Love is in the air, and social media is abuzz with honeys wishing each other a Happy Valentine’s Day. But more than that, consumers will spend $15 billion this year on Valentine’s Day related products and services. It’s easy to cash in on the contagious buzz that spreads around during Valentine’s Day if you have a product or service that’s useful to V-Day shoppers: online gifts, bakeries, flower shops, chocolate brands, films and TV shows, restaurants or bars, toys and games, apparel, greeting cards, art or music, e-cards, jewelry or watch brands, electronics, and many others. Your brand can be a part of that conversation with an appropriate social media strategy. You’ll fall in love with the idea of increasing sales during the most social holiday, Valentine’s Day.
Change your avatar on social media
The first step to creating goodwill for your company during the Valentine’s Day rush is to add some sickly sweet romance to your social media avatar. You’ll notice that Google creates a new doodle for all major holidays. You should too. You can easily use Photoshop to turn your avatar or logo into a heart or to add heart shapes around the border of your image. There are some tutorials on this available around the Web. This particularly helps small businesses stand out as creative and special against the backdrop of uncreative, unoriginal advertising that inundates the Internet around this time of year.
Use Limited Edition to your advantage
Can you make your product into a limited edition version for Valentine’s Day? This can help increase desire and exclusivity and help move more product. Depending on how customizable your product or service is, you might prefer the following tip…
Create gift packs out of multiple products
Gift packs are all the rage during Valentine’s Day because they’re a low-effort buy-it-and-forget-it opportunity for a smart gifter. Can you bundle more than one product or a his-and-hers version together to create gift packs? And can you mark them off 25% and offer free gift wrapping and free shipping? Then you’ve got a sharable hit on your hands!
Solicit testimonials with “looking for love” messages
Use Valentine’s Day as a way to build up testimonials via social media. Ask your customers to let you know how much they love you. “Looking for Love” greeting cards can be an excellent direct mail campaign with a social element added. Happy clients will help you further market your business and the campaign will remind your other customers about how great your products are.
Get ahead of the curve
Take a tip from Victoria’s Secret. In 2011, they launched a campaign on YouTube citing tips for the whole month of February. This helped extend the Valentine’s Day holiday and keep their brand top-of-mind prior to Valentine’s Day when gifts are actually being purchased. A quick scan of my inbox reveals that I was receiving Valentine’s Day-related correspondence as early as mid-January. Start early to capture the lion’s share of the $15 billion market.
Above all, remember that love is one of the most versatile words ever. You can often change its context to fit your brand and product without a lot of effort. Maybe your brand doesn’t fit in the romantic world. That’s okay – talk about your customers love for your brand rather than their love for each other.
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
