For Marketing Teams
Spate can help marketing teams align messaging, campaigns, and content with what consumers are actively searching for and engaging with. Teams often use it to make sure the language and narratives they're building around reflect real, and current demand.
Where to Start
Begin with the Lifecycle Stage. Before applying filters, consider asking: Where is this trend in its evolution?
Growth and Mainstream stage trends tend to be most relevant for marketing work:
- Growth — Consumer awareness is converting into real demand and cultural narratives are still forming. This is often a strong window for campaign development — there's momentum to build around and still room to own a position before it becomes saturated.
- Mainstream — Trends at this stage have broad consumer recognition and are often defining the current state of a category. Useful for ensuring brand messaging reflects where the market actually is today.
It's also worth keeping an eye on Fade-stage trends, if a trend your messaging is built around is showing declining momentum, it may be worth shifting focus toward Growth or Mainstream trends where consumer interest is still building.
Platform Examples
Once you have a sense of lifecycle stage, here are some actionable use cases:
Find the right language for your messaging Go to the Related Searches section of any trend or category and filter by Benefits or Claims. The terms consumers are actually searching, and how fast each is growing. The terms can feed directly into copy, product claims, and briefs. If "long lasting" is outpacing "luxury" in growth in fragrance for example, that's a signal worth acting on before your next campaign goes out.
Validate a trend before briefing your team Check whether a trend is showing up on both TikTok and Google. When momentum exists on both platforms, it suggests the trend has moved from cultural aspiration into purchase intent — a stronger foundation for campaign investment than social alone.
Build an always-on content calendar Set up Alerts around your brand, key topics, or competitor categories. Alerts surface trending signals automatically on a weekly or monthly basis, which can feed agency briefs, social calendars, and storytelling without requiring a manual platform check.
Identify organic content worth amplifying In the TikTok hashtag view, look for hashtags with high views and low paid penetration. These can indicate organic cultural momentum that hasn't been heavily commercialized yet.
Sharpen positioning using competitor sentiment Navigate to a competitor's brand page and review sentiment on their top posts. This can surface what consumers love — or don't — about existing products, and help inform how you differentiate your own messaging and claims.
Filters That May Be Useful
- Google: Trending This Month → Surfaces active search behavior right now — useful for timely campaign hooks. From here, look at the related searches to find specific language worth incorporating into copy.
- Google: Trending This Year → Helps identify longer-term narratives worth building a brand position around, rather than reacting to short-term spikes.
- TikTok: Trending This Month → Validates whether a trend has current cultural relevance before briefing creative or agency teams.
- TikTok: Organic Trends → Helps distinguish what's resonating authentically from what's paid-driven.
How to Sort
- Sort by Volume → Identifies the largest trends driving category conversation — useful for understanding what consumers are already talking about at scale before building a campaign around it
- Sort by % Growth → Surfaces faster-moving trends that may represent emerging messaging opportunities before competitors catch on
- Sort by Absolute Growth (Increase) → Highlights trends gaining real traction in absolute terms — useful when you need to show momentum beyond just a percentage
A Few Things to Keep in Mind
- Growth and Mainstream trends tend to offer the best combination of scale and relevance for marketing.
- TikTok can surface cultural energy early, but cross-referencing with Google search helps confirm whether that energy is translating into real purchase intent
- Lifecycle stage isn't static, messaging that felt current six months ago may need revisiting
- High popularity doesn't always mean healthy momentum — a trend can be large and still declining, so checking growth signals alongside popularity matters
A Starting Point, Not a Formula
Every brand, category, and campaign is different. The examples above are meant to show some of the ways marketing teams have found Spate useful — not to define the only way to use it. Let your own goals and expertise shape how you explore from here.