The 14th of February is a date that inspires billions of pounds in global spending. Through gift-giving and romantic experiences, individuals will purchase products and services in efforts to portray their love. Businesses have captured a huge opportunity to cash-in on consumer spending by flooding the market with Valentine’s Day advertising.
To stand out from the crowd, employing a variety of creative and considered marketing strategies can assist you in promoting your brand and converting sales. Generating emotion, inspiring user generated content and thoroughly understanding your audience are just some of the effective ways to capture the attention of Valentine’s Day shoppers.
Provide your customers with an opportunity to surprise their loved ones whilst increasing your revenue and online engagement. Consider our top 6 digital marketing campaign ideas to employ within your strategy and feel the love this Valentine’s Day.
Understand Your Target Audience
Before investing your time and resources into creating a Valentine’s Day marketing campaign, it is vitally important to define the audience that you will be targeting. You need to focus on the individuals who are most likely to convert with the right marketing message. Targeting a precise audience that might convert is far more valuable than targeting a huge audience that will never convert.
Search data clearly represents that men are the biggest spenders surrounding Valentine’s day. In fact, they spend almost twice as much as women. Male online shoppers tend to be between the ages of 18-34, with around 65% of this group making purchases for Valentine’s Day.
Whilst it might seem like there is an obvious target audience to market for here, you need to consider which products they are typically looking for. The biggest money-makers in Valentine’s Day promotions are chocolates, flowers, greetings cards, jewellery and clothing. Unless you are a popular provider of these products, gaining the attention of this target market will be challenging.
Valentine’s Day isn’t just for loved up couples of one kind. Love comes in several forms and this is something that is becoming more and more celebrated surrounding Valentine’s day. Across the UK and globally, there is a shared application of Valentine’s Day for the people closest to us. Hundreds of online users will be looking to celebrate love for their friends, parents, pets and co-workers. By offering inclusivity and authenticity, your brand will become far more valuable to these smaller audiences.
Think about the value that you provide to your customers. What is the most effective way to grab the attention of an audience that is focused on love, compassion and generosity? Consider whether your product or service can become a gift, an act of self-care or a way to make someone’s life easier. Focus on this within your target audience research and create a brand message that signifies the romantic angle that you are trying to implement.
Enhance Your Marketing Strategy With A Cross-Channel Brand Message
An impressive cross-channel Valentine’s Day marketing campaign could prove to be highly effective during this seasonal period. Create a complementary brand message across each of your platforms to consistently nurture your new leads and eventually benefit from their purchase decisions.
The key to curating a successful cross-channel marketing campaign is to reinforce your brand message and themed design across all of your active platforms. After engaging with any one of your marketing materials, consumers should be able to recognise the brand and story that accompanies your content.
If you have designed a theme for a unique landing page, the new design should be emulated across social media posts and marketing emails. Providing a recognisable brand which your potential leads can follow throughout the campaign to conversion will allow them to make a simple purchase decision.
See how you could integrate key marketing elements to create a cohesive strategy to optimise your lead conversions.
- Email marketing
Alert your previous customers to new Valentine’s Day deals via captivating and interesting newsletters or marketing emails. Ensuring emails are accompanied by personalised calls to action and subject lines will encourage engagement and interaction from your target audience.
- SMS push notifications
With an 89% open rate, SMS marketing messages are highly effective for reaching customers with your brand’s message. Offer interesting and useful information that provides details of a deal or competition that you are running on your website or social media platform. It may also be effective to offer friendly reminders that Valentine’s Day is approaching and they need to purchase a gift for their significant other. This offers an obvious call to action which redirects them to a product that you wish to promote.
- Social media
A coordinated brand message and design across your social media platforms create a flawless user experience no matter where they interact with your company. Creating unique and eye-catching posts that stand out from other Valentine’s Day promotions will ensure that users will remember your business instead of others.
- Website design
Producing a unique Valentine’s Day landing page for your website can help to direct customers to the products or services they are interested in. Creating a design that is mirrored in all other elements of the marketing campaign will ensure that your potential leads enjoy a seamless experience throughout their customer journey.
Leverage Engagement With User-Generated Content (UGC)
Valentine’s Day offers a unique opportunity to engage with a wider audience that may not have previously interacted with your brand. This particular holiday is evidently surrounded by emotions of love and romance. However, many individuals experience Valentine’s Day in different ways. Social media users are often keen to share their stories and relate to their peers through shared experiences. Make use of this interest by encouraging users to create their own content in response to a hashtag or a competition.
User-generated content offers plenty of benefits for brand awareness and engagement. Not only will users interact with your brand, but by creating their own content, they’re telling each of their followers that they trust your business. With around 70% of consumers placing a higher value on peer-written content than professionally created content, campaigns such as these can be successful for increasing traffic and converting leads.
Several brands have achieved success regardless of their relevance to typical Valentine’s Day themes. Consider the product or service that you provide and think about how you can create a romantic spin to initiate a conversation with your audience.
Alongside the launch of a new lip makeup, The Body Shop for instance, created a successful Valentine’s Day campaign focused around user-generated content. By posting an image of them blowing a kiss under ‘#sendingakiss,’ users entered into a competition to win the new product. With significant user engagement, this business was able to capture the attention of a massive audience. User generated content can be attained by offering something valuable or interesting to users. Integrating a Valentine’s Day theme attracts attention and initiates engagement across social media.
For ideas on how to create an attention-grabbing Valentine’s Day campaign that leverages user-generated content, we have a few suggestions. Firstly, research what techniques the competitors in your industry have previously used. If your brand seems like a hard sell for Valentine’s Day, take a look at what has worked for them in the past. You can then recycle this with your own unique spin. Alternatively, consider creating a campaign focused on user engagement without the need to promote your product or service. Showing your followers some love is still a great way to boost engagement levels and create a brand message that is authentic and interesting.
Refine Your Seasonal SEO
Many businesses look for different ways to enhance their conversion rates throughout the year. Seasonal SEO allows companies to benefit from increased interest in specific products or services that are associated with a particular time of year. Valentine’s Day is one specific holiday that is significantly associated with increased spending. Optimising your website by offering a great user experience, integrating effective keyword research and producing outstanding content can generate rankings that will grab the attention of your target audience.
Data significantly demonstrates that search engines are pivotal in consumers’ purchase decisions for experiences or gifts for Valentine’s Day. Combining this with the knowledge that only 6% of users navigate past the first page of Google results indicates that to capture the attention of your potential leads, you need to feature within the top ten results for your focused search term.
Keyword research can be especially useful to determine where you should focus your SEO efforts. Whilst there are hundreds of keywords that you could attempt to rank for, many of them are highly competitive. Selecting a handful of keywords that have a significant traffic volume but are also related to your products or industry will be most effective in a successful SEO strategy.
After developing some high-quality content and optimising your webpage for your target keyword, it is important to recognise the significance of user experience. Along with high-quality content that is useful to users, the quality of experience on your website is a significant search ranking factor. Creating an eye-catching mobile-friendly website with fast load speeds will encourage search algorithms to favour your website in their ranking decisions.
Spread The Love With Your Clients
In terms of marketing, Valentine’s Day can be a given for many businesses. Creating a romantic campaign that attracts customers to purchase gifts for their loved ones is incredibly effective. You might be wondering how B2B focused companies can also share some love. Making your clients feel special is a great way to boost engagement right at the beginning of the new year. Valentine’s Day can be a valuable opportunity to develop your client relationships, setting you in the right direction for the next 10 months.
Whilst generating ideas for your B2B Valentine’s Day campaign it is key to not create anything that might be perceived as too cheesy or unprofessional. Using business-appropriate messaging and humour is a good start. Creating a personality for your brand is a great way to encourage positive client relations, however, it is important that you remain reputable and authoritative within your field.
The most effective way to engage your clients utilising Valentine’s theme is by sharing your appreciation for their business. Whether you have recently closed on a high-value deal, are celebrating a long term relationship or simply want to offer some recognition, demonstrating their value to you is a great way to engage clients with your business.
Sending your clients some love can be as simple as writing personalised emails, to sending gift cards or chocolates to be shared amongst the office or with their significant other. Engaging in a lighthearted interaction that isn’t sales-oriented generates a valuable relationship that demonstrates compassion and authenticity. Your clients will reward you for your kindness in the future by making you their first point of contact or referring you to other businesses.
Target Last-Minute Shoppers
If you’ve left it until the last minute to develop a Valentine’s Day marketing strategy, you could be very similar to the 60% of consumers who complete their Valentine’s purchases in the five days leading up to the 14th of February. If you’re looking for a quick fix to target some of Valentine’s Day traffic, you’re in luck. The highest levels of traffic associated with Valentine’s Day purchases occur within the last week. Here are some top tips that could help you grab the attention of your last-minute shoppers:
- Exclusive last-minute discounts
Utilise a range of marketing platforms to grab the attention of shoppers browsing for gift ideas in the final days leading up to Valentine’s Day. Entice consumers towards making a purchase decision with generous discounts within SMS messages, emails, paid searches or social media posts.
- Create urgency by reminding them of “x” number of hours or days
Encourage urgent action by sending last-minute reminders or countdowns until Valentine’s day. You can incorporate this into social media posts or push notifications accompanied by discount codes or next-day shipping guarantees to further optimise lead conversion.
- Free gift wrapping
Offer some last-minute convenience to your customers to stand out from competitors. Advertising that products will arrive gift-wrapped saves customers the hassle of preparing gifts the day before Valentine’s Day.
- Next day delivery or guaranteed delivery before Valentine’s Day
For many panic buyers, stress sets in that you’re not going to be able to receive your product before the 14th of February. Provide some security and convenience to convert leads by offering next day delivery or guaranteed delivery before Valentine’s Day.
Conclusion
With Valentine’s Day quickly approaching, we hope to inspire a marketing strategy that elicits emotion. To take full advantage of the social media buzz and consumer spending, focus onutilising strong visual elements, user-generated content and themes of love that are inclusive to engage your customers and tap into a new consumer segment.
Remember, Valentine’s Day isn’t just for young romantic couples. The evolution of this celebration provides opportunities for you to engage with a wider audience. Online users are looking for something unique that can portray love and kindness. If you can emulate this throughout your marketing strategy, you could boost engagement and benefit from increased conversions.
The post Top 6 Digital Marketing Campaign Ideas for Valentine’s Day appeared first on Pinnacle Blog.
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