Valentine’s Day is coming, whether you like it or not. Even if you hate it, you can’t hate a huge opportunity to market your brand online! Especially right after the dead cold of winter when you haven’t had much foot or website traffic. We’re sure a lot of you struggled in January trying to get people in your store, make a purchase online, or fill out a contact form on your site. Well, if there’s a way you can work Valentine’s Day into your marketing strategy to boost your brand, now is the time!
First off, Valentine’s Day is notorious for being a last-minute shopping holiday. Some consumers will literally shop on the actual day! According to Fortune, consumers are expected to spend an average of $136.57 on a gift for their boo on Valentine’s Day, ranging anywhere from greeting cards, jewelry, flowers, and of course, chocolate.
If you’re in retail, snazzing up your store with hearts and teddy bears is the obvious way to get shoppers in the mood to buy. Some people think if your store is decorated for the holidays, you’re bound to have some sort of sale going on. Put your items for the holidays up front and center for people to see. Even if you don’t sell candy, chocolates, or flowers, or your business has no relation to Valentine’s Day, you can still utilize the holiday theme to your business’ advantage.
It also doesn’t hurt to bundle things together in-store, or better yet run a promotion on your gift cards. Businesses are always advertising by $50 get $10, or some sort of promotion where you get something back for buying a certain denomination of gift cards. To speak from experience, one of our own clients sold $125,000 in gift cards just from running a social ads campaign on Facebook for promoting gift cards! This is tangible proof that without some sort of marketing strategy, it’s hard to see growth and traffic to your website, and even more important, an increase in sales. Cha-ching!
Do you have e-commerce on your website? Well, 21% of Valentine’s Day presents will be purchased online. Fun fact – most purchasers start thinking about the holiday on the first of the month, so it’s important to get social users to start thinking about it right at the end of January and the beginning of February. With the help of iFocus Marketing, we can help you set up an editorial calendar so you can post regularly to inform users of your promotions, and potentially boost engagement. We can schedule your posts around times when users are more active or most likely to “like” or share your content.
Are you using Instagram? Make sure you are using appropriate hashtags to increase engagement and get more likes for your Valentine’s Day content, and like always, have a very strong visual to back up the copy that accompanies the post.
As a business, it’s our job to provide gift shoppers with some good ideas and market to them on social media. A solid campaign can get your brand in front of the last-minute shoppers when they’re trying to swoop something up on their way home to their Valentine. If you’ve set up a social ad campaign or created content to post to social media for the holiday, take a look at which social posts or campaigns did well last year for your brand and use that as inspiration to create something even better for V-Day. Which days did your campaign get the best results? What time were they most engaged? Which one performed the best? Dive in and check this out so you can inform yourself of a timing strategy for this year.
Run a contest! It will help boost your brand awareness and the possibilities are endless. If you put some advertising dollars behind a contest on Facebook, it’s a good way to reach a whole new audience for your page. Run a photo contest and ask fans to post photos of themselves with their pet/kids/boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife, or whomever it may be, and then let the Facebook community vote for their favorite entry to win a prize.
Here are a few social media marketing tactics for Valentine’s Day that some well-known brands used to appeal to their lovers:
Dunkin’ Donuts ran a “Dunkin’ Love” Instagram contest where they streamed on Facebook live, and had Snapchat Geofilters at certain Dunkin’ Donuts locations.
Revlon worked with Google to launch a personalized Valentine’s Day GIF e-card program that was named “Love Is On.” They allowed followers to share those animated GIFs on a variety of platforms. Revlon knew how to connect with their audience and chose the occasion of Valentine’s Day for their brand promotion.
Do you have a small business and just want to get the word out about your brand? A holiday like V-Day is the perfect opportunity to do just that. iFocus Marketing can help you set up a “reach” campaign where we can target specific people within your store. We would measure how many people your ad reached in your audience, and then collect data on how many impressions were served.
Do you have multiple products that you want to highlight and don’t think you can fit it all into one ad? A carousel ad style is the best way to advertise multiple products with different headlines. Furthermore, if you have younger and older people in your target demographic, we can create ads based on their interests and cater ads specifically to them. We know that a 23-year-old female most likely won’t have the same interests as a 55-year-old female, so we are able to create split audiences to ensure everyone in your target audience is being served the most relevant ads.
Keep it simple and try to create heart-warming content that your viewers will find relatable, and most importantly, know your audience.
So what were the most popular purchases last year? Bing released this information last year about what shoppers were purchasing for their loved ones:
- Candy – 53%
- Greeting Cards – 51%
- Flowers – 38%
- An Evening Out – 35%
- Jewelry – 21%
- Clothing – 16%
- Gift Card – 15%
Online searches for these items usually begin at the end of January and spike during first two weeks of February.
As marketers at iFocus, we use demographics and behavioral data to learn as much as we can about our audience, which is how we create successful, relevant, and engaging campaigns for our clients. Good marketing always has a strong call-to-action: an invitation, a special, an offer, or a free download.
Let the iFocus social marketing team be the solution to your online presence and contact us today!
