Valentine’s day is coming up and along with it, flocks of cupids looking for a perfect gift for their loved ones. If you’re running a business, this can be the first opportunity for this year to grow your business. In this article, we’ll walk you through a solid social media strategy for Valentines Day.
Who’s your cupid?
First and foremost, you should put some thought into who you are trying to reach with your campaign. Is your offer targeted towards men, women, families, new lovers, married couples, singles etc. Your target audience is going to influence your offer, your copywriting and your overall concept.
An ad for a family voucher to bring couples and their children to your restaurant to celebrate Valentine’s day together will look quite different than an offer for fresh millennial couples.
If your offer is not suited for couples you can make Valentine’s day about celebrating singles.
“What do you have that he doesn’t?”
To get their attention you need to stand out with an exceptional offer. Show the romantics out there that you want to help them make their loved ones happy. On top of that, throw in some treats like a special (free) gift wrapping or priority shipping for example. We suggest you put together a customized valentines gift bundle. Be prepared for “last-minute cupids”; Romantics that don’t buy their present until shortly before the big day. Help them to make it look like they planned ahead by letting your customers add a handwritten note or customize their present.
A special offer is not enough, you’ll also need a catchy picture. Grab a camera, it’s time for a photoshoot! If you need some inspiration check out industry-related pages and see what worked for them.
(If you are posting on Instagram, make sure you use the right hashtags. In this article, you learn how to use hashtags and our free hashtag tool to make your posts blow up.)
Spread the love
Once your offer and image material are ready, it is time to start promoting your product. We suggest you consider holding a contest to boost your sales for multiple reasons.
For its 2018 valentines day campaign, the body shop set up a contest on Instagram and asked people to post pictures of them blowing a kiss to a friend using #SendingAKiss .
The idea behind a contest like this is to get a lot of engagement on your post which boosts its organic reach. Just think of a good reason to make the cupids tag their loved ones. Making a beloved person win a prize by tagging them in a post is a very low investment compared to the potential reward. Depending on your audience you might want to try a less cheesy approach. For example: Incentivize singles to share their most embarrassing Valentines day stories and make the 5 best ones win for example.
More love
While your bundle is the main price, you can add other prizes like coupons, gift cards or single products.
This gives more people a chance to win and generates engagement which will get your post in front of even more people. Additionally, people who win a coupon are more likely to buy from you and may even become long-term customers. If you are broadcasting on different channels you can even use different coupon codes to track which channels performed best.
If you have a newsletter in place, make sure to let your subscribers know about the contest as soon as possible and make them participate.
Turbo boost that love
Once your post is online give it some time to spread: 24h should be enough.
By now you should have some engagement going on your post, which is the perfect time to boost it to reach more people. Boosting means paying Facebook to increase the posts reach. To do this we are going to set up a Facebook ad optimized for engagement.
Facebook rewards posts that have a lot of engagement with lower prices per click and more reach when boosted. This is why we are waiting for the post to get some organic engagement before boosting the contest.
You need:
- Facebook page or an Instagram business account
- Facebook ad account
- Ideally a Facebook business account.
Please note, that you are running Instagram ads via Facebook, so you’ll need a Facebook account one way or another.
Check the friend zone
Start by boosting your post to the people that already know and like your product, especially if you have a limited budget. You can do this by using a feature on Facebook called “custom audiences “. Custom audiences allow you to roll out ads to people who have visited your website before, like your page or have engaged with your posts.
To do this go to Facebook business manager>Audiences>Create custom audience>Engagement>People who engaged with your Facebook page or Instagram business profile.
Once you find this menu, you can choose to target people who made a specific interaction on your Facebook page or Instagram business profile. If you chose people who engaged with any post, for example, they know you already and are more susceptible to what you are offering. Once you save the audience it will update automatically, so nurture the audience and use it as often as you like. This allows you to monetize your audience far beyond Valentine’s day.
To use this audience, go to the ad set level when creating an ad and you will see a search field for custom audiences.
Target the right people
If you’d like to go further, create a second ad set where you use broader audiences instead of remarketing audiences. With broader audiences, you can target people who like similar products or brands worldwide. Depending on the time and budget you have, you can test separate ad sets, each targeting different people with a specific interest or attribute.
If you were selling luxury clothes, for example, you could create one ad set that targets people liking Chanel and one more for Versace. This allows you to compare the performance of the different audiences and focus your budget on the ones that perform best.
Another possibility is to target by demographics like “new relationships” and “married people”. Once again you can create separate ad sets to compare if married people buy your product more than new couples and spend your budget on the group that converts.
Know your cupids
Use your analytics tools to understand which channel clicked and converted most to optimize your targeting. If you’re advertising on multiple channels, the right tracking is key to understanding and optimizing performance. Don’t know what a UTM is? Check out this article to learn how to track your campaigns the right way.
If you’d like to use classical ads (not a boosted post) take the time to come up with a few versions by changing the image or the text. Let the different versions of the ads compete against each other and find the one that performs best. This process is referred to as split-testing or A/B testing and we highly recommend you give it a try.
Feel free to tag your contest with #fromneonwithlove to help us check on your progress.
From neon with love <3
