Mother and daughter making valentines day crafts. Marketing ideas for Valentine's

Valentine’s Marketing

Valentine’s Day is a big day for romance and marketing. These are also the two arenas where clichés only lead to eye-rolls instead of undying affection. Romance and marketing need to be inventive and authentic to get attention. Valentine’s Day is one of the first holiday opportunities in the new year for business marketing, but it also means every business is advertising around it. When so many businesses are trying to woo customers, you need to stand out to really charm them. Here are five tips to break away from those eye-rolling Valentine’s clichés and start planning original ideas.

Be Original and Make Your Business Creatively Romantic

Often when people imagine Valentine’s Day, they think of restaurants, candle-lit dinners, and flowers, but romance takes countless forms. Originality is the essence of charm. Imagine how your business can fit into romantic plans or a date, and have your marketing inspire novel romantic actions or gifts. Maybe certain products or Valentine’s packages can make a heartfelt gift or be the basis for a cute date. Have fun with it: new pajamas for a night away, bikes for a couple’s ride on the trails, or a board game for an intimate night at home. Be creative and market to the experiences and emotions of moments your business’ products/services can create. Even a gift card can be made romantic for partners to share a shopping spree date.

Market to their Original Relationships: Friends

Valentine’s is typically for romantic partners, but not everyone will be spending the holiday with their sweetheart. Friends, however, are no less important loved ones in our lives. You can include marketing that inspires shows of affection between friends. Our friends provide valuable emotional support like our partners, and it’s also nice to show them care and appreciation. Galentine’s Day on February 13 has recently become a more notable day for women to shower each other with amicable affection. It’s perfect if your business primarily caters to a feminine demographic. If you are looking for a more gender-inclusive option, you could go for the similarly punny “Pal-entine’s Day”.

Embrace Their Own Valentine

Along with partners and friends, everyone should have and show love and care to themselves. You can market services and products for those who are looking to or should give themselves that much deserved affection this Valentine’s Day. Along with marketing for platonic relationships, this strategy lets you reach customers or clients who may otherwise feel rejected or dejected during the holiday of love. Marketing that emphasizes their individual value and sympathizes with their possible loneliness helps motivate them towards acting on that original self-affection.

Be Their Valentine

Your marketing doesn’t just have to focus on customers and clients showing love to those important in their lives. Your customers and audience are valuable to you and your business, so Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity to show them some of your own love. Be their Valentine with special promotions or discounts. Create social media posts that acknowledge and thank your community. Be sure that those displays of affection or gratitude are authentic and in line with your brand so they feel sincere. Front-facing the human element of your business in this marketing will further ensure those Valentine’s posts create a real connection.

Combining These Together for Something Truly Original

One of these strategies alone will help you create some original Valentine’s marketing for the well-trodden holiday of love. However, using a strategy that only targets romantic partners, friends, or singles will exclude the others. Combining multiple of these strategies will allow you to reach and acknowledge most if not all your community and potential customers. Use multiple strategies together to create a fully original affectionate marketing roster that can pull on everyone’s heartstrings.

Originality is the Essence of Marketing and Romance

With these strategies you can bring some spice to your marketing this Valentine’s Day. Demonstrate how your business can play a vital role in your customers and community showing each other affection along with showing your own. Want more original strategies and ideas? Contact Rosewood’s marketing team for help creating novel and effective marketing.

An inspiring bookshelf with various books beside a pink chair.

Your follower number is an important metric for determining your brand’s reach, but it means little if that that audience isn’t regularly engaging with your content. That engagement creates a dedicated community around your business. If your content inspires engagement, said community will become invested in supporting, maintaining, and expanding the reach of your brand. That all starts by having a content strategy that inspires and motivates your followers to engage, so here are key tactics of a strategy that builds an inspired community.

Engage and Respond to Your Community

One of your first and best tactics for forming and inspiring your community to engage is by engaging with them. Respond to their comments, posts, and feedback to your content. Be sure to engage with them on your content and theirs. Everyone enjoys some acknowledgement. Giving your community members that attention, will inspire them to engage even more. Others who see that activity will also be more encouraged to engage. Everyone will be inspired to engage with each other, forming true communal bonds around your brand.

Keep That Community Positive

You need to maintain a healthy and safe space to keep that engagement and your community flourishing. Online communities need moderation and supervision. It’s unfortunately easy in online spaces for someone to enter and be toxic. Along with being harmful, they will scare off others from engaging. Be sure to remove that kind of activity from your community to keep dedicated followers and your community healthy. Followers will continue to energetically engage and those who witness that moderation will be inspired to remain in your brand’s safe community.

Educate, Entertain, and Inform

Along with promotional content, provide a variety of content that is educational, entertaining, and informative. The variety keeps your community actively interested and engaged. Educational content can teach your audience about some niche information about your brand and industry. Behind the scenes (BTS) content showcases your company’s human element, and the insider view lets your audience feel connected of your brand and its people. Entertaining content is another opportunity to show off your brand’s personality. It can also jump on a recent social media trend. That further inspires a community who will want to engage with the momentarily relevant content. 

Championing a Cause

It may seem outside your business’ scope to have your brand comment on a societal issue, but championing a cause helps unite and inspire your community. In 2019, Edelman found that 81% of people felt they must trust a brand to purchase from them, and in 2021, they found customers are 7x more likely to purchase from brands they trust. A central factor of that trust is not just honest business practices. People’s trust in businesses relies on their stance on a social issue. 53% of customers say they need their brands to take a stand on at least one social issue, and 86% expect brands to take one or more actions beyond their business or production, primarily addressing at least one societal concern. 

Motivating your followers to contribute or benefit such a social cause will inspire and empower them. They will associate your brand and its community with a larger social impact and benefit. Posts on a certain issue relevant to your brand provide a great opportunity for your followers to engage and feel inspired. If you brand contributes to a charity, you can encourage followers to also donate or promote. Brands for charitable organizations or non-profits can directly inspire followers to action by engaging directly with your content, fundraisers, and events.

Stick to Your Brand and Its Values

Your brand shouldn’t champion every cause or jump on every trend. It will reduce your content’s impact, confuse your brand’s core personality, and undermine its authenticity. Brand personalities are like people; they need to stay consistent for people to trust them. Stick to a select few causes that pair with the character and values of your brand. Your followers and customers can associate these with your brand. A fashion business may promote a cause for body positivity or a charity that provides clothes to the impoverished. Any small business can champion a charity or cause that’s part of their local community. 

Recognize Your Community

Beyond just engaging and inspiring them, have content that recognizes your community. If your community creates their own content with your brand or participates in your charitable acts, be sure to acknowledge and celebrate those accomplishments. If your business sees some success or reaches a certain milestone, recognize how your community has played an important role in that accomplishment. This recognition of a symbiotic relationship strengthens your followers’ bonds with your brand. They will only be more inspired to engage with and support your business and brand.

Start An Inspiring Strategy

With these essential tactics you can start to build a strategy of inspiring content. An engaged community around your brand will stay dedicated to supporting your business and expanding its reach. If you’re looking to build a social media strategy and start creating inspiring content suited to your brand, talk with Rosewood’s social media marketing team. We can help you flesh out an entire long-term plan for inspiring that following.

Woman working on her laptop through a glass window.

Social media remains vital to your business and influencers can help you use it to its maximum potential. Influencer marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. At least 61% of people trust a brand because of an influencer’s recommendation. Every dollar spent on an influencer campaign earns an average $5.79. This gives it one of the highest ROIs compared to other marketing strategies. You’re probably looking to hire an influencer for your brand and are curious how to start. An influencer relationship will ideally be long, so be certain to make relationships with the best influencers for your business. Here are some key tips for how to hire an influencer.

Determine Goals and Budget

As with anything for your business, you need to establish a goal and plan for hiring an influencer. Determine the promotion’s length and cost. You should also consider the sizes of influencer you are looking to hire to properly scale the promotion’s budget. Mega influencers bring large followings but also big price tags. Micro- and mini-influencers may have smaller follower numbers, but they boast higher engagement rates, can provide a closer partnership, and will cost your business less. 

The kind of campaign

Part of determining that budget will rely on you determining the type of promotion you’re hoping to get from an influencer. Here are some of the most common types of influencer promotions:

  • One-time mention – An influencer mentions a business in one piece of content 
  • Content integration – Products or services become part of the influencer’s content. For example, a fashion influencer may include a product as part of an outfit. 
  • Collaboration – An influencer works with a company to design a specific product. 
  • Review/Unboxing – An influencer creates content products and/or provides a (hopefully) positive review of your products/services.
  • Long-term cooperation – Sometimes called an ambassadorship. These are prolonged influencer relationships, which can include other kinds of the above campaigns. 

The kind of promotion will determine the cost. A one-time mention may be better suited for an influencer with a bigger audience, where you will have a larger, single payment. Other promotions like content integration, collaborations, and ambassadorships will be longer partnerships and contracts, so plan accordingly.  A digital marketing team can help you determine the right kind of promotion.

Consider Your Target

The strength of influencer marketing comes from their ability to reach and interact with those they influence: their audience. When hiring an influencer, be sure that their community aligns with your own business’ target. A proper match will advocate your business to many potential clients or customers. On the other hand, an engaged audience will mean little if it does not include those likely to be interested in your products or services. 

Fits your Brand

Along with your audiences, your brand and an influencer’s need to align, especially if you plan to have a prolonged promotional partnership with them. Be certain an influencer’s values, messaging, and tone pair well with your own business’. They don’t need to be identical, but they should be collaborative. Research their reputation and consider how that might affect your business. When an influencer’s values or messaging oppose your brand’s, it can lead to confusion, misrepresentation, or even damage your business.

Watch Their Work

When you have determined a prospective influencer you may want to hire, follow their content. The best influencers engage their audience with consistent content.  Watch how they regularly engage their audience. Do they respond to comments? Are they posting content daily or weekly?  These are key performance factors to help you determine the strength and value of an influencer to help your business reach a target. This analysis will also help you determine aspects of their brand and whether their followers are your target audience or filled with ranks of automated bots.

Develop a Relationship

The best relationships with influencers develop organically. You can begin interacting with an influencer by engaging with their content. This allows your business to capture their attention. Even better, you may have a previously built relationship. An influencer may have already recommended your products or services themselves, or you have previously sent them products which they enjoyed. This will put your hiring proposal before others who lack any familiarity with the influencer. 

The Hiring Process – Proper Communication

Once you have chosen an influencer and established a rapport, you need to propose hiring them. Use the preferred communication channels. Many prefer an email and provide one on their profiles. If there isn’t one provided, directly message the account and they should provide you with contact information. For smaller influencers, this communication will often be directly with the influencer themselves, but larger influencers may have a team who help them coordinate promotions and agreements.

In your communications, be clear about the kind of promotion, the products or services, and your goals. Explain to the influencer why you believe their perfect for the promotion, the products/services, and your business. In turn, listen to their suggestions or feedback about the promotion. They know their audience and how to create content. Maintaining this dialogue will be vital to continuing a long-term partnership between your business and said influencer. You can then negotiate payment to draw and finalize a contract. Compensation can take monetary and gifting forms.  

Time to Start

Following these tips will help you be successful in hiring the right influencer, with whom your business will hopefully have a long relationship. The most effective influencer marketing is a sustained partnership where their audience becomes attached to your brand by association.  If you need help creating influencer relationships or planning a promotion, contact Rosewood’s digital services team.  Their social media expertise can help you determine promotion type, find the right influencers, and start building relationships.