You Ask, I Answer: Staying Aware of Marketing Trends?

In today's episode, Sandeep asks, how do you stay aware of new marketing trends? Okay, well, the answer here is relatively straightforward. Um, your communities. Your communities that you belong to are the ones that will be providing you intelligence on what's new on on what's happening. And it's based on the questions that people ask.

If you belong to uh Facebook groups, uh, which should not be my first choice, but uh LinkedIn groups, uh Slack servers, Discord servers, wherever it is that you spend time online uh with your peers, those are the communities where you'll see people asking questions. Hey, has anyone heard of this TikTok thing? Hey, has anyone joined Parler? Has anyone done this? Has anyone done that?

And after you see it a couple times in the feed, you go, okay, this is a thing that we need to pay attention to. Um that would be the very straightforward answer. Now here's the catch. Um, it requires time. It requires you to invest the time in joining those communities, in stopping by and listening, um, doing your own assessments of them, and then ultimately uh making decisions and doing some research based on what you find.

If you're not a member of any communities, uh or significant ones where you're getting enough uh intelligence, that's probably the first place to start. So go to uh you know, go to Facebook, go to LinkedIn, uh hunt around in the bigger public groups that you're a member of, uh, you know, s the social media marketing world group, uh the secret team, uh any of these these larger communities, uh, those would be the first places to start. And ask people, hey, what Slack servers or Discord servers do you belong to? And again, you can uh join uh if people are willing to let you know that they exist, they probably want you to join them. Uh for example, the Analytics for Marketers community on Slack.

It's the one that uh my company runs, Trust Insights. Go to TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. There's about you know fourteen hundred people in there. And the most recent questions have been very heavily about things like Google Analytics 4. So uh after enough of those, you go, okay, there's clearly a thing here.

Uh if you're unfamiliar, this is you know what a Slack group looks like. This is the the Spin Sucks community from uh spinsucks.com. And this is uh about a thousand, I think, maybe more than that. Uh people who are talking about media relations, public relations, community management, uh influencers, etc. Uh the most recent question on you know, ebooks, uh ebook formats.

So what you will find is these communities are great sources of intelligence. Uh the more that you participate in them, the more that you become a uh a full-fledged member in the sense of being active in the community, the more people will ask you specific things that you might have answers to as well. And that is of great benefit because then you're gonna get the tough questions about things that you have expertise about, and that may indicate new use cases, uh new challenges, etc. For example, um this morning in one of my communities, someone's was asking where the referral exclusions are in Google Analytics 4. They're missing.

They're not there. Um you have to ha sort of hack it yourself. But that's not something that I would have thought to talk about unless someone from one of my communities asked the question. With a lot of these online communities, too, you can ask people like, hey, what things are you working on? What things are you trying out?

What's crossed your desk recently that's new? And again, get some useful information to folks as long as you have a reputation in that community for being a upstanding member, if you will. Uh just lurking and then asking a question out of the blue every now and again. It's probably not as effective as you contributing answers and help to the communities, feeding the communities with uh your insights. Now you can do this with more public sources, like Twitter, for example, uh, but you tend to get a lot more junk that way.

You tend to get a lot more junk and a lot more self-promotional stuff. A lot of these communities, particularly on Slack and Discord, are strictly non-promotional, um, to the point where members will be expelled if they're you know out there hawking their stuff, and that's what you want. You want places where the actual discussion has uh happens. The really critical thing though is that you need a community for your customers. Uh, where do your customers spend time online?

You know, depending on who your customers are, it could be an old-fashioned you know, bulletin board system. Um, it could be a a web forum, it could be an email list, uh, it could be uh a Slack group, it could be a Discord server, it could be any of any of these places where people hang out. But you need to figure out where your customers are hanging out and then spending time in those places to stay in tune with your customers, not just marketing trends, but what are your customers up to? What questions do they have? Um, and this you can only get that through asking them.

So if you've got an email list, send out an email saying, hey, what online communities are you members of and where do we find them? We want to go show up and listen. Um is there a Discord server? So if you are a gaming company, you better have uh not only your own Discord server, but you better know you know the top five or six in your industry and and be listening constantly to see what people are talking about there. If you're in B2B, yeah, you better have your own Slack group, but then you better be joining you know other networking uh Slack groups that can provide you useful intelligence about what your customers care about.

Because with a lot of these communities, especially ones um uh that are private that are not in you know the Facebook ecosystem, you get more honest conversation. Uh so you can ask people, hey, uh what do you think of of trust insights? Oh god, these people are so difficult to work with. Um and that can give you some really good unfiltered uh feedback about your company and help you understand where you stand in your ecosystem, where you stand in uh the world of trends around your company's products and services. So that's how you stay aware of marketing trends.

You spend time with the people who you care about, and you listen to them, and then as appropriate, you adjust your marketing strategy based on the things that they're talking about. And if you're not doing that, you're kind of flying blind. Uh you're kind of not tuned in to the pulse of your customers and the things they care about. One of the things you're gonna find out, by the way, uh particularly with marketing technology, is that your customers lag behind you a fair amount of the time, unless you're you're yourself are lagging pretty far behind, but things like good old fashioned email newsletter may still be the best way to reach your customers despite all these new technologies and platforms. Your customers might be there, but they not be may not be engaged there.

Uh whereas a simple email newsletter may generate more business for your company than uh all these social networks put together. So keep that in mind that and that's why having that community of your customers is so important so that you can listen to them and go, oh we're going to launch this whole new thing but turns out nobody cares about that thing. Right? That's that's the value of these communities. Good question.

If you have follow-up questions about communities, uh leave them in the comments below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter and join the Slack group. Go to trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. Join the Slack group. You can ask questions affect somebody just asked questions seconds ago and saw my notification pop up about uh Google Analytics for so join the Slack group.

Join the communities that can benefit you the most and keep an eye on those marketing trends. Thanks for watching. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems.

Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.