Trend articles

What a trend article is

A trend article names one change that is already happening in your trade, shows what you can see of it from your own work, and tells a buyer what to do about it in the next few months. The change is the subject. What the reader should do is the reason the piece exists, and it is the half most trend articles leave out.

It is not a forecast, and it is not a list of predictions for next year. It is also not a reaction to this week's news, which is a different service at a different speed. A trend article is written about something moving over a year or more, and it is written slowly enough to be right.

The rule I work to is that no prediction is dressed up as a fact. Where the piece says what is going to happen, it says who is judging that, on what evidence, and what would prove it wrong. A trend article that states the future flatly is guessing with confidence, and readers in your own trade can tell.

When you need one

You need one when buyers keep asking whether they should wait. Something has changed enough that people are hesitating, and the firm that explains the change honestly, including the case for waiting, tends to be the firm they come back to when they stop hesitating.

You also need one when the sales conversation keeps starting from an out-of-date assumption. If you spend the first ten minutes of every call correcting the same belief about lead times, materials, regulation or pricing, that correction is an article, and writing it once is cheaper than saying it two hundred times.

You do not need one if nothing is actually changing. A piece that announces a trend nobody can see is a brochure with a graph in it. If the subject is settled and simply misunderstood, an explainer is the cheaper and more durable buy, and it will still be accurate in five years.

What goes in it

• The change, named in one sentence. Specific enough to be wrong. "Lead times on imported hardware have roughly doubled since 2023" is a change. "The market is evolving" is not.
• The evidence you can point at. What your own quotes, order book, suppliers or service calls show, described plainly. This is the part a competitor cannot copy, and it is the reason the piece is believed.
• What has not changed. The honest counterweight. Naming the parts of the trade this does not touch is what separates a trend article from an alarm.
• What a buyer should do now, and what they can leave. Two or three decisions to make this quarter, and an explicit list of things that do not need deciding yet.
• How confident you are, and what would change your mind. Stated in the piece, in your own words. It costs nothing and it is the difference between an opinion and a forecast.

What you get

The article. One thousand to sixteen hundred words in a shared document you own, in your voice, with headline, title and meta description, and every forward-looking sentence marked so you can confirm you are willing to stand behind it.

A review date. A short note attached to the piece saying when it should be read again, usually two quarters out, and which three things to check at that point. Trend articles go wrong quietly, and a date in a calendar is the cheapest defence there is.

The travelling versions. A newsletter paragraph and three social posts drawn from the piece, so the argument reaches people who will not read sixteen hundred words but will read the instruction at the end of it.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A fourteen-person commercial landscaping firm in southern Ontario has watched municipal stormwater requirements tighten across four of the six townships it works in, over about three years. Its buyers, mostly property managers, keep asking whether to budget for drainage work now or wait for their own township to move.

The owner spends fifty minutes on a recorded call going through eleven tenders from the past two seasons and the three sites where a retrofit was forced mid-contract. The article names the change in the first line, shows what the tenders asked for in the first season against the most recent one, and says clearly which two townships have announced nothing at all. It then gives property managers three decisions: get a site assessment before the next budget cycle, stop specifying one common surface on new car park work, and do nothing about existing lots under a stated size. The confidence line says the owner expects the remaining townships to follow within two budget cycles, that this is a judgement based on tender language rather than an announcement, and that a change of council could delay it. The piece is reviewed in nine months and one paragraph is rewritten.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you think is changing, how long you have been watching it, and who keeps asking you about it. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. One article or a set of three under one theme, with the revision rounds and the review date stated.
3. The evidence call. Forty to sixty minutes, recorded, with your quotes, tenders or job records open in front of you. I ask what you have actually seen, not what you believe.
4. The draft, ten working days later. Every claim about the future flagged, every claim about the past marked for you to confirm.
5. Your read. You strike anything you would not defend to a competitor, and I revise. Two rounds are included.
6. Handover, with the review date booked. The article, the newsletter version, the posts, and a calendar note for the revisit.

What it costs

Trend articles are quoted as a fixed price after the half-hour call. The price turns on length, on whether the evidence comes out of your own records or has to be gathered and checked, and on whether it is one piece or a set of three published over a year. Everything is in CAD and agreed in writing before the evidence call is booked. The pricing page explains how fixed pricing works here.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. When the change finally makes the news, the article is already written and only needs a same-week piece pointing at it. When readers dispute the evidence, the honest answer is to go and measure it, which is publishing your own numbers. And at the review date, the piece is either corrected or retired, which is part of keeping older articles true. None of it is required. One trend article is a finished piece of work and nothing further is assumed.