What is Topical Advertising and Why Your Business Should Be Using It

Topical advertising or momentum marketing helps to gain attention and most successful brands use this approach to cash in on a trending topic. Apart from bread and butter advertising, it pays to centre your advertising/ social media posts around current happenings. It could be from any field be it politics, sports, current affairs, a fashion trend, a goofed up zoom call, or just about anything that’s going viral on social media. Latching on to the trend and creating your brand’s own quirky take on it helps to grab eyeballs.

Suppose you have a sporting event and Team India wins. You can use a social media post to congratulate the team and use creative copywriting to link your brand to it. The smarter and quirkier the post the more the audience will engage with it.

The difference between normal advertising and topical advertising is the speed of delivery. It is all about being in the moment and delivering within minutes of the start of the trend. You need to have an on the go team that can come up with wacky captions on the topic and get the designer to create a post that can be published within hours after getting instant approval from the client.

Topical advertising falls into two broad categories –

• Planned – Toward the end of a month you can check out all the important days in the following month – be it festivals, significant days, days of national importance, sports events etc. You can plan how you want to post on social media on these occasions. Depending on your budget, you can have normal carousel posts or videos. You can even run week-long or month-long theme campaigns. If you want to engage with your audience you can organise online competitions for them during these periods and give away prizes. Several top-notch brands love to cash in on the IPL fever in a cricket crazy country like ours. Similarly, they focus on days of national importance like Republic Day and Independence Day and come up with special videos integrating the brand with nationalistic fervour. These are examples of planned topical advertising that go down very well with the target audience.

• Unplanned – A celebrity delivers a baby and you are a leading diaper brand. You can use the event to your advantage and design a post congratulating the parents while promoting your brand. Striking when the iron is hot is a good promotional strategy. In this fast-paced internet world, news travels in the twinkling of an eye. It is important to make the most of the momentum and get in your take first. Being fast and quirky requires some amount of creativity but the results can be astounding. Some brands have made a name for themselves by being the first to be off the block when it comes to moment and momentum marketing. Moment Marketing doesn’t need fancy graphic designing or exotic videos. All it needs is smart wordplay. Even a good tweet is enough to capture your share of the limelight.

Look at this post by Prega News on the Ranbir Aalia wedding

Preganews

Bunny finally got ‘Raazi’  Wishing newly couple all happiness and a wonderful journey ♥️

#trending #momentmarketing #wedding #bollywoodwedding #GoodNews #jodi #Congratulations #crush #jodioftheyear

Or this one on the Miss Universe Crown Coming to India

Preganews

The crown returns home after 21 years! Congratulations Miss Universe 2021 🥳

#PregaNews #GoodNews #MissUniverse2021

The post needs to tie up the brand to the trend and be quick about it.

            How does Topical Advertising help a Business?

There is nothing called too much advertising. It helps to stay visible at all times across channels and today’s businesses are spoilt for choice with the plethora of platforms available to them. Every single promotional opportunity must be used to enhance brand visibility and topical advertising comes with its own momentum. There is a clear increase in audience engagement on those days as google searches for relevant content increase. Use of the right hashtags will ensure that your post shows up on most searches and you can be visible to your target audience. Campaigns can be planned around topical events depending on the promotion budget, However, even a simple tweet can be powerful if done right. All that is needed is to capture the essence of the moment in words. Topical advertising widens the reach of a brand as you are riding an available trend.

To Sum it Up

Apart from product advertising, topical advertising plays a key role in enhancing the visibility of a business and reaching the target audience. Riding an existing trend gives extra momentum to brand promotion. The quirkiness, timing and sense of humour determine the success of such campaigns. Engaging the audience during topical campaigns brings in astounding viewing statistics and often converts into increased sales volumes for the brand. Topical advertising is powerful, invest in it while building your brand.