Valentine’s Day Campaigns: Quick and Easy Digital Marketing Ideas

Forward planning is essential for all marketing activity, as it helps you to ensure that you have enough time to research, plan and execute great campaigns that really resonate with your customers. As we explored already in a previous blog post, there are some really key things you can do to help plan your digital marketing campaign around a popular calendar event (such as Valentine’s Day).

With only a short time to go until the annual celebration of love and all things heart-shaped, you have hopefully got your marketing campaigns all primed and ready to go. But if not then fear not! We’ve put together a few ideas that are quick and easy to implement, yet could still make your customers fall in love with your brand all over again.

Quick Valentine’s Day marketing wins

Here’s a selection of ideas for you to implement with minimal effort:

Engage with your customers

Think of ideas of how to engage with your customers using your social media platforms. This could include asking them to share their stories of how they met their partner or even disastrous dates. Tie this into a competition to incentivise the engagement further, plus use a suitable hashtag to pull this together. You can also consider how you can then turn this social content into other content for your website, such as a quick blog post.

O2 used the #O2tweeheart hashtag to offer people the chance to win a weekend away http://news.o2.co.uk/2013/02/04/share-the-love-and-win-a-hotel-break/

Gu gave away a year’s supply of their puddings on Twitter using the hashtag #ilovegu

Add images

Use a tool such as Canva.com to create simple love-themed images to accompany your social media posts.

Cisco use tech-themed love images across the social media networks

Find people who need help

Many people leave buying presents or deciding on what to do on Valentine’s Day until the last minute, so you can help play Cupid by monitoring Twitter for people who are looking for help, then tweet them with your advice or solutions.

One word of caution however is to ensure that your approach is gentle and you’re not going in with a direct sales message. Engage with them first, have a conversation, then offer your advice. Also it’s worth checking that they are going to be potential relevant customers, i.e. are they in the right country?

What should I get my boyfriend for Valentines Day? Please help it's been a while since I actually spent this day with someone 😩😩😩

— Champagne Pop ✨ (@BeautifulCrime_) January 26, 2016

I need help this is the first year im not alone for #ValentinesDay i dont know know what to do or get him it what card do i get pls help me

— katonya hendrickson (@katonya_angel) January 26, 2016

Two examples of people taking to Twitter to ask for help. Feel free to offer advice, but make sure it’s in context

Surprise and delight

Find the customers that engage with you the most on your social media platforms (the guys who are your real brand advocates). You can then reward them with a surprise tweet or message, for example by giving them a free gift or discount, etc. There’s a good chance they will be so pleased they will then talk about this again, not only via social media but also via word-of-mouth to their friends and family, giving you even more brand exposure.

Jet Blue Airways rewarded a customer who tweeted them on Valentine’s Day with some extra loyalty points

Special offers for customers

Everyone does offers, but why not create something that is unique? You can then promote the offer via your enewsletters, social media platforms and also onsite with homepage take-overs. Make the offer run for 24 hours then measure the take-up of this.

Pizza Hut created a unique ‘Tie The Knot package’ for people looking to propose on Valentine’s Day in a very different way

Segment your audience

If you have a healthy customer database then you can look to split this into segments, for example by gender or age, and then target these people with different products based on what they are more likely to buy. These segmented groups can then be used via your enewsletters and also paid social media, by uploading the lists as ‘audiences’ to Facebook and running targeted ads.

Themed landing pages

Even if you’re short on time, it’s a good idea to give your users the chance to view any Valentine’s Day gift ideas in one place. A themed landing page works well for this, as you can group all the products together and ensure there are some strong CTAs.

Notonthehighstreet.com created a themed landing page, plus gave their homepage a makeover in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day

Paid social media adverts

These are quick, easy and also budget-friendly, so once you have an offer in mind then make sure you promote this via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All of these platforms offer ways of targeting your audience (by location, gender, age or interests), so use this to run several campaigns and test the engagement. If you can, give yourself time while they are live to tweak them depending on what results they are delivering.

Use Facebook’s Advert Manager to identify your targets for the paid social media ads, segmenting your list by demographic data such as ‘relationship status’

Even if your business does not necessarily sell Valentine’s Day related products, hopefully these ideas have given you some inspiration for how you can quickly inject some love into your marketing on February 14th. 

You can also download our Content Marketing and Social Planner – an essential tool to help you plan and track the progress of your next content marketing campaign.