We all know that social media trends provide a tremendous opportunity to raise brand awareness and grow your brand’s social media following, whether it’s engaging in the current challenge, employing a trendy Instagram Reel sound, or putting your own spin on a viral dish. They can, however, be used to improve search engine rankings, resulting in more traffic and revenue for your business.
If your brand’s digital marketing strategy doesn’t currently include taking advantage of social media trends in some way, keep reading. This post will explain why it’s critical to get on board and provide you with a list of actionable activities to help you win.
Examples of social media trends influencing search results
If we build a list of recent social media trends and check Google Trends for related terms, we may see a recurring pattern: search results for linked terms increase when their social media trends go viral. Consider the following examples.
Little Moons
Little Moons mochi ice cream has been available for over a decade, but its popularity didn’t really take off until January 2021. All are owing to a natural, mid-lockdown viral trend started by a few Instagram influencers.
It quickly snowballed into tens of thousands of Little Moons-themed Instagram videos of people looking for and tasting their items, with over 500 million views. Little Moons ice cream became the most popular in the UK, with sales increasing by 2,000 percent. Product, brand, related unbranded, and retail searches on Google grew dramatically during the virality’s peak, as shown below.
The considerable reduction in searches following the initial rise implies that the trend has died out, which is a result of the limited shelf life of social media content, whether viral or not. Influencer marketing allows brands to keep the momentum by establishing new trends and reaching new audiences.
Tax the rich
While Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez putting her “tax the rich” Met Gala outfit on Instagram isn’t the most convenient method to do it, there’s no doubting that it’s a brilliant example of how a social media post can not only sell but also help promote awareness about a cause. When the post went up on September 14, 2021, searches for “tax the rich” soared to new heights. Naturally, the media frenzy surrounding the event aided them in their efforts.
How can brands use influencer marketing to boost search and demand?
Another wonderful strategy to raise awareness and improve searches for your product or brand is to collaborate with influencers to highlight your brand or product while engaging in a trend. Influencers have a distinct edge in that they already have a committed following. Many times, content creators will do a better job of communicating with their potential new consumers in the unpolished language of social media, resulting in higher conversions.
This is how Popsockets, a phone grips company, capitalized on an existing “Emoji Outfit Challenge,” in which participants videotaped themselves matching their clothing to famous emojis. They engaged eight of their ambassadors in the challenge by incorporating their product, reaching a total of two million people.
Don’t overlook it if a big influencer in your niche has already included a generic product you sell in a hot piece of content that might lead to follow-up content or makes the type of content your product could be neatly incorporated into. Use the power of word-of-mouth marketing to reach out to them for product placement. You can identify influencers in any niche, and you can even look outside of it. Even seemingly incompatible pairings can now produce successful results with the correct creative twist, as long as the target audience overlaps.
How to run a successful influencer marketing campaign
Working with influencers in your niche comes in useful when you’re launching a social media campaign and trying to make it go viral. It aids in gaining the initial momentum required for your campaign to begin trending, creating views and, eventually, further reactive organic content, searches, and clicks to your website.
If your company hasn’t tried influencer marketing yet, here are some pointers to keep in mind when building a campaign that converts before or after you’ve recognized a social media trend you want to participate in.
Define the campaign’s objectives and target audience.
Always start by establishing your advertising goals and target audience before coming up with a creative viewpoint. One of the most common mistakes new and established brands make is selecting influencers solely on the basis of their fame or number of followers. To fully resonate with the audience, your target demographic must overlap, and the partnership must be genuine.
Having a clear understanding of your campaign goals from the start can aid you in identifying the proper influencers to work with and selecting the appropriate social media platform(s) for your campaign. Do you want to increase brand awareness or enhance sales of a specific product? Even within a single platform like Instagram, there are numerous distinctions between what works on the feed and what works on stories. Having an influencer promote your goods on their Instagram feed might not be the greatest option if you want a huge amount of hits to your site right now.
A feature on the influencer’s Instagram Story would be a preferable alternative because you’ll need a mechanism for their audience to reach a clickable link without having to take additional steps. When you’ve found the influencers who can help you achieve your goal, don’t forget to tell them about your campaign aims so they can tailor the material to your intended outcomes.
Avoid one-time partnerships.
Jumping on trends can lead to marketers pursuing one-off features, but collaborations that last longer and include frequent, organic product integrations are far more effective in allowing the influencer’s audience to actually create a bond with your product.
Collaboration with a variety of influencers
Working with multiple influencers rather than basing your entire campaign around one is highly suggested because influencers frequently do not share a fan base while operating in the same niche. This will allow you to reach out to new audiences and expand the reach of your campaign. Also, don’t forget about the smaller creators! Their engagement rates are higher, and they have a stronger relationship and trust with their audience.
Conclusion
Using social media trends and influencer marketing to increase brand awareness, search results, and sales is a very effective marketing strategy that businesses of all sizes can use right now. Instagram has drastically altered the game – for the better. As of now, it’s still a platform where not only paid but also organic material may reach millions of people, making it very simple for new and small businesses to get involved in co-creating viral trends and/or developing optimal supporting content to capitalize on searches. It will become much more vital as social commerce grows in popularity.