What is Trendjacking? How to Use it in Your Marketing

If you’ve ever seen a corporate brand jumping on a viral TikTok trend or posting meme-laden tweets, you’ve witnessed the concept of trendjacking in action.

In this guide, we’ll go over what trendjacking is, how it can help your brand, and how to try this marketing technique correctly.

How Does Trendjacking Work?

Trendjacking happens whenever a brand decides to leverage specific cultural moments, viral content, or popular trends to extend their marketing reach.

Trendjacking is all about speed and relevance. To be successful, you must:

• Quickly find trends that fit your brand
• Move fast to create relevant content
• Ride the wave of changing trends to adapt and react to your audience’s response
• Offer an original take on the trend so that you stand out from a sea of related content

Benefits of Trendjacking

When done right, trendjacking may make a brand seem fun, human, and approachable. Trendjacking can:

• Introduce your brand to new audiences
• Improve overall brand awareness
• Generate media attention for a funny or well-executed social media post
• Grow existing customers’ connection to your brand and products
• Boost sales of specific products

But if done incorrectly, Trendjacking can make a brand seem inauthentic, outdated, or like it’s trying too hard.

Is Trendjacking the Same as Newsjacking?

While a brand engaging in trendjacking may create content around viral beauty trends, TikTok challenges, or trending songs, newsjacking takes a more “ripped from the headlines” approach.

When a brand attempts newsjacking, they’ll typically try to add their take to a big story or important current event. Brands can newsjack on serious or lighthearted stories. The news just needs to be relevant to their audience in some way.

5 Steps for Successful Trendjacking

These five steps will help you make the most out of your first, or next, attempt at successful trendjacking.

1. Research Current Industry Trends

Timeliness is an incredibly important factor in successful trendjacking. You’ll want to invest time in researching trends and making sure that they’re going to still be relevant by the time you produce your marketing content. But you don’t want to spend so much time researching trends that you miss your window of opportunity.

I’ve talked to many marketers and founders who rely on Exploding Topics to find the most valuable, relevant trends for their brand campaigns — weekly trend newsletters make it easy to see what’s surging in popularity right now.

Because the Exploding Topics database is organized by industry, it's very easy to find and review trends that have relevance to what you do or sell.

2. Evaluate Trend Relevance to Your Products and Audience

Finding a timely, popular trend is only part of the process — you need to make sure it will resonate with your audience, too. This is why it’s important to have a solid understanding of your current and potential customers before attempting trendjacking.

If you aren’t sure exactly who you want to see your content and buy what you’re selling, then you’ll need to stop here and do some more market research.

Once you know who you’re marketing to and what they’re interested in, you can then take a look at your list of timely trends with a more critical eye. Think about whether a trend:

• Is popular on your social media platforms of choice
• Attracts engagement from your target audience
• Aligns with your brand values
• Speaks to what your audience is likely to feel or experience in their lives

3. Consider trend longevity

Next, consider whether the trends you’ve identified have a decent chance of longevity. Trends come and go, so your trendjacked content doesn’t need to be truly evergreen. Ideally, though, you’ll be able to generate views and traffic from your trendjacking for more than just a day.

You can get a feel for how long a trend might last by using a few different Exploding Topics features and data points.

Channel popularity

Some trends are more popular on TikTok, while others take off on Reddit. Understanding what trends and channels are experiencing surges in interest is very important — this will make it easier to find the right variety of content and keywords to support your trendjacking content.

Trend History

Does the trend surge in popularity over and over again (as evidenced by a graph with peaks and valleys) or has it built steadily over time? Are there recent sharp spikes in popularity? This can give you an idea of how stable a trend may be.

Trend Forecast

By turning on the trend forecast feature in Exploding Topics, you can see how a trend is likely to perform in the near future. These forecasts are built using Exploding Topics’ blend of human and machine learning-aided data analysis — not to mention a vast array of data points.

You can also see whether a topic is currently experiencing regular growth, exploding growth, or if its popularity has peaked.

Seasonality

Seasonality is important to assess, too. If you’re reaching the end of a particular season or holiday period, there may be some trends that aren’t worth jumping on.

4. Personalize the Trend To Match Your Brand

Don’t forget to create content that’s personalized to your brand, too. If a trend is so unrelated to your company or products that adding your own flair to it feels like a stretch, don’t bother.

Look for trends and topics that you can reasonably connect to your brand voice and offerings. This will help you stand out from other people leveraging the trend and make sure that your brand comes off as relatable and authentic, not like you’re trying too hard to be ‘fun.’

5. Set a Goal for Your Trendjacking Campaign

Finally, you’ll want to treat trendjacking campaigns and content just like you would any other marketing asset — set a goal, track brand performance, and if you can, analyze audience sentiment toward your trendjacking content.

Quick Check: Should You Try Trendjacking?

Before attempting to trendjack, ask yourself these questions:

1. Are the people engaging in this trend online similar to my target audience?
2. Is the trend popular in the countries where my audience tends to live?
3. Does the trend make sense across the social media channels I usually use?
4. Can I connect this trend to my company or products in some way that makes sense?
5. Does the trend align with my normal brand voice?
6. Am I comfortable having my brand associated with this trend over time?
7. Is the trend growing in popularity now or is it waning?
8. What do I want to get out of this trendjacking campaign?

Get Reliable Trend Data to Grow Your Reach

If you're interested in trying your hand at trendjacking, start by signing up for Exploding Topics — your first seven days are free. You'll get access to our full library of trend insights, curated trend reports, meta trends analysis, and more tools to help your brand turn trends into valuable marketing content.