Market trends: 5 types of tools to study them

Let’s start with some questions that every entrepreneur, manager or freelancer should always ask themselves:

• What’s new in my industry?
• What is trending for my target customers?
• More importantly, what are the trends that are emerging in my market?

If you want to get ahead of the competition and seize opportunities before other players, then you necessarily need to answer these questions, and to do that you need two things:

• the right mindset and
• Tools to help you with your research.

In this article, let’s find out how to get both! Would you rather watch a video? Here it is 👇

Elon Musk’s advice-and the mistake of many entrepreneurs

But first let’s take a step back. Do you know what Elon Musk’s main advice to entrepreneurs is?

“Always think about how things could be done better and question yourself!”

Elon Mush

Questioning oneself is essential! If today you can find a better way to do what you have always done, it doesn’t mean you were doing it wrong yesterday!

Yet, through years of experience and after working with entrepreneurs in a variety of industries, at Central Marketing Intelligence we have come to realize that the first competitor of any company is precisely the “comfort zone .”

In fact, the mistake many entrepreneurs make is to be static, firm in their position, and to lack a proactive approach.

The problem is that any market today is highly unpredictable and working !as you have always done” is very dangerous! We have all learned this very well, with the Covid pandemic, with the war in Ukraine, with the advent of ChatGPT and AI, and so on.

Precisely for this reason, entrepreneurs today more than yesterday must have an investigative mind, be ready to catch all changes and especially weak signals on how the scenario will evolve.

And as we always tell the students in our Marketing Intelligence Community Boosters, those who do business today should not be afraid to change, to transform themselves and their businesses to stay relevant!

How to unearth market trends?

Scouting for new trends and market direction is therefore a key skill that must be trained and practiced every day if you have a business and want to grow it.

You’re probably wondering, “But how do you do it?”

Well, that’s what we’re here for!

Today we want to recommend some practical tools and methods that we also use at CMI to identify new trends in your market and help you seize new opportunities

These tips, as you will see, involve tools that are almost always also available for free and that apply to all entrepreneurs, no matter what industry you are in or whether you sell B2B or B2C!

Method 1: Start with Google to find updated reports

The absolute first method is to start with Google. It may seem trivial to you, but it is the best performing solution!

If you enter into Google the topic you want to search for along with words like “trend,” “trends,” “market,” “statistics,” and then try English as well, you will see how many reports, and articles will come up in the results!

Open them one by one to see if they are really interesting and save the useful graphs and data in a file or presentation.

By the way, we recommend that you go to Tools – Date – Last Year so that you don’t find results that are too old and then open them one by one, marking the key information in a file.

Method 2: uses databases to find quantitative data

To understand trends in your industry you can then search online using database software, for example:

• nationals such as Istat in Italy,
• European as the site data.europa.eu
• private, such as Statista or ReportLinker.

These sites collect tables and graphs from studies internationally, allowing you to discover aggregate numbers, trends in market value over time, opinion rates, and so on.

This is an indispensable tool for any market research, as it is essential to start with the context in which we find ourselves, quantifying the situation and its trend over time.

Method 3: Analyze social media trends to unearth qualitative trends

You can then look for trends from social media, which express users’ interest.

The best social media for finding trends is Pinterest, which offers a specific section called just Trends, at the link /trends.pinterest.com/.

In this section you can find out for each type of product or topic which images are the most shared, statistics on people’s searches and interest trends

Or, for Twitter you could use sites like https://getdaytrends.com/, while for Facebook you could take a tour of Facebook Ads Library to see what ads are currently active.

Enter keywords related to your industry and dive into the results!

Method 4 : analyze Google searches to understand the trend over time

Another method for understanding how interest in your industry evolves and for unearthing interesting news is to look at search trends on Google, particularly through the free Google Trends tool.

We have already talked about it in detail in an article dedicated just to Google Trends, if you missed it you can find it in our blog!

In fact, Google collects our searches from 2004 to the present and allows us to understand what is growing and what is now disappearing!

Method 5: Use Trend Hunting software.

And finally, you can look for trends on sites dedicated just to TrendHunting, such as TrendHunter or CoolHunting for example, which are just dedicated to discovering trends and news for each industry.

In some cases it is necessary to register, while in others it is enough to browse by searching for trends by keyword.

Another idea is to use crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Mamacrowd, where people with a project seek funding and pre-sales from people who give them confidence.

By browsing these sites, you can explore innovative projects and ideas in your industry to see what’s new, what gets funding, and then how your industry might evolve.

Everything, however … starts with the Mindset

As you have realized then, there are plenty of tools and methods for finding trends!

However, what we want to convey to you in this article is that all these tools dedicated to marketing intelligence are only facilitators: the important thing is to have the right mindset, to always be curious by going in search of new trends, and above all, to be ready to test and get out of your comfort zone!

In fact, it’s not a matter of doing a search every now and then, but of always being with your antennae perked up, ready to pick up on weak signals and consider how they might benefit you.

And then when you spot a trend, always ask yourself: how can this impact my company? How can I make use of it? How can I take cover if it is a threat?

In fact, the important thing is not to find trends, but to act before others after discovering them!

If you need help finding trends in your industry, contact us by clicking here to request a free consultation on what data might be uncovered in your case.

And if you had any questions about how to use these tools, please write to us in the comments! Until the next article, in the meantime, remember: Think Big Data!