examples out there. All right, I think that’s a great episode for, I guess, the second week of March now.

Zac: 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.