How To Adapt Trends To Align With Your Brand

Trends have become a critical element in how brands connect with their audience, helping them remain relevant. But it's not enough to simply hop on every trend — you need to select trends strategically. When approached tastefully and according to your brand identity, trends can enhance your marketing efforts, creating opportunities to engage with a wider audience while still staying authentic to your brand message. This blog provides a step-by-step guide to adapting trends in a way that puts your brand first while driving growth.

The Importance of Trends

Trends play a crucial role in your strategy. They provide opportunities for you to stay relevant, as you tap into a larger conversation and drive increased visibility; however, it’s important to approach trends strategically. You don’t want to participate in any and every trend, rather, you want to approach them thoughtfully to ensure that your brand remains authentic while leveraging the current cultural moment for growth. Here’s a blueprint on how you can do that.

Evaluate the Trend's Relevance

Before jumping on a trend, it’s important to evaluate its relevance to your brand and target audience. Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it aligns with your values or resonates with your customers. Take a step back and ask: does this trend reflect our brand identity and core values? Will our target audience relate to it? Does our target audience even know about, or like this trend? Make sure to never sacrifice your current community with the potential reach from another piece of content that might not align with them. 

Stay True to Your Brand Voice

Once you’ve identified whether or not you should participate in the trend, the next step is making sure that you are remaining true to your brand voice, because that is a non-negotiable. Whether your tone of voice is more bold or playful, ensure your adaptation of a trend mirrors your already established voice. A perfect example is RyanAir, whose cheeky, playful approach works seamlessly with trends, allowing them to retain their personality while staying timely. Shifting too far from your usual voice for the sake of a trend can come across as forced or inauthentic, risking the trust of your audience.

Add Your Unique Spin

To stand out in the crowded space of other brands potentially chiming into the trend, adding your brand’s unique twist is essential and arguably the most important step in the process! For example, ByRotation tapped into the recent “demure” trend by infusing their brand, offering and tone of voice - making for the perfect, relatable trend for their community. By adding your creative flair, you’ll ensure the trend serves your brand rather than the other way around.

Leverage Platform-Specific Features

Each social media platform has its unique features that you have to keep in mind before curating your trend. Make sure that you optimise your content for the platform to help you maximise reach and engagement. Your Instagram trends won’t be the same as your TikTok trends! By leveraging the best features of each platform, your trend-driven content can be more impactful.

Rinse & Repeat!

Trends come and go, so keeping on your toes and staying adaptable will be key to sustaining your social media strategy. Continuously monitor what’s happening in your industry and broader social media culture, and be prepared to jump on trends quickly when they align with your brand. The cycle of analyzing, adapting, and executing trends should be part of your regular strategy to maintain relevance and growth. And remember, not every trend will fit — it's important to be selective and authentic in your approach.

If you need help determining whether you’ve been infusing trends strategically in your content strategy, have us take a look at your profile and give you some actionable steps and concrete ideas with our IG & TikTok Audit service (our most popular & affordable one)!

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