You Ask, I Answer: Missing Micro Trends as FOMO?

In today's episode, Vedica asks, does missing a micro trend mean missing a crucial marketing opportunity? As a digital marketing intern, every trend feels like my responsibility to catch and create on time. But the moment I miss one to spot it late, it feels like I've missed something important. Is it me, or does every marketer feel this weird FOMO too? Uh it depends, which is the worst possible answer in many cases, but it's also correct.

It depends on your audience. It depends on what they care about. If your audience is, say, addicted to TikTok, then yeah, you gotta be on top of every trend because that's how that platform works. That's what's involved with it, right? If your audience is on, say straight up email marketing, yeah, probably not, you know, you don't have to worry too much about trends because that's not what your audience cares about.

It always comes down to what who the people are and what it is that they care about. And it depends also on what you define as a trend, right? So micro trends is kind of a misnomer. You're really talking about anomaly marketing because these are not things that are durable. If they were durable, they would be a trend that would stick around for a while, right?

And what you're describing is clearly not that. What you are describing is flash in the pan, miniature sort of meme style marketing. That is very hard to keep up with. That's a that is quite a treadmill to stay on, but also it's not really a trend. It is a it is essentially bargaining and auctioning for attention.

And you know, if that's if that's your audience and that's how you get people to pay attention to you, great. You know that, and you know what you need to do to make that happen. But it's not strictly a trend. So, how do you keep on top of these things? Again, it really depends on where your audience is and what their expectations are.

What is it that they pay attention to? One of the things you have to come up with is you have to come up with a list of the things that they care about and think through how do I track those things. And you also you correctly identified for something like uh a platform like TikTok, you have to figure out what does the internal machinery that runs that system, what does it care about? That's gonna be based on who makes it, who operates it, etc. Um, and what's in their algorithms.

So you need data, you're gonna need a lot of data about what is trending now, about how long those trends last, and again, this is all knowable stuff, but you got to do the research, and there's a lot of research involved in it. Ultimately, however, the challenge with trend marketing and micro trend or anomaly marketing is it's very hard to have durable value in it, right? Because you're constantly changing the message to fit the audience and what people and machines are interested in at any given time. That is very difficult to prove an enduring brand promise. So, as a marketer, uh that is that's a very tall order.

That's part of your your strategy that you have to look at too. And as the intern, because you did say you were the intern, as the intern, you need to be working with your management to help them understand and ask them how they want to balance the micro trendslash anomalies with whatever the durable brand value is. And if they don't know that, or they can't articulate that, I mean, again, you are the intern, so you you obviously don't have a whole lot of role power to play here. You have relationship power at best, but somebody has to somebody has to delineate how much you want to rely on anomaly marketing versus how much you want to communicate brand promise and things that are more durable. As the intern, by the way, this is this is the kind of thing that internships are great for learning these things and being and giving you a low-risk way to uh to learn how marketing works, and it sounds like if you're being asked to do this kind of anomaly marketing, you might be working for a company that maybe does not understand the media environment it's operating in.

Good learning experience for you, good education opportunity for you to talk to your the stakeholders there and educate them, provide them some education about how micro trend or anomaly marketing works and how it doesn't necessarily provide lasting durable value without being anchored to a much more solid brand promise. Because just chasing attention for attention's sake, that is both costly and it doesn't necessarily provide great results. So, give that a thought or two, and good luck. Good luck. Thanks for the question.

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