14 Simple Solutions for Tracking Your Industry’s Trends

What are trend-tracking tools?

Trend-tracking tools are software and other methods used to collect and analyze consumer data. These tools can help your company understand what your customers are looking for and where your industry is headed.

These tools include traditional market research methods such as surveys and focus groups, as well as software for social listening and analytics.

How do they help your business?

By staying on top of industry trends, you can anticipate customer demands. You might see a demand for a product or service before other companies do. Trend-tracking tools allow you to anticipate changes in consumer buying behavior.

Here are the biggest benefits of using trend-tracking tools:

• Understand your customers: Trend-tracking tools will give you more insight into your customers’ behavior and preferences. This helps you ensure your products and services remain relevant to what your customers need.
• Know your competitors: Trend-tracking tools can give you insight into your competitors, their products and their pricing structure. This information can help you see how they’re changing and adapting to the market.
• Find new opportunities: When you understand and can identify future trends, you’re able to recognize opportunities. You can identify a new target market or create a new product or service.
• Make data-driven decisions: Making a major change in your business can be intimidating, but trend-tracking tools ensure you’re making decisions based on data, not just a gut feeling.
• Become a more innovative company: Staying on top of trends in your industry helps you become a more innovative and resilient company.

14 trend-tracking tools to keep tabs on your industry

There are many tools available to help you track industry trends, but not all of them are helpful or provide consistent results. Here are a few that work.

1. Feedly

This service aggregates all of the stories, outlets, keywords and trends that interest you in into one easy-to-manage list, so you can keep up with trends and news stories. Feedly can save you time from scouring the internet for the information you are interested in.

2. Stratfor

Stratfor is a geopolitical intelligence firm that provides intelligence information and aggregates trends and articles from sources worldwide. This is an excellent resource for businesses that operate internationally. You can use it to help anticipate opportunities and events worldwide so you’ll have a better understanding of international developments.

3. Facebook

Facebook can also operate like a news aggregator. You can “like” industry publications and quickly review them via the Pages feed. The feed is useful because it combines pictures and enough text to know if the article is relevant to you.

4. Slack

Slack is a chat application that allows teammates to communicate easily. It acts as an internal social network where users can share a variety of content, including relevant news. Users can also have one-on-one conversations.

5. Private lists on X (formerly Twitter)

X (formerly Twitter) offers businesses a lot of value by allowing users to create private lists that you can manage and sort however you like. This is a great way to manage and sort a variety of industry-related information.

6. Moz Top 10

The Moz Top 10 is a semimonthly email newsletter that shares inbound marketing news, insider tips and relevant links uncovered by the Moz team. This newsletter is a great way to stay current on internet marketing trends.

7. This Week in Startups Ticker (formerly Launch Ticker)

This Week in Startups Ticker (formerly Launch Ticker) is designed to help entrepreneurs stay on top of news about trends and startup funding. Subscribing to the AM Daily News is free, and the newsletter is an easy way to get important info in one location.

8. NewsBlur

NewsBlur allows you to create your own RSS feed. You can set it up to receive news relevant to your industry.

9. Flipboard

The Flipboard app’s user-friendly interface lets you quickly read and digest information from your chosen publications. It offers an easy way to identify industry-relevant sources and congregate that content in one location.

10. Your network

One nondigital way to keep track of trends is to build a network of other business owners within your industry. Set aside time to connect with your network regularly to keep up with the issues and trends they are seeing.

11. Custom Google Alerts

Google Alerts can help you stay on top of industry news, competitors and your own press. Google allows you to set alerts for any keywords. Whenever those keywords appear in a news article, Google will send you an alert with a link to the news source. You can choose how often you want to receive the alerts.

12. Google Trends

Google Trends is a website that shows how often a particular search term is entered into Google. It’s one of the best options for companies focused on keyword research. You can use Google Trends to track search terms and receive detailed data analytics about the people searching for these terms.

13. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a social listening tool that allows you to track mentions of anyone or anything. For example, you can monitor any time your company, your products or your competitors are mentioned in the media or on social media.

14. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is a newsletter that provides a weekly overview of trending topics, and it includes expert analysis and commentary. You can sign up for the newsletter for free or invest in the paid subscription if you want even more information.