It’s vital for leaders to stay on top of the ever-shifting tides in their industries, and tech can make doing so easy and efficient.

The greatest business minds all tend to share the same traits, especially ambition and tenacity. After all, it requires decisive action and a burning passion to turn a simple idea into a thriving enterprise.

But there’s an equally important factor that sometimes goes under the radar: foresight. More than ever, you have to look ahead to stay in front of the competition—otherwise, you’ll likely be left behind. Fortunately, there’s a wealth of online resources available to help you get any up-to-the-minute information you need about your industry. With such trend-capturing tools, you can better see what’s hot, what’s not, and what’s emerging.

Set your vision

Humanity has a long history of trying to peer into the future through unscientific methods like fortune-telling, tea leaves, and horoscopes. In the twenty-first century, though, data-driven technology makes it more feasible, assisting you in understanding your customers, your competition, your industry, and society as a whole—and where your company stands in relation to all of them. In turn, you can make smarter, more informed decisions and even possibly anticipate trends before they take off, resulting in one “aha” moment after another about solutions your business can provide.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. But before diving in, make sure to figure out what your primary goal is for this journey. Do you want to merely learn about the latest trends to assess them yourself, or do you want to receive readymade predictive analyses? Would you rather control what you search for via a user-initiated search engine like Google, or would it be easier for a trend-tracking tool to automatically deliver the hottest trends that impact your industry?

Discovering answers to such questions can help you set parameters for what I think is the most important one: How will you use all this information to transform your company? Your goal might be as simple as identifying the most popular podcasts in your realm so you can subscribe to them, learn from them, and potentially be on them to expand your visibility and influence. Another viable option is going all in and tracking real-time and predictive trends so you can tweak your offerings to be more in line with your customers’ (and future customers’) expectations.

Choose your tools

There are seemingly endless trend-tracking options out there. Here are just some of the top ones to consider, depending on what you’re looking for and how much you want to invest. Free options The simplest way to delve into what’s happening is through social media, so start with the resources offered by the big players: Facebook, X, Instagram, and the like. Then expand your net to peruse other choices out there.

Google Trends
Google Trends allows you to search what’s immediately trending—or what has historically been—via multiple parameters on the world’s largest search engine.

Feedly
The Feedly app similarly allows you to compile news, trends, and topics in one easy-tonavigate source. Of particular interest is its Market Intelligence hub, which includes industry trends and competitive intel among its many features. (It also offers paid options.)

Detailed
Detailed dubs itself the “Bloomberg of SEO” because, per its website, it culls its findings by keeping tabs on “the rankings & revenue of 3,078 digital goliaths,” which you can access for free when you subscribe

Dual free/paid options

It’s no surprise that to get the most useful data, you’ll have to subscribe—after all, in order to make money, you need to spend money. The following are a few popular options to try if it’s financially feasible.

BrandMentions
BrandMentions, as the name suggests, is a particularly helpful tool for tracking your own and competitors’ brand success on other websites, blogs, news articles, and more. You can do a test drive via its one-week trial, and it offers three paid plans focused on different company sizes, making it easy to get what you need for your budget.

Statista
The well-known Statista site is tough to beat for quick and easy access to current and historical bar charts. Through it, you can dig into select numbers and findings with no strings attached. But to peruse more in-depth figures and, yes, trends, you’ll need to purchase an account.

Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics promises to “find trends before they’re trends,” making it worthy of a virtual spin. Try the free version, or delve deeper with a tiered Pro plan to get access to its Trends Database—featuring more than a million emerging trends—and exponentially more alerts and opportunities to explore. As a bonus, you can also subscribe to its free weekly newsletter.

StartUs Insights
Austria-based StartUs Insights offers an AI-driven Discovery Platform that can quickly educate you on not only trends and tech but also millions of other startups around the globe. Just think of what you can make happen with such information, from customer solutions to potential partnerships.

Make it a team effort

As with most areas of business, there’s no reason to go it alone. Getting experts from your workforce involved might make it easier to cull information at a more micro level and maximize its impact. For example, task your social media team with staying on top of trends in traffic, SEO, and marketing with a tool such as BrandMentions, BuzzSumo, or Glimpse (the latter of which claims to be the “world’s largest trend platform”). Then set up a system for how and how often they should disseminate their findings to you and other key players so that everyone in the organization can make smarter, more precise decisions.

Because of the sheer number of these tools out there, you might find yourself getting caught up in researching and trying them—it’s understandably exciting diving into anything you can use to potentially grow your business. But the reality is that keeping up with what’s happening in your industry or the business world as a whole doesn’t require a ton of effort or expense; it’s mostly about taking that first step. So open the door of this massive gold mine of information and opportunity today to discover just how much it can help your company achieve peak performance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Luke Acree is an authority on leadership, a lead-generation specialist, and a referral expert who has helped more than 30,000 entrepreneurs and small businesses grow their companies. He hosts Stay Paid, a sales and marketing podcast, and has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, and Foundr.com.

TAKE ACTION:
Explore trend-capturing tools with your executive team to determine which could be a boon for your business.