In today's day and age, every industry is subject to fast-paced change. Between TikTok’s ability to send the world into a frenzy within minutes, to the shift of consumer attitudes over the years, the evolution of industry trends comes quickly and often.
To put it simply, the landscape is changing at such a pace that it can be difficult for brands to stay on par with the trends, and keeping up is crucial to ensuring your success against competitors albeit can be very time-consuming.
In its simplest form, industry trends are widespread changes that alter the industry as a whole. These patterns or occurrences continually happen over time within a specific industry and materialize in a number of different ways, such as product demand, purchasing, marketing strategies, packaging, consumer interests, and much more.
The impact of these trends can be both positive or negative, and will often be seen at a small scale first before rapidly growing. Examples of industries that are often affected by quickly changing trends include the fashion industry, the beauty industry, the CPG, food and beverage industry, and many others.
Following Industry top trends is becoming increasingly more important. Just as consumers are following new trends all the time, businesses need to be following the trends in their industries as well. But why is it so important you may ask?
Staying up to date on industry trends can be somewhat tedious, time consuming, and challenging but there are a couple of ways to help lead your search so you are not completely in the dark. To make the process of finding trends within your industry easier, you should use some or all of these strategies:
Being active on various social media channels every single day is key to staying up to date with what is trending within your industry. Making sure that you’re paying special attention to your competitors' pages and checking for new and popular posts using industry relevant hashtags will help you to ensure that you’re never missing out on a new or upcoming trend.
Having just one person keeping an eye out for trends can be very time consuming and makes it easy to miss an opportunity to capitalize on a popular new topic. Get your whole team involved in watching out for trends by creating a messaging thread or form where employees can highlight trends they are seeing within the industry along with a link to an example and any other relevant notes.
When a certain topic is trending, it’s likely that consumers are searching for it. Enter industry keywords into an SEO tool to find patterns in popular searches and niche searches that are on the rise. Oftentimes by using this strategy you are able to find topics that may have a low search volume but if the patterns display an upward trend, it’s likely that you’re catching the trend early on and getting ahead of the curve.
In most trending industries, you can find publications that report on current and upcoming industry trends. Whether it’s through trade journals or consumer facing magazines, subscribing to these publications and blocking out time to read these on a regular basis is a great way to keep up with trends.
Don’t ever underestimate the power of networking! Whether you attend trade shows for your industry or engaging with customers through socials, word of mouth is a great way to understand what others are seeing happen within the industry.
Even with the above strategies, finding industry trends can be a tedious task. Opt for a tool that tracks industry trends for you so that you can take the guesswork out of finding topics that are on the rise. By using an industry trends tool, you can gain back time in your day and ensure that you are always up to date.
Dash Hudson makes it easy for brands to stay on top of trends by helping them keep on top of what top competitors in their industry are posting, and where they are seeing success. By keeping an eye on what people are talking about, it allows brands to spend less time sifting through the noise, and being able to see what’s trending so they can capitalize on trends in a timely manner.
Dash Hudson easily provides brands the ability to create different trend groups by adding in competitors, inspirations, and/or market leader accounts to better understand the performance of how trends across all industries behave and engage with their audience. These trend groups can be as broad or generalized depending on use-cases for brands, as well as pulling in deeper next-level concrete insights. It’s a place for brands to analyze their data-backed creative strategies to save valuable time and money. Then hop into Dashboards reporting tool to see how adopting these trends is impacting your performance month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter.
Trends are prevalent in every single industry, from the largest to the most niche of industries. Below are some of the trends that we are seeing, and will continue to see, throughout 2023. The top trends we have outlined are general to each industry, though through your own research you may be able to find more granular trends specific to your niche.
The beauty industry is more popular than ever. Some trends to note for 2023 are:
With fashion week back in full swing, there are more exciting fashion and luxury industry trends emerging in 2023. Some fashion industry trends for 2023 are:
While luxury brands are no stranger to the social landscape, the luxury industry has long relied on elevated shopping experiences — however, by 2025, 25% of luxury purchases will be made online. What can luxury brands do to compete in the online space?
The consumer packaged goods industry will always be important, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sensitive to change. Here are three trends for the CPG industry in 2023:
The financial sector is Financial services are prevalent in nearly everyone's lives. Here are some trends expected for the financial services industry in 2023:
Sustainability remains a top trend for the automotive industry in 2023 — in addition to sustainability and electric vehicles, these trends are on-the-rise:
In business, a trend is an overall shift or change in the direction of a market. This change could be either upward or downward and is depicted by a consistent change in the same direction. Picture a line graph; a trend would be graphed as a data line that consistently increases or decreases as time passes.
Some of the fastest-growing industries in 2023 are the personal services, travel, healthcare, information technology, and construction industries. The growth of these industries is expected to skyrocket throughout this year.
Industry trends can be short-term, long-term, or somewhere in between. Short-term trends are typically small things related to a specific type of product or service. Short-term trends are very prevalent in fashion as demands shift quickly and are typically influenced by what one person or one brand is doing. Long-term trends on the other hand are the results of a bigger shift in consumer needs or shifts in what is important to buyers. In many industries, one of the biggest long-term trends we are seeing in 2023 is a push for sustainability, which will likely continue for years and years to come.
Though trends can often be classified as short or long-term, there are also trends that fall in between the two. These trends will typically stick around for a couple seasons or years, but will eventually decline as another medium-term trend arises to replace them.