How to advertise during Valentine’s day

There are only a few periods in the year when people don’t look at what they are spending and when they buy more than usual. Those are Black Friday, Christmas, Easter and … Valentines Day.

This is the period when those who love each other try to express their love in as many ways as possible. Valentine’s day is a perfect business opportunity that you can leverage to sell more so we made a list of marketing tips for you.

Start early

In marketing, timing is as important as the campaign you create, so start early. We are writing this post on the 4th of February, which means that there are only 10 days until the big event. If you read this, you should start your campaign now.

Create the campaign as early as 5-6 days before the event so you can warm people up. Design a social post that will tell people they get a 10-15% discount or other benefits during Valentine’s day in order to create some buzz and engagement building up to the event. This will increase the number of sales you can get on that day.

Customize your messages for genders

In marketing, you need to create emotion and the best way to do it is to tailor your message to your customers. If you sell flowers, now it is the time to create Facebook ads targeted only to the male audiences with messages like “Make her feel special”, “Buy her a gift she’ll love” or “Get her the best flowers this Valentine”. Do not forget to target these messages to people who are in a relationship so you will avoid unprofitable spending or get single men offended (this may sound like a joke but it is a real deal).

If you are selling gifts, do the same and alter the message, if you target women change the message, now you can be specific because there are a lot of emotions involved around this event.

Now is the time to be funny

This period can offer you the chance to be a bit more bold with your messaging. You can be more playful with what you sell so you can make people relate more and engage with your business. Here is an Ikea commercial from a previous Valentine’s Day.

Some say this may be too playful, but it will definitely make you comment, send it to one of your friends as a joke or like the post for its creativity. Even though people don’t engage to necessarily buy, your post/ad will get to more people and indirectly you will sell more. Be as creative as you can.

Target people who are single

A lot of business owners and marketers forget that Valentine’s day is not only for people who have a relationship. This day is also a good opportunity to sell to people who are single or that want to be in a relationship (almost everybody).

If you own a local restaurant, you can invite your customers to ask their crush out for example. If you sell flowers you can use messaging like: “Now is the time to ask him/her out” or “Get out of friend zone, buy her flowers” etc. The idea is to involve as many people as possible. This about how good it will be for your business if your restaurant is the place where one guy met the love of his life. That’s proper customer loyalty (haha).

Get color-themed

We all know that red is the color of love and that hearts are the sign of love, so use that to create a proper atmosphere that will help people take action. Change your business profile to red, add hearts to your online logo, change the color of your website etc. This will help people see that you are really involved and that you really care about them.

Creatives. Creatives. Creatives

The competition will be high during these events so having great creatives is mandatory. Try to be unconventional and present your services in a visually pleasing way. The Ikea example is a very good one because it represents so much. Get inspired by it and do something similar to your products or services.

Our agency is preparing especially for people who are single and entrepreneurs that do have relationships but don’t get presents for their business-we challenge you to think about what kind of messaging will fit this audience (haha).

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Now it’s the time for contests

The industries that benefit the most during Valentine’s day are the following:

1. Jewelry – $4.7bn
2. Going out (Horeca-hotels, restaurants, cafeterias) – $3.7bn
3. Clothing – $2bn
4. Flowers – $ 2bn
5. Candy – $ 1.8bn
6. Gift Cards – $ 1.5bn
7. Pets – $982mil
8. Greeting Cards – $894mil

If you are in any of these industries offer one of your best products or services for free to one couple. In order to enter your contest ask them to like your Page or follow you and recommend them to tag a few friends (recommend it only, don’t make from this a rule, because it is against Facebook’s Terms).

After you create the posts, share it in different groups and advertise a little bit on it. Most of the businesses we used this strategy on, had really good results.

Conclusions

This holiday is a great opportunity for sales, growth or social engagement. Use it as much as possible. Valentine’s day happens only once a year, so you don’t have a lot of chances like this one. We hope this article was helpful. If that’s the case, consider dropping us a like below. Share it with your business partners.

Here is a summary: