Translating Social Media Trends into Marketing

You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. Jenny Tase Topic translating social media trends into marketing. Jenny, are we going to be talking about tick-tock dances? No, and in fact, we are not going to be talking about this. We’ve run an expert to talk about social media trends that is not our expertise. But yeah, super interesting podcast today. Really we’re thinking about these like larger macro trends that might be influenced by Gen Z but can be relatable to any generation of visitors that our cultural attractions are marketing to. So think of these as larger macro trends that can impact your marketing, your retail and your education, not just what’s the latest dance trend or music trend that you need to pop into a social media post and it’s gone tomorrow. I still want to be talking about selling tickets though. I wanted to be talking about new visitation, selling memberships, spreading the mission. I hope we can be able to get into that with our guests. Yeah, yeah. I think trends are always, when we’re thinking about it, what we’re going to talk about today is going to be more focused on again, how these trends can be impactful for your marketing, how you can learn from them and how you can understand what your audience, your next visitor when we’re talking about younger audiences, what they’re interested in and how that might help you appeal to them. All right, all right. So tick-tock dance equals selling tickets. I’ll take it. You’re telling me this is going to be a little bigger than that. I think we’re going to get a little bit more interesting than the viral tick-tock dance. All right, cool. So yeah, today’s expert, our guest today is Becky Paxton. She is the account executive at Garden Media Group. Let’s get into it. All right, Becky, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So excited to be here. All right, Becky. So give us some background. Tell us a little bit about Garden Media Group and what makes you all experts in this space. Sure thing. So I’m an Account Executive with Garden Media Group. And we are a boutique. We are in marketing firm that specializes in the garden industry. And when you think about the garden industry, that’s a broad umbrella. It covers everything from public court of culture and some of our terrific nonprofits that do work in the green industry to those plant brands that you know and love whenever you go shopping for plants. We are really known for our innovative campaigns, our top media placements, and the thing that we love to do every single year. And we love to talk about it at the beginning of the year is our annual trends report. Now, on over 20 years running. So you guys are working in the like for profit space as well. Like you have like consumer products that you guys are representing. Is that right? Absolutely. That’s a big focus of ours. Some of the brands that we represent are the Southern Living Plant Collection in encore, Zalia. And we really, whether you are looking to plant the perfect cut flower garden and looking for terrific picks, they’re interested in floristry, foraging, or just creating that dazzling landscape of your dreams at your new house. And our clients represent a lot of those products that can help get you there. Yeah, cool. I always like bringing on folks coming from outside the space, maybe like adjacent to the cultural attraction space as a whole. All right. So you guys do this annual trends report. Becky, what are some annual trends? So the trends are so fun. They really come from kind of a convergence of our teams, collective experience and acknowledge and research. My area of focus, my background is in public gardens. I actually started working in public gardens. I knew this was all I ever wanted to do. I started when I was 14 as a volunteer. I got my first job at 15. And so public, political, sharing in our local cultural institutions super near and near to my heart. So whenever I’m looking for trends every year, I always have that hat on because I remember how tough it was for years and years to be thinking a year, two years, three years ahead, what kind of exhibits are we going to mount? What programming is going to bring folks through the door? How are we going to make the case for contributed revenue? And so when we think about trends and these broader cultural currents that are moving, they all have major implications that can really help our cultural institutions. I’m a data nerd. And so I work with social listening tools. I built a screening tool about six years ago. At this point, we’ve screened over 10 million stories, posts and videos from across social media. If it uses the word plant in seed or house plant garden, this giant net catches that. We have a few things in place to make sure we’re not getting people’s bad poetry, but this is actually plants that we’re talking about. And from that massive pool, we’re able to pull trends and see things that are kind of episodic, new, up and coming and things that really have staying power. That’s really helped us pick trends that have what we call stickiness. I think whenever you’re thinking about a trend, there are the laboos of the world, which are the flash in the pan, momentary, ephemeral trends. And then there are those ones that really signal a shift in the culture. And that’s really what I’m excited to talk with you guys about. And I heard a couple of y’alls in there. Can you maybe talk about your garden background? Yes, absolutely. I am from Nashville, Tennessee. My parents are in country music and my grandparents before that were in music. And so how do you rebel when you’re a teenager and your dad plays the electric guitar? It’s hard to do when, you know, they’re out late at a rock show. How do you come up with a rebellion? So for me, that was public-corticulture. I knew immediately that was all I ever wanted to do with my life and my parents were stunned. So I got my first job at a public garden at an institution called a Cheekwood estate in gardens in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s still very, very near to my heart and I visit as often as I can. Well, Becky, before we jump into these trends, obviously your background is in gardens, garden tourism, I’m sorry, garden media group is in gardens, but these trends that we’re going to talk about today can apply to beyond gardens, right? I think you have some examples for us that maybe with some museums and things too, but just for our listeners who are across all cultural attractions, a lot of these trends are going to apply whether a museum or garden is you aquarium. Absolutely. It’s super important. You know, there is the same customer who we think about going to public gardens so often they are looking to enrich their lives out of their family by visiting these other cultural institutions and it’s really important when we think broadly and creatively about what doesn’t just work for us but works for other institutions that are adjacent to us, we end up with better trends. Awesome. Okay, well, let’s get get up then. I’ve got down the first trend we’re going to dive into is what you’re calling architecture. Tell us a little about this. Absolutely. So, architecture is just how it sounds, bark signifying dog and architecture meaning the built environment around us. This is a trend that’s all about pet inclusive design and pet inclusive living. We first noticed this trend because in studies about gardeners, it revealed that 70% of gardeners also own pets. Not only that, America’s pet owners are spending more on their pets and they’re spending more permanently meaning you will go to a home and you may see for the first time things like a dog shower built in the mud room and these are features that you really wouldn’t see maybe 20, 30 years ago but they are now. It’s because 80% or 7% of pet owners view those pets as a part of their family and when we look at social media landscape, particularly TikTok which is that new huge social media platform, super popular among millennials and younger generations. Hasheg spoiled is the most commonly word. Hasheg to describe that. So that is kind of a 10,000-foot overview of bark texture. It can be a little tough as a cultural institution. Maybe you’re an institution that is well suited to having pets. For example, you have a lot of green space. There’s also a lot of tricky kind of sticky wickets in that. If you’re a botanical garden, you know how destructive animals can be on a property if you have things like rare and valuable plant collections, things that don’t love to be nibbled on or otherwise desecrated. And then sometimes you’re an institution that has a living collection that is animals and those animals can be alarmed or made uncomfortable or even their health can be jeopardized by the presence of other animals. So this can seem like a really tricky trend. However, there are some cultural institutions doing some really smart things. The goal is to signal as a cultural institution that our guests or visitors are viewing pets as a part of their family. So when we look at some of these institutions, what kind of programming are they doing? You’re seeing institutions have like public gardens doing things like dog days and they’re doing these during the shoulder season. They’re doing these during times of year when it’s tough to get visitors through the door. Maybe it’s freezing cold and your holiday lights display is over and the grounds are still dormant. That’s a great time to bring in pets and you can even charge an additional admission for those pets. We have other institutions that are doing dog memberships. I know Tower Hill Botanic Garden of Emboston has a Tales and Trails membership, which I wish I’d come up with that name is so good. And then we also have on the other hand a really different approach to inviting animals and the story of animals as part of the family. There’s a Botanical Garden in North Carolina that was unfortunately just devastated by Hurricane Helene. It’s called Lake Lur flowering bridge. It’s a beautiful bridge in rural western North Carolina and they had one feature in particular that was quite memorable. It was called the Rainbow Bridge. It was so named because there’s a poem about when your dog or when your pet passes that they cross the Rainbow Bridge. Visitors could come to the garden and snap their pets collar on the bridge. I’m going to take a moment in a beautiful garden nearby to really reflect and meditate and begin to heal. Well, unfortunately during the hurricane that bridge was lost. However, the garden is doing amazing work rebuilding the bridge and they’re actually finding segments of the bridge that was lost and they’re recovering it and having an artist restore the columns and the colors. And it is just such an inspiring testament to the way that we can involve pets in our public institutions. Sometimes without even having them on property, it’s about the story. I do love that. And as a dog owner and dog spoiler myself, I can absolutely identify to the all of these trends. But I love what you said. It’s more than just like allowing dogs in but being thoughtful about it, whether there’s particular place in the garden or, you know, we’ve got to be right. We’ve even had, you know, um, one park zoo was on talking about how they’ve, you know, embraced this for the last few years now. I’ve had my dog memberships and it’s a great way to just reach out to a new audience. It maybe isn’t coming. I think a lot of our listeners target families with kids, but families pre-kids with pets. It’s a really nother great audience to focus on for thinking about growth, but yeah, I think there’s some great ideas. Yeah. Um, open park zoo, they did a yappy hour if we’re going into puns, if that’s what we’re doing today. Um, but you talked about that transition between, hey, how do I go to the zoo, get introduced to the zoo and not, you know, be that parents with young kids will lose parents with young dogs. And then as the kids become part of the family, as that natural transition. So shout out to that episode over there in the folks at the Wood Park Zoo. Um, all right, Becky, you got another trend for us. We’re calling it level up. What do you got there? Yes. So video gaming has changed. This is not when you think about the typical video gamer. It is not who you think 97% of video gamers are still under the age of 39. However, nearly half of them are women and the average age of a video gamer today is in their mid 30s. So this is a really interesting development and one that really has blossomed since the pandemic. Gaming is increasingly about relaxation and escapism, but most importantly, a new buzzword has come out with video games. And that’s calm. It’s no longer this competition that we envision with these video games of the past, a lot of new, particularly popular video games center the natural world. And they focus on things like slow living and the experience of caring for plants and animals. Well, as soon as we noticed this trend, we thought to ourselves, oh my gosh, what are cultural institutions doing around it? Because when we think about leisure time, that’s the overlap. We have leisure time in which we go to our cultural institutions and then the leisure time that we have video gaming. And it just makes so much sense for the two to intersect. If you’ve been in cultural institutions for a minute, you probably remember the Pokemon go explosion of popularity. I think it was around 2011 when all of the sudden video games started, or public gardens started saying, wow, we had a massive spike in attendance this week. What happened? And it was folks playing this video game called Pokemon Go on their cell phone and they were going to botanical gardens to play because it was a really interesting terrain that had been looped into the design of the video game. It has been a minute since public gardens and other cultural institutions have really capitalized on the momentum of a trend like this, however we think the time is right. Mensions of cozy games have gone up over 57% year over year. So that’s just between 2024, 25 and now. And so if you are not on board thinking creatively about ways that you can get this rapidly growing audience through your doors and engaged with your programming, you’re really missing out on a fascinating opportunity. So give us a few examples of maybe how this might play out in real life. Do you have any that you could share? Oh for sure. As a video game nerd myself, this was one of my favorite trends to dive into with the team. I love the mo pop, the museum of pop culture in Seattle. I love seeing what they’re doing to bring gamers in with exhibits around fantasy and sci-fi. One of the best examples I have seen of very diverse cultural institutions coming together around nerd culture to raise awareness for their work. And this is work that is very different from video games is in Atlanta. Every year around Labor Day weekend Atlanta is host to a conference called DragonCon. It has about 70,000 attendees from across the southeast and you will see every year collaborations with Atlanta Center for Puppetry, which is a local museum as well as the Georgia Aquarium. They will have not only nights out where huge numbers of these attendees will go to those cultural institutions, but those institutions will also have, there are educational tracks at these massive video gaming conventions that have themes like science and engineering and these cultural institutions can actually come in as experts and tie connections to these pop culture franchises with their work. I’ve even seen local blood drives that come every year to these massive fan conventions set up and do really important community work. You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media. Attend media is a media planning and buying agency specializing in zoos, aquariums, gardens and museums. For more information, please visit attend.media. Now back to Ryan and Jenny. All right, Becky, so we talked about architecture and leveling up with gaming. Let’s talk about a few design trends. What do you have for us? Sure. So what we’ve seen rise in the last few years in what we call the aesthetic trends. This is a term that comes to us from Gen Z social media, aesthetic meaning just the visual presentation of something. When we look at the world a lot of times, it’s through a single or a double-screen view, we’ve got our phone up and so what we see really matters. These design trends really matter. And so one that we’re really locked in on this year comes to us from Japan. It’s called Kusumi Colors. And this means colors covered in ash. Think about pastels. You’re probably thinking about those spring pastels. Super bright. Now tone them down a little bit. They’re a little muted and a little faded. That is what a Kusumi color is. And this color palette, which has been a huge boom in Asia for the last two or three years, has made its way over to the US. It’s made its way in two ways. Number one in its own name, Fender Guitars has a new line of Kusumi color guitars. And then also we are seeing people use the term the Nancy Myers home aesthetic, which refers to that director from the 90s. And that search term has increased 9,900% in one year talk about a social media trend. Awesome. And then how, like, so thinking of a trend like this, how should somebody think about using this? Is it maybe how they’re pulling things together in like their social media content and messaging? Like how are you seeing some people use this or taking advantage of this trend? I think as far as any aesthetic or design trend goes, you can kind of think about it in three ways. And then the third thing I would like to think about is the kind of things that are really important to pull those trends in there too. That creates a real start to finish immersive experience. So that’s the first thing that I would like to do is to get a look at the design trends. And then the third thing that I would like to think about is the kind of things that are really important to pull those trends in there too. That creates a real start to finish immersive experience so that that promise that you made when those younger generations saw you on social media is fulfilled all the way through. Yeah, like that one. Okay, give us another design trend. Sure. Another one that we are really thinking about is called Botanical Bento. Bento boxes, again, this is just coincidentally, I’ve pulled for you the two that came to us with inspiration from Japan, but a bento box is a beautiful, well-packaged, convenient and portable way to carry food historically. But we are really seeing this move towards that small, intentional, curated and portable as a design movement. We are seeing it in a lot of different, really innovative products from seed packages. It is sometimes very challenging to make a seed look exciting because you know it’s going to be something really beautiful down the line. But when you are holding it in your hands, it seems so small. And so we are seeing companies use this bento idea to really elevate and give a theme and a sense of expectation and excitement to packaging. We are even seeing it in the food space. There is a brand called Oishi Strawberries that has a strawberry omakase box. It is a beautiful box that has these wildly expensive strawberries inside that are flawless. And the sense of anticipation mixed with portability is something that is so new and fresh. It is a real design moment that we are seeing. And so if you are a cultural institution and you are putting that hat on, how do I use this hat? Think about workshops that create items that are beautiful, curated, portable. When you go into your gift shop, again, think how can I design in think in terms of cubes where everything is grouped together. Everything looks harmonious. The colors match. How am I curating my sets and encouraging more than one purchase? So these are really exciting ways to use that trend. A lot more goes behind the scenes and picking out how to display all of that right than we think of on the scent. Well, let’s talk about selling some tickets. Yes. I like what she said a little bit earlier about boosting shoulder season, visitation, for the folks up north when the grass is brown, we can sell some dog tickets. Any more ideas or trends around that? Oh, for sure. One of the thought exercises I always like to do with institutions is make a map of the times in which no one is there. There are your usual reasons, which is we are not open. We haven’t opened yet and we have just closed. Write those down because those are opportunities. And then there are other ways to think about it. What are seasons where we’re just not popular? Maybe the weather is terrible. Maybe we’re a bit of a drive and that’s a barrier to people. And then think about your dream audience. When are they free? And then you can really start to tie overlap and say, okay, here’s a period of low visitation where we perhaps have opportunity to staff up and do something special and pull in people who can’t order nearly a 10. Because unfortunately, a lot of times when we’re open like at Tuesday through a Friday or Tuesday through a Saturday, you’ve got younger folks who are working and that’s your next generation of attendee, the people who you really want to plant that seed early so that they take their kids there and that they continue to become a member. So that’s timing is so important. I really would encourage you to think creatively about that. And then I always think about what kind of events, how can I divide them so that they’re thematic or programmatic so that they’re episodic so that there’s multiples that encourage people to come back week after week. This is why I love exercise classes in the garden or at the aquarium because you kind of guarantee if it’s a short period like four classes, you’re going to get those people back in the door at least four times. And then the concept of online events, I don’t think any of us are really chomping at the bit to go to anymore like Zoom Baby Showers at this point, hello pandemic. But for a lot of people, an online lecture is the best way to squeeze that in their schedule. Younger people, particularly Gen Z, are hungry for expertise. That’s different than knowledge. They have all the knowledge at their fingertips through chat GPT and their Google. They want to have it locked in and we know this because when we look at our social media screening, they are statistically more likely to use the Latin name of plants. That is awesome. It’s so cool and unexpected. So that’s why I really would encourage us to revisit the idea of these online classes, any because they fit in the schedule of folks who may have an unpredictable or really really packed work schedule and be because they are craving expertise. They want to become the expert. Get all that, Jenny? That’s pretty good. Well, Becky, I know that you’ve got a lot more trends than what you just shared with us today. Anything you want to kind of wrap up or finish up with and then of course end it with how everyone can get in touch with you too. Absolutely. I really just want to reiterate when it comes to trends, it’s really great to think of it like a stock portfolio. You want to have some of those quick flash in the pan social media trends, the viral dances that nobody on your team wants to learn, but you feel like you have to. That’s a small part of your portfolio. What you should really stack your portfolio. And by that, I mean your marketing strategy, your exhibition plans and your class plans are those big cultural and recurrence, the really sticky trends. The ones that are going to stick around for a while. We have plenty more of those. If you go to our website, guardamediagroup.com, you can actually download our trends report. It has all the trends I’ve shared with you today in great detail, plus so many more. I mean, we are believe it or not going to start working on 2027 in just a couple of weeks. So I would encourage you to put your trends brainstorm on and begin thinking about what’s new and next because that’s the exciting thing about this work. It’s always changing. Awesome. And then Becky, so we know they can go to the website. Any, I’m linked in. What’s your preferred way to get in touch? Absolutely. Which me, you can go ahead and search for Becky Paxton on LinkedIn. There aren’t that many of us. So you’ll see me up there surrounded by two lips. And then also on social media, we are at guardamedia on Instagram. We are active and we are constantly trying out those goofy dancing trends. So you can kind of get a taste of some of those there. We love it when you connect with us, interact with us. Ask us your questions. And of course, if you have any needs in terms of trends or PR, always feel free to reach out. Becky Paxton from the guardamedia group. Thank you very much for joining us. Oh, thank you guys. This was an absolute pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show, please visit our website at MarketingAttractionsPodcast.com. (u