How to assess which cultural moments are right for your brand to act on

A cultural moment can happen in an instant and dominate news feeds for days. The constant feed refreshing, the group DMs, the memes—it all combines to create a uniquely gripping spectacle that’s impossible to ignore.

These periods of high engagement are typically brought on by a real-time event or the onset of a new trend. In best-case scenarios, they create conversations that unite people over shared interests. It’s no wonder brands are eager to hop on these opportunities for cultural advertising.

That said, not all moments spark the same kinds of conversation. Culture moments can range from fun and lighthearted to serious and nuanced. More often than not, they’re a mixture of both.

Understanding your brand’s role in these high-value occasions can make or break your social media presence. In this how-to guide, we’ll share how to spot, vet and contribute to cultural moments in ways that resonate with your audience.

Let your values align your brand to cultural moments

Your core values should serve as a north star for all your marketing efforts, including your cultural advertising plays. It sounds simple, but it’s easier said than done. After all, cultural moments don’t come with brand guidelines.

To better understand how a social media movement aligns with your values, you’ll need to put your research cap on. Here are a few questions to think through as you get familiar with the conversation:

What caused the spike in conversations? An inciting event can take even the most common topic and push it into the limelight. However, these inciting events aren’t always positive. Before creating social content around a moment, dig into what’s causing the conversation. If it’s scandal, outrage or negativity, you may want to steer clear.Who’s talking about it? Look into the people, brands and media outlets that are present in the conversation. Is there overlap with your target audience? Do you recognize any key contributors? Are any of your competitors showing up?What conversations are happening? A single cultural moment can spark a variety of reactions. Condense the conversation into a few major buckets to identify how your brand can best contribute.How do people feel about it? Remember: cultural moments are often nuanced. A conversation might be all fun and games at the surface but touch on some hard topics when you dive a few layers deep. If the conversation makes you feel out of your depth as a brand, you may want to opt for strategic silence.

As you work through these questions, you may identify gaps between the moment and your brand purpose. Don’t be afraid to sit out on a cultural advertising opportunity if it feels too forced. Not chiming into a discussion can be FOMO-inducing, but it’s better to stay silent than to share something inauthentic to your brand.

How to find the cultural moment that matters most to your customers

A cultural moment may align with your brand values, but if your customers aren’t talking about it, contributing to the conversation may fall flat.

Thanks to media fragmentation and the 24-hour news cycle, there have been some drastic changes in what counts as a moment. In the past, a single event could captivate audiences for weeks. Now, small-scale cultural moments happen all the time. How much they matter all depends on who you’re talking to.

So before you craft the perfect trend-jacking post, be sure to assess the moment for audience fit. You can do some hashtag research or use native analytics tools, but both of those options are fairly time-consuming and time is of the essence. If you want quick, comprehensive results, try social listening.

Using social listening to assess audience fit

Cultural moments generate a huge amount of messages across social. Listening is the key to tapping into those conversations for actionable insights. Think of it as a speedy alternative to a focus group.

In Sprout, Listening Topics automatically backfill 30 days worth of data—perfect for topical events and trends. Once you’ve created a Topic, you can dig into valuable demographic data and information on which profiles are driving the conversation forward. These insights can help you find intersections between your audience and the conversation at large.

The market research benefits of listening extend well-beyond demographic information. You can also use listening to validate the initial assessment of your cultural advertising opportunity. Here are some other key data points you can review once you’ve created your Listening Topic:

Volume: Look for spikes in conversation volume, then review the messages from that day to find out exactly what caused the influx of conversations.Themes: If the culture moment sparks several conversations, use themes to categorize and identify patterns in messages.Sentiment: Get clear on how people feel about the moment by measuring audience sentiment, broken down into positive, neutral and negative.

Brands who got cultural advertising right

Now you know how to audit a cultural moment for brand and audience fit, but what does that look like in practice? Let’s look to three brands that nailed cultural advertising on social media for inspiration.

Calm + Naomi Osaka

What happened: In June 2021, tennis star Naomi Osaka decided to skip press conferences at the French Open, citing mental health. In response, the organization fined her $15,000, sparking a massive outcry from fans and mental health advocates alike.

To support Osaka’s decision, meditation app Calm pledged to donate $15,000 to a French organization dedicated to promoting mental well-being through sports and physical activity. The company also offered to cover fines for any other tennis player that would like to opt out of media appearance to prioritize mental health.

Mental health is health. 🎾

To support Naomi Osaka’s decision to prioritize her mental health, Calm is donating $15,000 to @LaureusSport in France, an organization doing incredible work in the mental health space to transform the lives of young people through the power of sport. pic.twitter.com/C53ptXsks5

— Calm (@calm) June 2, 2021