Keeping up to date with the latest trends is how many businesses continue to be successful, but the most prosperous ones take advantage of changes in the market. Be it offering new products, or phasing out out-of-style ones, adapting offerings and practices to what customers are looking for is how businesses can keep themselves relevant in an increasingly cut-throat marketplace.
Make sure you are up to date with trends
As a financial advisor, it can make all the difference to the businesses you support if you can quickly help them react to changing trends. No one wants to be left behind, so here are our top tips for guiding your clients as they implement them for their own businesses.
The first step to making the most of trends in the market is by staying up to date with them and knowing what they are. As someone supporting a business, you should learn what to look for and keep connected to changes in your client’s industries and the wider socio-economic climate. Market trends could cover anything from changes in customer behaviour – like public opinions on the environment – to purchasing frequency impacted by economic factors.
You can stay on top of trends in many ways, from diving down the rabbit hole of Reddit to the clean stream of a curated RSS feed with news from industry publications. Even simply setting Google alerts for keywords in your industry is a handy way to automatically stay up to date with the latest news. Forums like Reddit bring together the good, the bad and the ugly of public opinions on the internet, but you will often find deeply knowledgeable people going into great detail in subthreads, putting out information waiting to be leveraged by businesses. To sift out the best of Reddit, you can use plugins like Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro and news aggregators like Feedly scours sources from across the web to give you even broader insights on what is happening in the industry.
You could also find these insights by keeping in regular contact with your network to learn about new trends from people in the know before they are common knowledge so that you are ready to act upon them early.
Identify relevant trends
Being able to spot what is popular in the market is great, but you’ll need to differentiate what is applicable to your clients from what is trending. Your clients will also want to make sure they aren’t getting sucked into jumping onto fads, as these could lead to sunk costs and short-lived interests.
Though they seem similar, there is a distinction to be made between a trend with longevity and a fad. Fads gain popularity quickly and can often have a novelty factor or be extremely time specific. On the other hand, trends are gradual overall changes in consumer tastes or technology advances, and these are advancements in industries that mark longer-lasting shifts in preferences and expectations of businesses.
Take Coors Beer’s reaction to the growing soft drink market in America. Looking to emulate the success of non-alcoholic competitors like the flavoured seltzer brand La Croix, Coors launched its sparkling water brand in 1990. But a combination of consumers unable to dissociate the Coors brand with alcoholic drinks and packaging that were considerably different from their core products left them canning their foray into fizzy drinks by the decade’s end.
Businesses can spot trends, including keeping closely tuned into the discussions in specific industries and noticing the ideas and talking points that are staying put. Thinking on a bigger scale is an excellent way to keep on the lines of trends rather than fads, as fads won’t have as big of a grip on an industry as shifting trends will.
Assess trends and their impact
Once your client has narrowed down a potential trend to act upon for their business, they’ll need to analyse how it can be implemented for their specific circumstances and what impact this will have on their customers.
They could analyse the impact of a trend on a business through market research reports and specific analytics software such as Tableau or Google Analytics, where businesses can view their company data and see how trends can be applied to what has already happened in their metrics.
A real-world example is how Netflix has adapted and reacted to changing trends multiple times to take advantage of shifting consumer preferences. Having started as an at-home DVD-mailing service, Netflix capitalised on the rise of the internet to stream films as physical DVD rentals got shelved. When they expanded into commissioning their own content rather than just streaming from established film companies, they wound up with creative freedom that saw the creation of Stranger Things, the biggest success story of content created from analysing viewer data.
But committing to implementing a new trend can be risky and costly, so businesses might look to test the waters slowly and carefully. One way to assess a trend without sinking too much time and cash before a full launch can be through launching beta versions of products and piloting new approaches with a select group of customers for testing. Using these methods allows your product to be tested by real users on a smaller scale so that any teething problems can be more easily managed and changes can be made more easily.
Support your clients to adopt relevant trends into their business strategy
So you’ve found a trend your client is keen to hop on, and you’ve explored how this could work for their business – now what? First, advise them to take these learnings and commit to making them a part of their business strategy.
When your client includes new trends as part of their business strategy, they prioritise their implementation and take them seriously. By incorporating trends, they can find additional benefits like improving their whole business output, which could change the business’s future.
Take Domino’s Pizza, which took convenience ordering to the next level in the late 2010s. When they developed their Anyware service, customers could order directly from other apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or even a smart speaker. As a result, Domino’s reported over $16bn in global sales in 2020, thanks in part to their ability to capture the demand for mobile ordering that was convenient for the customer, meaning they didn’t miss out on a slice of the action.
The final step for accounting partners to help their client is to make accessing the funding they need simple. So if you’re looking to sign up to become an OakNorth partner or you’re already signed up and have clients ready to take on a fast and flexible loan, come to us to get the ball rolling.
