Christmas and the New Year are over, which means marketers are gearing up for the next big event: Valentine’s Day!
If your business isn’t quite ready for the day of romance, never fear! This article will give you some helpful inspiration for your Valentine’s Day marketing, so you can share the love with your audience.
“It may or may not have an aphrodisiac effect. Sip it and see.” By introducing the ability to tweak labels with poems, cheeky messages and adapted graphics, Innocent Smoothies came up with a fun campaign for Valentine’s Day 2012.
Firmly ticking the ‘creative’ brief, Innocent then also ensured a social media presence for their campaign by enabling customers to print, attach and share their labels on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. A sure fire way to get people talking and create some user generated content (UGC).
Cheeky, interactive and shareable, this Valentine’s Day marketing campaign certainly hits the mark. By giving customers the ability to put their own stamp on their product, the brand ensured that it would get talked about on social media. And that couples with a sense of humour would make an Innocent Smoothie part of their Valentine’s Day gift exchange.
Valentine’s Day isn’t just about romantic love, and more brands are trying to capitalise on the love between gal pals.
In this social media campaign, Nina Ricci encouraged their customers to send in videos and photos of them with their BFF and perfume. These were then shared on its social media channels in a great use of UGC.
A social media campaign like this is quick to set up – and can get you a lot of attention!
If you want to have a go at this type of campaign, keep the message positive, encourage your followers to share and tag photos with their friends, and create a catchy hashtag to tie the campaign together.
This Valentine’s marketing campaign by Ford was certainly not done on the cheap. However, the result was a video that went viral and generated more than 1.5 million views.
In 2015, the company hired a stunt driver to take some unsuspecting men for a spin during a blind date. This was later revealed to be a prank. This was not only perfectly suited for its Valentine’s Day release but also showed a beautiful Ford Mustang in action.
You don’t necessarily need the big budget of Ford to make a video like this work for you. The key for a viral video is a quirky concept that takes the viewer by surprise, perhaps by turning an accepted concept on its head. Once made, a strong social media campaign will help it to gain traction
Partnering with a like-minded brand for V-Day can be a great way to both widen your usual email audience and gain exposure.
This lovely example from The Foggy Dog and Ampersand Design Studio shows how effective a collaboration can be. Note how they’ve also made good use of Valentine’s colours to give it an attractive – and timely – look.
A partnership can be a fabulous way to get your brand in front of a whole new audience. Take a look at businesses that would mesh well with your products and services and see if there is a dream partnership waiting to happen!
You may expect Twitter to do all of its campaigning online – but this isn’t the case. For 2020, the social media platform went offline with a series of display ads. These showcased an array of funny and sarcastic posts about Valentine’s Day. This made good use of USG and put highly relatable content front and centre.
Marketing campaigns are often digitally focused, but even if your brand is based online, it may be worth experimenting with something physical. Key to success is to be bold and eye-catching, so think carefully about your message and graphics
Seen any great examples of Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns? Share a link with us on Twitter or LinkedIn!
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Credit: Main photo by Sarah Pflug from Burst
