What is Trendjacking?
Trendjacking is a marketing strategy in which brands capitalise on trending topics, seizing a viral moment and injecting themselves into the conversation. By riding trends, brands can increase their visibility, drive engagement, and boost brand awareness. Trendjacking may seem to be a simple concept, but the execution can be tricky.
To help you do trend jacking effectively, this piece will guide you through:
- Why Trend Jacking Matters in 2024
- The Basics of Trend Jacking
- How to Identify the Right Trends
- Trend Jacking Best Practices
- How to Maximise Organic Reach Through Trend Jacking
- Case Studies (Global and Singaporean Brands)
Understanding Trendjacking and Why It Matters
Trendjacking is a marketing tactic for keeping a brand relevant. Often, it uses humorous content, such as memes, to ride a trend. It allows brands to break through the noise of the saturated content economy, positioning themselves at the forefront of a trending conversation, leading to viral growth and increased organic visibility.
Not limited to a viral meme, trendjacking can be a blog discussing or giving opinions about a current news event or a discount promo related to a trending topic. An effective trendjack can help brands attract attention when the trend is at its peak. However, successful trendjacking requires striking the right balance between relevancy and authenticity, ensuring the trend aligns with the brand’s voice and values.
Why Incorporate Trendjacking into Your Marketing Strategy
Nowadays, brands are no longer relying on paid advertising. Because of budget constraints, brands seek to increase their reach organically while achieving their marketing goals.
As a result, marketers are focusing more on organic strategies like trendjacking to achieve growth. Viral content allows brands to gain exposure without the financial outlay required for paid ads. This shift is evident in several areas:
- Consumer Trust: Modern consumers trust organic content more than ads. They have also developed a nose for discerning whether a piece of content is a paid ad. Therefore, trendjacking helps brands engage in conversations that feel less like advertisements and more like a natural part of the digital experience.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Because performance marketing is an essential strategy in digital marketing, giant advertising platforms like Google and Facebook continuously raise their prices. Trendjacking offers a cost-effective way to generate buzz and reach new audiences.
- Increased Competition: With more brands vying for the attention of the same audience segments in the same digital spaces, they need to stand out through real-time relevance more than ever. Trendjacking allows brands to capitalise on the hottest and latest conversations to reach a broader audience organically.
Challenges and Risks of Trendjacking
According to Direct Agents, trendjacking is a double-edged sword. While trendjacking offers exciting opportunities for brands to increase visibility and engagement, it comes with significant challenges and risks. Poorly executed trendjacking can harm a brand’s reputation or alienate audiences if done inauthentically or insensitively. Some of the key challenges include:
- Irrelevance to the Audience: Not all trends resonate with your target audience. You must be careful about which trend to jump into to avoid confusion and alienating your loyal followers. For example, your brand is for senior citizens. Trendjacking a meme popular with teenagers may seem out of touch with your core audience.
- Misinterpretation of the Trend: A brand needs to understand the context of a trend or its more profound meaning to avoid sending the wrong message. Misinterpreting a trend can lead to PR disasters or backlash from communities that feel the brand misused or trivialised a serious topic. For example, your country is experiencing the perils of a super typhoon. Making a meme about it and slapping your brand on it may seem insensitive to the sufferings of those affected by the disaster.
- Timing Issues: Trendjacking is all about timing and seizing the moment. Joining a conversation too late may make the brand seem outdated. On the other hand, jumping on a trend too early can lead to wasted resources without the viral payoff because only a few understand the context when you publish your trendjacking content.
How to Identify the Right Trends
When it comes to trendjacking, identifying the right trends to engage with is crucial for success. Brands must be selective, ensuring that the trends they capitalise on are relevant to their audience and brand values. Choosing the wrong trend can make a brand appear disingenuous or disconnected, while the right trend can significantly boost visibility and engagement.
Here are some of the ways to go about it:
Use Social Listening Tools
Brands often use social listening tools to keep up with emerging trends. These tools help monitor conversations, frequently used keywords, hashtags, and hottest topics across various platforms. Here are some of the popular social listening tools your brand can use:
| Tool | Purpose | Key Features | Price Range |
| Google Trends | Monitors search volume for specific keywords over time to spot emerging trends | Search volume insights, regional interest, trend longevity analysis | Free |
| Buzzsumo | Discovers the most shared content across the web, helping brands see which topics are resonating with audiences | Shows most shared content, identifies influencers and monitors social engagement metrics | USD 119 to 299 per month |
| X / Twitter Trends | Highlights the most talked-about topics in real-time, allowing brands to join the conversation on trending topics | Displays trending hashtags, topics, and conversations; enables brands to engage with live trends | Free via Twitter or X Platform |
| Sprout Social & Hootsuite | Social media management tools with listening features to track keywords, mentions, and hashtags across platforms | Monitors real-time conversations, offers keyword tracking, and provides cross-platform analysis | Sprout Social: USD 249 to 499 per month; Hootsuite: USD 99 to 739 per month |
Choosing Trends That Align With Your Brand
Jumping on trends that don’t fit a brand’s tone, voice, or mission can confuse audiences and damage credibility. That is why more is needed to identify trends; you must ensure that the trend aligns with your brand identity and target audience.
- Consistency with Brand Voice and Mission: Your brand should select trends that naturally fit your established messaging. An example is a brand that focuses on sustainability. To trendjack according to your core message, you must choose topics related to environmental issues that make sense. Moreover, creating a meme about an ecological topic requires you to craft it relevantly and tastily.
- Resonance with Target Audience: Evaluate a trend to see to see if it resonates with your audience. Is this trend aligned with your audience’s interests, values, or pain points? To answer these questions, revisit your analytics and study your audience’s behaviour and demographics. You can also use customer feedback to guide you in selecting trends.
An excellent example is the difference between Gen-Z-oriented and B2B brands. A Gen-Z brand may focus on riding TikTok trends, while a B2B brand may use industry-related trends.
Timing is Everything
Trendjacking is all about timing. If the brand can seize the moment or ride the trend at the right time, the virality return and brand awareness can be rewarding. Trends often have short life cycles, and brands must act swiftly to be part of the conversation while it is still the hottest talk of the town.
- Speed Matters: Swift reacting to a trend is critical to successful trendjacking. If a brand takes too long to respond, the trend may have peaked, and its contribution could seem outdated. Being proactive and having a streamlined content creation process can help brands react promptly.
- Avoiding Late Trendjacking: Brands can ensure they don’t miss the boat by setting up alerts and notifications for emerging trends through social listening tools. Another strategy is to empower a dedicated social media team to act quickly without lengthy approval processes, allowing for faster decision-making and execution.
Best Practices for Trendjacking in 2024
In 2024, many brands successfully trendjacked content. They leveraged its virality to increase brand awareness and sales conversions. Because trend-jacked content is saturated, brands are changing tactics, requiring them to be more authentic, creative, brave, and data-driven. Here is a breakdown of the best practices for effective trendjacking.
Stay Authentic and Relevant
Consumers are now savvy. They can easily detect when a brand tries to force a trend into its content without a genuine connection or purpose. If a trend doesn’t naturally fit a brand’s identity, it can feel disingenuous and turn customers off.
- How To Integrate Trends Authentically: To avoid seeming inauthentic, brands must organically weave trends into their content. Instead of forcing a trend into a campaign, consider how it naturally ties to your brand’s story.
- Application: For instance, if a fitness brand sees a viral dance trend on TikTok, they could incorporate it into their workout videos rather than simply copying the trend for the sake of views. The key is ensuring the trend is a natural extension of the brand’s identity.
Create Engaging Content
Regarding trendjacking, your brand must create engaging and shareable content. You must capitalise on formats people tend to share, like memes, short videos, and interactive content.
- Tips for Creating Shareable Content: Trendjacking works best when the content is easy to digest and fun to share. Use formats that resonate with your audience, such as memes, GIFs, or short TikTok videos. Visual storytelling is especially compelling in 2024, with platforms like Instagram and TikTok emphasising short-form video content. To create engaging content:
- Use humour, but make sure it aligns with your brand’s tone.
- Include CTAs (calls to action) encouraging users to share the content with their followers.
- Stay true to the platform format—memes for Twitter, videos for TikTok, and infographics for LinkedIn.
- Visual Storytelling in Trendjacking: Visual storytelling can elevate your trendjacking efforts by adding an emotional or humorous element that engages audiences. Many brands use Instagram Reels and TikTok’s storytelling features to jump on viral challenges.
One effective approach is to combine trending content with your brand’s product or service in a playful and visually appealing way. Imagine a fashion brand using a trending dance to showcase its latest collection or a tech company using a meme format to explain a complex product.
Leverage Multiple Platforms
Different platforms cater to different audiences and prefer unique content formats. Therefore, you must optimise your trendjacking content for various social media platforms to maximise reach.
- Optimising Trendjacking Content for Different Platforms: Each platform has its own culture, style, and audience. You must tailor your content accordingly. Here are some tips on how you can go about it:
- Instagram and TikTok: Focus on visual and video-driven content. Short, engaging videos work best on TikTok, such as challenges, duets, or product showcases. Reels and Stories are the best ways to jump on Instagram trends.
- Twitter: Short, witty text combined with memes, GIFs, or images works well here. Twitter thrives on real-time engagement, so brands must capitalise on trends quickly.
- LinkedIn: While trendjacking may seem tricky here, it can still be effective. Brands can engage in industry-related trends or create professional takes on trending conversations that resonate with a business audience.
Be on Top of Industry-Specific Trends
Hopping on a general pop culture trend can be tricky. It can give virality opportunities, but there is a high chance that the trend will not align with your audiences. Therefore, the best way would be to be keen on industry-specific trends. Using trends related to your industry can be more impactful and relatable to your loyal followers.
Spotting Niche Trends
Image source: Dolce & Gabbana
Trendjacking doesn’t always involve global or viral events. Sometimes, trends specific to an industry can offer more meaningful engagement with your target audience. Brands can use social listening tools like BuzzSumo or industry-specific platforms like Reddit forums to keep a pulse on emerging trends.
For example, following innovations and product launches in the tech industry can provide trendjacking opportunities. Dolce & Gabbana, a global fashion brand, even jumped into the trending conversation around NFTs in 2020. They earned a whopping 6 million dollars in selling fashion NFTs with unique perks.
Localising Trends for Specific Audiences
In 2024, localisation is essential. Brands can tailor global trends to resonate with a local audience. For instance, if a worldwide fashion trend is emerging, a Singaporean fashion brand can localise it by incorporating local culture or seasonal events to make it more relevant to its audience.
Monitor Real-Time Results
As with any marketing campaign, tracking performance is essential. You must always observe and note the performance of your trendjacking efforts to know what worked and what did not. You must also be open if your target audience receives trendjacking well.
Using Analytics to Refine Strategies
By analysing the performance of past trendjacking efforts, brands can identify patterns in which types of content resonate the most. For instance, if a video trend performed better than a meme, it may be worth focusing on video content in future campaigns.
Additionally, brands can track how quickly they responded to trends and whether timing affected engagement levels. This data can inform a more agile approach to trendjacking, helping brands move faster and be more strategic in future efforts.
How To Integrate SEO Into Trendjacking
Trendjacking allows brands to enhance their organic reach by integrating trending topics into their content. When done strategically, it not only boosts visibility on social media but can also improve search engine optimisation (SEO). Here’s how brands can optimise their trendjacking efforts for search engines to maximise organic reach.
Optimising Content for Search Engines
For trendjacking to be effective in SEO, it’s essential to incorporate trending keywords throughout your content. These keywords can seamlessly integrate into blog posts, meta descriptions, and social media captions, helping your content rank higher for trending searches.
Incorporating Trending Keywords
When a topic becomes popular, expect a surge in search volume for related keywords. You must capitalise on this event by including the viral keywords in your blog posts, titles, headings, and meta descriptions. This effort helps the search engine to recognise your content as relevant to current events.
For instance, if a particular meme or social movement is trending, brands can craft blog posts that naturally include these terms, helping them appear higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keyword Research for Trendjacking
Before jumping on a trend, it’s important to conduct keyword research to understand which trending terms have SEO potential. Tools like Google Trends or BuzzSumo help brands identify a trend’s search volume and potential longevity. Targeting keywords relevant to the trend and aligning with your brand ensures your content can benefit from the increased search traffic while staying authentic.
The Role of User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) plays a significant role in amplifying the reach and impact of trendjacking. When users create content around a trend your brand promotes, it extends the trend’s life and helps generate organic traffic through social sharing.
Amplifying Trendjacking with UGC
Encouraging your followers to engage with trends by creating their content drives engagement and boosts your visibility. When users contribute to a trending topic by sharing their experiences or creations (such as memes, videos, or comments), they increase the chances of your brand content being shareable. This network effect amplifies the trend, enhancing its social reach and search rankings.
For example, when a fashion brand promotes a TikTok dance challenge, users participate by posting their versions, creating backlinks and social signals, and improving SEO.
Encouraging Engagement Through UGC
UGC from Gymshark on TikTok by Leana Deeb
To make the most of UGC in trendjacking, brands can launch campaigns that invite users to participate. Contests, hashtags, or calls to action, such as “Tag us in your post”, can incentivise followers to generate content around a trend. UGC drives engagement and increases the chances of your brand appearing in more searches.
Case Studies: Top 3 Brands That Nailed Trendjacking for Organic Growth
When executed correctly and strategically, trendjacking can deliver high organic growth and engagement for your brand. By tapping into viral trends and responding quickly with engaging content, several brands have leveraged trendjacking to boost their visibility and connect with their audiences. Below are three case studies demonstrating how brands used trendjacking to achieve organic growth.
Wendy’s on Twitter (X)
How Wendy’s Used Viral Trends and Witty Responses
Image source: BoredPanda
Wendy’s has built a reputation on Twitter for witty, sarcastic, and timely responses to customers and competitors. The fast-food chain has created an online persona that resonates with its audience by engaging in viral trends and using clever, often humorous replies. Wendy’s is mainly known for its Twitter “roasts,” where the brand playfully insults other users and brands, jumping on trending hashtags and conversations.
For instance, on National Roast Day, Wendy’s invited users to ask for roast responses, which went viral and generated millions of impressions. Wendy’s also uses popular culture references and memes, making its content highly shareable and relevant.
Organic Growth Through Trendjacking
Wendy’s trendjacking strategy has resulted in significant organic growth. Wendy’s increased its social media following and engagement metrics by consistently engaging in real-time conversations and leveraging viral trends. The brand’s posts often go viral, bringing in retweets, likes, and replies that extend its reach organically.
Wendy’s also became a trending topic multiple times, driving brand awareness without needing paid advertising. This approach improved brand visibility and deepened their connection with a younger, digitally engaged audience.
Netflix and Memes
How Netflix Leverages Trends and Memes
Image source: English Jagran
Netflix is a master at using trendjacking to promote its shows and engage users, primarily through memes. The brand consistently taps into popular culture, repurposing viral memes to fit its content and encourage upcoming series. For example, Netflix has frequently used the ” Is This a Pigeon?” meme to promote its shows.
Additionally, Netflix’s social media team often jumps on trending memes. It integrates them with popular Netflix series like Stranger Things and Squid Game, creating posts that resonate deeply with its audience.
By leveraging memes and trending topics, Netflix promotes its content and drives engagement across social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Its social media presence is fun, relatable, and highly shareable, making Netflix’s posts go viral organically.
Organic Growth and Increased Social Media Presence
Through its trendjacking strategy, Netflix has increased its social media following significantly. Memes shared by Netflix are often reposted, liked, and commented on by users, creating a viral engagement loop. This approach has helped Netflix maintain a strong presence on social media, translating into organic search growth.
Whenever a new show or meme is released, Netflix benefits from the momentum, boosting its SEO rankings and driving more traffic to its platform. By consistently engaging with trending content, Netflix has maintained a leadership position in social media and organic search visibility.
Foodpanda Singapore and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour
How Foodpanda Singapore Leveraged a Cultural Event
Image source: Foodpanda Singapore
In an interview with Darryl Chua, the Marketing Director at FoodPanda Singapore, he said having Swifties on the marketing team would help trendjack the Eras Tour. Because the Swifties team members know the culture, they created more authentic and Taylor Swift-related content.
Moreover, they used their mascot, Pau Pau, to bridge the brand and the buzz around the concert. According to Chua, “He is a mainstay character in Foodpanda’s social content and featuring him would retain coherence between our usual content and those that are trendjacking in nature.”
Beyond its social media clout, Foodpanda jumped on the trend by responding to the opportunity for concertgoers to line up to enter the venue. The food delivery app also decided to provide food to the concertgoers. Foodpanda handed out branded fans to increase brand visibility, as the National Stadium could get hot during the event hours.
Organic Growth Through Trendjacking
By aligning the campaign with the buzz surrounding Taylor Swift’s tour, Foodpanda Singapore successfully connected with a passionate and engaged audience. Swift’s fans responded enthusiastically, sharing the campaign across social media platforms. The clever integration of Swift’s themes and humour helped the brand gain significant traction organically, driving higher engagement rates without relying on paid advertisements.
The campaign allowed Foodpanda Singapore to stand out during a significant cultural moment and build stronger connections with a younger demographic. This trendjacking effort increased brand visibility and led to an uptick in orders, proving the power of leveraging viral trends in pop culture for organic growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is trendjacking, and how can it help my brand grow organically?
Trendjacking is leveraging current viral trends to create timely and relevant content. By aligning your brand with a trend, you can increase visibility, engagement, and reach without relying on paid advertising. It allows your brand to participate in conversations that are already happening, boosting organic growth through shares, likes, and comments.
How do I identify the right trends for my brand to engage with?
Use social listening tools like Google Trends, BuzzSumo, or Sprout Social to monitor emerging trends. Selecting trends that align with your brand’s voice, mission, and target audience is crucial. Relevance and timing are critical to ensuring the trend complements your brand identity.
What are the best practices for using trendjacking in 2024?
Key best practices include staying authentic, creating engaging and shareable content (e.g., memes and videos), leveraging multiple platforms for maximum reach, monitoring industry-specific trends, and tracking real-time performance metrics. Quick reactions and a genuine connection to the trend are crucial for successful trendjacking.
Can trendjacking backfire on my brand?
Yes, trendjacking can backfire if the trend doesn’t resonate with your audience or the content feels forced or inauthentic. It’s essential to ensure that the trend fits your brand’s message and that you’re not late. Reacting too slowly or jumping on inappropriate trends may alienate your audience or lead to negative feedback.
Are there any successful case studies of brands using trendjacking for organic growth?
Yes, several brands have successfully used trendjacking to grow organically. For example, Wendy’s witty responses on Twitter and Netflix’s use of memes to promote its shows are all prime examples. In Singapore, brands like Foodpanda have also capitalised on trends to increase visibility and engagement.
