You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Trends vs. Tactics and Strategies?

In today's episode, Alexander asks, what defines a trend versus a tactic or strategy? Um they're they're totally different things. Uh a strategy is why you do something, what's the purpose of it? Uh tactic is what you're gonna do, right? Execution is how you're gonna do the thing.

That's you know, strategy, tactics, and execution. That's pretty straightforward stuff. A trend is something totally different. Um mathematically speaking, a trend is a sustained change in a metric uh over a period of time that has been proven with some sort of statistical test. Uh so again, a sustained change in a metric over a period of time that can be proven with a statistical test of some kind.

That's what a trend is. Um when you look at uh a chart of you know dots or lines or whatever, uh if you can use some sort of uh mathematical test like for example, linear regression, logarithmic regression, uh polynomial regression, exponential regression, something that can you know fit a line to the data and have that be uh reasonably statistically sound. I mean, there's a there's a correlation there, there's something that you can uh mathematically show yes, there's an increase in this or there's a cyclicality to this. That's a trend, right? Uh I'm guessing by the intent of this question, we're talking about you know what is the the usage of a particular channel or tactic or strategy and whether you should be doing those things, right?

So uh is uh TikTok a trend or an anomaly? Well, depends on the period of time and and the data you're using to to make that assessment. It how many users are on it, um, how quickly is the rate of use changing? Uh would be things that you could test out. You could also test out, for example, uh how often people search for it, how often people talk about it, and in that sense, uh, you're looking at a chosen metric of some kind, probably a sort of some measure of popularity, and whether there's enough of it there to warrant you participating in it.

Uh there's you know a new social network or social media app nearly every day, most of them don't survive. Um, but also, you know, there are other uh trends people try to take a look at. What is the usage of Facebook? Uh how many news media outlets are there? Pretty much any number that occurs over time can be measured to see if there's a trend.

Here's the challenge for a lot of marketers. Uh most marketers do not have any kind of statistical background. Uh mathematics was uh for some the reason why they got into marketing because they didn't want to do math, and statistical uh assessment and analysis is definitely not something they signed up for. So in a lot of cases, marketers are making decisions on very qualitative data, like, hey, five of my friends just signed up for this new thing, it must be popular, um, as opposed to actually looking at the data and using some form of statistics to make that determination. So, how do we understand this?

Well, the key to understanding trends is in the statistical test. When you look at any time series data, any data that occurs over time, and you fit a line to it of change over time. Do you see in the given period of time that you're trying to assess a meaningful sustained change in that metric? If you were to take a chart and it had you know dots all over the place and uh you know for each individual day, and you drew a straight line through it and it was just completely flat, there's no change, right? Or going down would be would be bad.

Um as opposed to uh going upwards either as a straight line or maybe a curve. Um those would be the tests you would run to determine is this thing an actual trend. And there's three different kinds of things you're gonna see, right? You'll see anomalies, which are where you know you've got dots that are way above or below whatever line you're drawing on the chart. Uh those would be things that are odd, but definitely not indicative of a trend because remember, a trend is a sustained change.

A breakout would be the beginning of a trend where the dots or the lines on a chart suddenly start to go up and then stay going in that direction, and then the trend is the sustained um momentum in that direction of that uh change. Trends can go up and down, right? So you can have things that are de-trending or becoming less and less popular. Uh, there are, you know, for example, bell bottoms were a trend upwards in the 1970s, have been on a trend downwards ever since. So you have not really seen them come back.

Um, so you've got to be able to run the statistical tests. Now, the good news is many, many software packages can do basic trend analysis very well. Microsoft Excel does it very well. Uh Tableau does it very well. IBM Watson Studio does it very well.

You don't need like heavy-duty machine learning software to find you know the four basic trend types. Um but you do need to know how to to run them and you do need to know be how to interpret them. And that's the challenge that uh again a lot of folks will run into. But remember the four basic trend types are linear trends, which is a straight line, uh logarithmic or uh no logistic, sorry, logistic trends, which is where it's sort of an S-shaped curve, exponential, where it's a straight up or straight down curve, um, and polynomial, which can fit a line to waves. Most marketers are gonna run into polynomial trend curves uh with cyclical data, especially if you are a um uh B2B company.

Um you have you work with polynomial trends every single day, you just don't know it because your traffic or your leads or whatever goes up Monday through Friday and goes down pretty sharply Saturday, Sunday. So your chart looks like this every week, right? So you have a polynomial curve. Um when you fit a trend line to that, you're obviously looking for the interday or interweek changes, but then you're gonna add an additional trend line on top of it to say, okay, in general, is my website traffic going up or is my website traffic going down to determine what the trend is. So when we're talking about identifying a trend in order to apply marketing strategies or tactics about it, we're talking about doing the data assessment first and then making a decision.

Is this something that we want to be part of? Um and you've got to do this frequently. Uh it's not something you can do just once and make a decision. Um for example, a year ago, a little more than a year ago, TikTok was like, eh, okay. The trend data was starting to, you know, move upwards, but it wasn't really as hot.

Uh fast forward six months ago, it takes off. Right? And so if you're not measuring trends frequently or looking for trends frequently, you may miss things. Um this is again why a lot of really good uh marketing analytics uh departments or groups have automated software that pulls the data in and looks at it very frequently to say, yes, is there a there there this week? You know, are you starting to see oh it's uh nudging upwards?

You know, real ugly version of this. Uh look at the number of coronavirus cases. There are trends up and down and up and down, and you've got to be keeping an eye of careful eye on it because it can change rapidly. It can change, you know, within days and see uh a change in that the the velocity was called an inflection point uh that suddenly indicates out there's a new trend starting. So we've got to have the tools to to look for them frequently and be able to react to them.

The most important thing when it comes to trends is being able to make a decision from it. You look at a trend change and say, Yep, it's now changed enough that we should do something about it. And again, you need to be monitoring constantly for that. So in this context, that's what a trend is. It's a sustained change in a metric over a period of time that can be proven with a statistical test of some kind.

Um got further questions on this? Leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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