At times, writing or creating content can feel like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. You can put in hours of work researching your topic, formatting your work, and putting on the final touches. But if you don’t capture the attention of an audience, that work could go largely unrecognized.
In actuality, creating content as a sports media professional isn’t just about creating content anymore. If you want to build and sustain a presence in the sports media industry, you not only have to create compelling content, but you also need to capitalize on trends to ensure that content meets demand and draws views.
The mere creation of content already tasks a sports media professional with a great deal. With that pre-existing responsibility in mind, here are a few helpful tips to make your experience identifying and building off of trends easier, more natural, and more fruitful.
5 Strategies for Identifying and Producing Content on Trending Topics
1) Immerse Yourself in Target Communities
There are a few different ways to identify trends, but we’ll start with the simplest one. If you want to identify trends and identify them early so you don’t miss them, the best, most organic way to do this is to be an active part of the community you intend to target with your work.
For example, let’s say you’re a Minnesota Vikings fan, and you want to be the go-to source for Vikings analysis. You can do standard game recaps that take in results and stats, but if you’re an active participant in the community, you can go a step further. You can discuss hot topics, pressing storylines, moments that had the fan base up-in-arms – and you can work with that knowledge from the outset.
By immersing yourself in your target community, you can get a feel for trends as they initially form and develop – essentially getting in on the ground floor. You won’t be responding as they expand beyond your initial audience. Instead, you’ll be part of the wave that drives that growth.
2) Stay Up-to-Date With Voices That Have Pull
In a way, this goes hand-in-hand with the first note about immersing oneself in a community. However, staying up-to-date with voices that have pull takes it a step further. Now, you’re not just immersing yourself in the community. You’re identifying the driving forces behind trend creation, and you’re monitoring them to stay ahead of the game.
In the age of influencers, there are countless engaging voices on YouTube, TikTok, and other social media channels, who have legitimate active followings and trend creation capabilities across the media space. By staying up-to-date with voices that have pull, you can position yourself at the very front of the funnel. You can see firsthand which topics are gaining traction in real-time, and you can operate off of that observational data.
3) Keep a Finger on the Pulse of Search Data
The impact of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, has changed over the past year with the rise of AI and various algorithm changes. That said, search engine analytics will always serve as a guiding light toward which topics audiences are gravitating toward in the present day.
By using trends.google or other various data intermediaries, you can keep a finger on the pulse of the wide-scale search audience itself. You can enter keywords of interest and see how they’re trending across time intervals. You can peruse the most searched items and topics, and you can get insight on what’s fueling conversations in the current moment.
You can ultimately choose which stage of your content creation process you’d like search data to be a part of as well. If you’re not dead-set on a certain topic, you can use the broad search data itself to direct your efforts, so you’re always investing your energy in topics that catch the wave.
4) Repackage Trends Into Relevant Content
Once you’ve identified trending topics – either through community immersion, influential voice observation, or search data analysis – now you can repackage those trends into relevant content.
If you’re struggling to channel trend information into written or recorded content, think of what it is the audience needs within the context of the trend. Is the audience looking for an answer to a question? Is the audience looking for an informed take on a subject? Does the audience desire to be included or interacted with?
Decipher whether the audience wants information or conversation. That dichotomy alone can help you target and channel your trend-based content effectively.
5) Be Ready to Pivot and Adapt
There’s one thing we all know about the world of trends: It changes quickly. The trends of the Internet and social media move at the whim of the many, many users and viewers. A trend can gain steam at any moment. Sometimes, it dies quickly, too – so be prepared.
Not only do trends prove volatile, but the Internet’s constraints through search engines and social media platforms do as well.
That’s one thing Jeanna Kelly, Associate NFL Director at SB Nation, emphasized to Sports Media Playbook when spoken to: “You have to be agile in this industry because Google, social media traffic, and other external sources of traffic change standards regularly.”
To survive in the world of trends, you can’t be reliant on any one topic. Whether you exist within a confined content sphere, or whether you’re willing to extend beyond it, you have to be able to pivot and adapt to different trends when your audience changes course. If you can pivot and adapt, while also identifying trends and content strategies early, you’ll be poised for success.
