How to Use a Holiday (Like Valentine's Day) to Market Your Business

Valentine’s Day is a day famous for love, expressions of affection, and chocolate. As such, it may not be obviously apparent how the holiday lends itself to marketing your business to other businesses. However, there is potential for the holiday of love to stir up some action for your company.

Coming On Too Strong

There are some holidays that tend to monopolize the public awareness, so much so that you almost have to engage in some themed marketing. Valentine’s Day is not one of those holidays.

Valentine’s Day is a holiday that can sneak up on people if they aren’t reminded of it, and so your marketing has the opportunity to serve as a reminder of the holiday, as well as your services. If you time your initiative to start a short while before the 14th, your audience gets a heads-up that Valentine’s Day is coming, and you get to make an impression on your prospective clients.

You should also keep in mind that, since Valentine’s Day is a little less restricted than other holidays, you can be a little more creative with your marketing. While a holiday like Christmas or Independence Day have set traditions and ‘rules,’ of sorts, the lack of set-in-stone customs for Valentine’s Day give you a little more leeway as you create your marketing, and the approach it will take.

Where Your Focus Should Be

Since there are so few conventions that are set in stone for Valentine’s Day, you can be more creative with your marketing, as you are less constrained by convention. You can reference any of the typical Valentine’s Day conventions, while also referencing the holiday itself as much (or as little) as you want.

Where you really need to focus is on the professional relationships you hold with your targets. Valentine’s Day doesn’t work very well as a ‘serious’ pitch foundation. Therefore, you should accept the day as it is meant to be today, lighthearted and fun. This means that, instead of pushing the hard sell, you need to playfully introduce them to the value that your services provide in a general sense, or make your services more memorable in the way you present them on Valentine’s Day.

There are a few simple ways of accomplishing this.

Social Media

By nature, social media is one of the more approachable marketing tools, and so it only makes sense to leverage it for Valentine’s Day. There is a little more freedom implied in social media marketing efforts, which means that you can make your social media activity as cheesy or as schmaltzy as is appropriate for your approach.

However, in order to not bury your social media audience with content, it helps to be coquettish and leave them wanting more. Therefore, a total of 4 or 5 posts leading up to Valentine’s Day are enough, with perhaps an additional post drawing attention to your other marketing efforts (which will be discussed soon enough).

See? Coquettish!

Postcards

This is one of the few times of year that people are honestly excited to get mail. After all, they might get a card from their special someone.

As a business, your contacts probably aren’t expecting a Valentine to come from you, which is just another reason to send them. While postcards are generally used in the B2B market to push a service and pique interest, there’s no rule that says they can’t be used as an appreciation piece. Besides, as Valentine’s Day draws near, your recipients will be intrigued by a valentine in their mailbox.

Sending a postcard expressing your appreciation to your contacts and clients (and maybe including a “special offer” or two) is a good way to keep your business and services at the top of their mind once the festivities have run their course and they return to business.

Appreciation Blog Post

Finally, with all of your other marketing materials distributed, it is time for your pièce de résistance: a blog post expressing your heartfelt appreciation for the clients that keep your business afloat, published on February 14th.

This blog post should feature minimal references to your services. Instead, it should focus on your professional relationships, their loyalty to you and your loyalty to them, and how grateful you are for all of them. You may be able to sneak in a request for a testimonial or a referral, but don’t push it too much. The focus of this post should be how much your clientele mean to you, and how much you value these relationships--not making a sale.

How to Make These Pieces More Fun (and More Business-Centric)

Of course, while you aren’t focusing on pushing for a conversion with these materials, it may be fun to allude to your business and use it as a basis for your materials. Try making a playful reference to a well-known aspect of your business.

For instance, if you want to advertise what you can deliver as a managed service provider, you could send them a postcard that reads, “Don’t worry if you get your heart broken this Valentine's Day… we’ve kept a backup.” Not only is it relatable, as hearts are too often broken on Valentine’s Day, it alludes to the services that your company can provide in a fun and approachable way.

Making the Most of These Lessons

Keep in mind, while we’ve presented these ideas with Valentine’s Day in mind, there are plenty of other holidays that also work in this framework. Try experimenting with some of the others as well, and you might just find yourself with an idea that you really love. If so, reach out to us, and we’ll help you make the most of it.

We hope that you have a very happy Valentine’s Day!