We all have Moms, we (at least most of us) love them, and Mother’s Day is a great way to recognize and appreciate them for all the great things they do.
But, if you are a brand and you spend time and energy developing your business through social media, creating Mother’s Day promotions could be a trap.
Many brands feel pressured by their peers (other brands) to build promotions around many major holidays. They pour time and resources into random social marketing campaigns for holidays that may or may not make logical sense for their product or their audiences to make sure they aren’t “missing out on a hot opportunity.” Messaging like this only dilutes the impact you’ve worked hard to create and confuses your audience, but this doesn’t mean you should reach out to our social communities.
Here are some tips for staying ahead of the curve on social media this Mother’s Day.
1. Don’t make a sappy picture with a puppy or a heart on it.
Think outside the adorable animal picture. Every other brand is going to create a sappy picture of a puppy or a heart that says “If you love your mom, you’ll share this photo!” This is a blatant call for universal, spray-and-pray style sharing motivated by a sense of guilt that it’s Mother’s Day and you forgot to buy her flowers—instead of providing a meaningful experience or something with inherent significance.
This type of content provides no real value to the people you’re trying to reach, and in fact, completely kills your ability to target and market to relevant audience members. This type of content also serves you no real business purpose. Even though a post like this may garner a whole bunch of retweets or eleventy billion shares, that reach is fleeting and not impactful because the content is lacking in.. well.. content, and any discernible brand messaging.
Create a connection based on value with your social communities. Do a little research, find out what type of people your audience members are, how to talk to them effectively, and make a smart assumption about what kind of CTA (call to action) would make sense for them in regard to their mothers. Create a piece of content that will inspire an experience between Mom and child (based on something your brand supports) this year.
2. Own up to who you are.
General well-wishing is awesome, but if you can’t make business sense out of your efforts on Mother’s day.. then why the heck are you doing it? Not to be a cold, emotionless reptile, but make certain that a Mother’s day promotion could logically drive sales or brand equity for you before spending a bunch of time and resources on a campaign.
Ex: If you are a medical practice and run a promotion that says “Hey! A mammogram is a GREAT gift for Mother’s day!,” most of your audience will think you are clueless or just an idiot, and the Mom’s of the people who will inevitably fall for your ploy will hate you—the opposite of what you are trying to foster online. A better promotion for your medical practice would be “Moms are people too and we should make sure they stay healthy. Dark chocolate contains tons of antioxidants to keep her body well and her heart happy this Mother’s day.”
No, it isn’t a direct sale or direct lead generation, but people will remember you for being awesome when they inevitably do need that mammogram.
3. Don’t fall into the “MUST SOCIALLY PROMOTE EVERY MAJOR HOLIDAY” trap.
Don’t just slap a discount on a product, say “we are having a random sale on this completely unrelated product because it’s Mother’s Day!,” send it to Twitter, and call it a social marketing campaign. In other words, don’t just phone it in. Your social communities are fragile and will drop your brand super quickly if you consistently provide lame content just to provide content.
It’s okay to not build promotions for every holiday in the world. Save your resources and bandwidth for special promotions for the correct holidays for your brand, even if they aren’t major ones, and make them count! For instance, if your pet grooming company wants to run a social promotion, doing so on “National Hairball Awareness Day” (April 26) is much more attention-grabbing and relevant to the interests of your audience (those with pets). A promotion like this will cut through the noise and grab attention on days which Twitter and Facebook aren’t bursting with the same repetitive content.
If it doesn’t make sense for your brand, don’t pour resources into a Mother’s Day campaign. You can acknowledge all the Mom’s out there with a tweet or similar, but don’t try to capitalize on something that is going to fall flat just to “promote.”
Think critically about what holidays and events make the most sense for your brand to create social media marketing campaigns around. Then make them awesome. A great social media campaign can have a huge impact on your bottom line and will build your brand reputation as someone with great, relevant content every day of the year, not just on major holidays.
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