How to Track Industry Trends - 5 Useful Tools

Tracking industry trends is a perfect way to learn what your customers want and what you need to offer to meet their needs and expectations. It gives you the insights you need to market your brand and products better, attract customers, and sell more products.

The problem is that there are so many tracking tools you can use to do this that it can become overwhelming. And let’s face it, when you’re overwhelmed, you’re going nowhere. To prevent this, we’ll look at 5 helpful tools you can use to track industry trends in more detail. 

Why Should You Track Industry Trends?

• More opportunities. When you know what’s trending and what’s not, you’ll know which products are popular, which are not, and what products your customers want. As such, you’ll have far more opportunities to take advantage of. 
• Better marketing. Understanding market trends shows you what types of content and marketing resonate with a specific audience. When you have the insights, you can launch marketing campaigns that get your content in front of the right people at the right time. In turn, your revenue grows.
• Planning. If there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that new trends come and go, and trends evolve. You’ll learn when certain products and marketing tactics are more popular when you analyze trends over time. This allows you to plan better to take advantage of these trends. 
• Growth and revenue. Ultimately, when you’re able to plan better, take advantage of market trends, and market more effectively, you’ll sell more products and generate more revenue and, as a result, grow your business. 

5 Tools to Help You Track Industry Trends

We’ve now looked at the “why” of tracking industry trends, so let’s look at the “how.” Here, we’ll deal with 5 helpful tools you can use to track trends in your industry. As a bonus, most of them are free. 

Google Trends

One of the best ways to track industry trends is by looking at what people are searching for on the internet. This is where Google Trends comes in. It’s a free tool that lets you see what people are searching for by providing a keyword or topic. You can also refine your search by filtering the results based on category, region, time period, and more. The tool even provides topics and searches related to your search.

By using all this information, you’ll understand what’s trending and what’s not, and how trends change over time. In turn, you’ll be able to shape your product, sales, and marketing strategies to take advantage of these trends.

Social Media

Another effective tool you can use to track market trends is social media. Most social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter allow you to easily see what’s trending. They do this in a few ways. 

For one, many of these platforms provide you with trending topics based on your activity on the platform. For example, your YouTube homepage will display trending videos based on the videos you’ve watched before. 

Some platforms provide dedicated trending tools showing you what’s trending at any given time. For example, Twitter provides trending topics that show you trends in your country but also allows you to broaden your options to view trending topics worldwide. 

Finally, you can also spot trends on social media platforms by searching for and following specific hashtags. This will, for instance, be the case with Instagram, which allows you to search for specific hashtags and discover related hashtags. As is the case with Google Trends, all these tools are free.

BuzzSumo

Rather than a trend-tracking platform alone, BuzzSumo is an all-in-one content marketing platform that offers various tools that allow businesses to do market research and monitor content performance. Its discovery phase is specifically aimed at trend tracking and allows you to see search volume for any keyword over a given time period. 

The platform also lets you search through its massive index of social engagement data, from where you gain insights into historical trends. You can then use these insights to improve everything from your content’s performance to your search ranking. In addition to these features, you can also track and monitor both influencers and your competitors to see what content they’re sharing and what’s trending under their audiences. 

Feedly

Feedly is a feed aggregation tool that helps you stay updated on websites and blogs. It provides a central place to read and get updates on any topic you’re interested in. So, it’s an excellent tool to get updates on what’s happening in your industry. 

The tool is relatively simple to use, too, and you can add sites and blogs to a feed quite easily. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds, bookmark and save articles and blogs, and share content easily. Another benefit is that the tool has mobile apps available and is completely free. 

ScreenshotAPI

In a list of industry trend tracking tools, we’d be remiss by not mentioning our tool – ScreenshotAPI. It allows you to take programmatic screenshots of any website and export them in any format you’d like. You can also take full-screen screenshots, timed screenshots and even export the text from the screenshots.

It’s the perfect solution if you use many other tools, including those we mentioned earlier, but simply don’t have the time to manually navigate and check the sites. Also, many of the tools we mentioned give you the trends at any given time.

By taking screenshots, you can compile a vast record of historical trends and have more profound insights into what the market wants.

To learn more about ScreenshotAPI, get started for free today!