11 Top Tips on How to Stay Up to Date With Digital Marketing Trends

With the marketing landscape in continual flux, businesses are often left wondering, how do you stay updated with the latest digital marketing trends?

It’s important to flex your marketing strategies as the online world changes. This keeps your marketing efforts current and in-line with what audiences are expecting. However, sifting through the ‘noise’ of marketing trends can be overwhelming, and time-consuming!

As a digital marketing agency, we understand how precious time is and have spent years learning how to stay up to date with digital marketing trends in an efficient way.

Take a look at our top tips for staying in the loop, with some nuggets from our team.

1. Google Trends

The amazing thing about Google Trends is how versatile its searches can be. This free tool allows you to discover worldwide trends, or filter by country and categories in order to hone in on what’s important to you.

Related topics and related queries can be sorted by rising trends or top trends.

This helps to identify trends over time and filter out ones that may just be a fad.

Google Trends also allows for image search, Google Shopping search, YouTube search and news search. Take a look at these game-changing ways to use Google Trends and get the most out of this free trend tool.

2. Answer The Public

Another fantastic, free online tool is Answer the Public. It collects data from Google searches and compiles a list of the most relevant searches for your target term.

The results are mapped out in colour gradients to highlight the most popular search terms along with smaller volume search terms. Results are also subdivided into questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and related searches.

With Answer The Public, you can identify trends within your market as well as topic areas for content creation!

3. YouTube Trending Topics

Head to the YouTube home page, and within the main navigation you’ll find the ‘Trending’ category.

This highlights some of the most viewed content on YouTube, which can then be subdivided by what’s trending now, music, gaming, and films.

In an increasingly visual landscape, knowing what kind of content is resonating with audiences may help to inspire some of your own visual marketing content ideas.

4. Pinterest Trends

Discover the top Pinterest Trends of the week, including trending topics and categories. Filter results by trend type, date, interests, keywords, age, and gender to really focus on what your target market is interested in.

Results will show weekly, monthly and yearly changes displayed as percentages, allowing you to see how the trend fairs over a stretch of time.

5. Instagram Trends

Utilise Instagram's hashtag searches to highlight the latest, trending content.

The ‘suggested accounts’ feature will help you to discover rising and trending accounts based on your previous activity on the platform. As video content continues to grow in popularity across Instagram, you will likely see an increase in the number of trending videos. Instagram videos can be up to 60 minutes in length, and provide artistic freedom that is unrivalled on other social media platforms. Discover our tips to embrace video marketing on Instagram.

6. Twitter Trends

Utilise Twitter Explore to keep up to date with key industry trends.

You can choose to explore trends selected For You, as well as Trending, News, Sports and Entertainment.

Twitter’s trends are determined by an algorithm that, by default, tailors what trends its shows you based on your activity on the platform, your interests, whom you follow, and your location.

7. Follow Industry-Leading Social Media Accounts

You can guarantee short and sweet snippets of gold when you follow marketing businesses, industry leaders and influencers on social media.

Their goal is to provide their audience with useful, relevant and unique insights in a bid to establish their own expertise and authority within the field. You can capitalise on this and gather a significant amount of actionable marketing takeaways to apply to your own business.

Don’t worry about having your social media feeds overrun by marketing posts - simply create a custom feed for all your marketing trends and insights, and dip in and out of it when it’s convenient for you.

Here are Georgie's (our Social Media Strategist), favourite social media accounts to follow: 

• Klowt

Klowt is a personal branding agency, run by Amelia Sordell. Amelia speaks candidly about life as an entrepreneur and running a business. She offers honest and direct advice, practical tips for social media, quick content creation tips and how to make your marketing as efficient as possible to max your ROI.

• Ogilvy

Ogilvy is a worldwide marketing agency challenging all preconceptions about what marketing should be. It is known for leading innovative, creative and industry-changing campaigns. On their social media channel, they not only provide a great benchmark for stand-out marketing campaigns, but offer applicable marketing tips and advice for businesses in all sectors.

8. Subscribe to Leading Marketing Newsletters

Marketing newsletters aren’t just for marketers. They condense the magnitude of noise into bitesize chunks of valuable information and discoverable marketing trends. Here are some of our favourite marketing newsletter subscriptions:

• Matt Navarra

Matt is a social media industry expert with over 15+ years of industry experience. Now a social media consultant, he is often called upon by top businesses looking to level up their social media strategies. His weekly newsletter condenses the latest marketing trends and industry changes of the past week into focussed, key takeaways.

• Pretty Little Marketer

Run by Sophie Miller, her weekly marketing newsletter condenses the latest and most important information impacting the marketing industry. She offers her own personal take on the latest marketing trends as well as providing invaluable tips and advice.

9. Tune into Leading Marketing Webinars

A top tip from April, our Head of Content, is to sign up for marketing webinars. Some of the easiest ones to find are hosted by marketing software providers, such as SEMRush, Prowly, Moz and Hootsuite, and are typically free to join. Because webinars are in real-time, you can trust them to provide up-to-date industry insights, along with tips on how to capitalise on marketing software and predictive trends for the future. April explains: “I find video content like this more engaging, and I’m more likely to commit to watching it as it is at a set date and time. You can also rely on it being current!”.

What's more, many marketing software providers offer free learning resources such as SEMrush Academy, Ahrefs Academy and Moz Academy, and offer lessons across a wide scope of marketing topics delivered by marketing experts. 

10. Listen to Marketing Podcasts for the Latest Trends

Podcasts provide the perfect medium to stay up to date with the latest digital marketing trends, without taking up too much time. Podcasts often provide a deeper understanding of the latest trends, offering listeners the why’s and the how of implementing these trends for themselves. Here’s our favourite marketing podcast:

• Marketing Millennials

Hosted by Daniel Murray, Marketing Millennials is an unfiltered marketing podcast bringing its listeners the latest insights with guests from some of the coolest companies in the marketing industry. Listen to Marketing Millennials on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Sound Cloud, and the Daniel Murray website.

11. Stay up to Date with Your Competitors' Marketing Tactics

One of the most important aspects of staying up to date with digital marketing is to keep an eye on your competitors’ marketing tactics. This can help to identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your own. You may also be inspired to tweak your own marketing strategy to stay ahead, and to offer your audience something better than your competitors.

Competitor research could include:

• Seeing what their customers are saying - Weaknesses in their products or services may offer an ideal space to focus on the strengths of your own products or services.
• How do they market their products or services, and what can you learn from this and apply to your own business?
• Do they regularly post blogs, produce informative whitepapers or run a regular podcast? This could identify channels that are resonating well with a target market.
• Are they active on social media and what kind of content do they post? Take a look at their best performing posts to get an idea of what is working well, and generating the most engagement. This could provide some ideas for your own posts, including the type, style and topic of the post.
• What topics are resonating with their audience? Again, this could provide some ideas for your own posts and marketing tactics. Your target audience is more likely to engage when the topic is relevant.

Now you know our top tips on how to stay up to date with the latest digital marketing trends, you’re equipped to stay in-the-know, cut through the noise, and use your knowledge to adapt and improve your marketing tactics. While you don’t need to adopt all the latest marketing trends, make sure to keep informed with changes that are most relevant to your business and industry, and may impact your search visibility, audience reach and brand perception.

Our team is here to discuss how you can best implement the latest marketing trends to achieve your core business objectives. Contact us today and find out how our biddable media, SEO and content marketing services can benefit your business. Alternatively, head to our blog.

for more actionable tips and advice, including how to choose between in-house marketing vs agency marketing.