With Valentine's Day just behind us, most brands already made a creative effort to launch a holiday-inspired social media campaign to boost brand awareness and consumer engagement. It clearly doesn't take a massive amount of your advertising budget to come up with a highly relatable branded social Valentine's Day campaign. It's about that all-important simple emotional connection or little splurge of creativity to help raise your customers' heart rate.
Simple campaigns clearly aren't going to cut it, so brands need to stand out and make their content count big time. For example, by researching relevant hashtags, a brand is able to join the conversation easily. Don't push your stuff too hard! Be a social expert and think beyond warm, cupid-like sentiment by introducing a differentiated approach.
What approach should you take on a seasonal campaign like Valentine's Day? Here are a few quick tips from this year's brand efforts.
- Mobile and Social Make for a Cute Couple
A lot of brands intertwine social and mobile to the fullest. For example, Pizza Hut's #CommitToGreatness campaign encourages consumers to create an Instagram video or Vine to "propose" to the highly popular food chain.
According to Pizza Hut, "Valentine's Day is one of our busiest days of the year". Pizza Hut loves to celebrate it with their customers and consequently thought of the "proposal" to help elevate the brand's message. Originally, the development only happened on their own social pages, however, a fun partnership with OKCupid formalized their relationship status.
- Shoot All Your Arrows to Elevate Top-Notch Customer Experience
Valentine's Day is obviously one of the biggest card-sending holidays. American Greetings tapped into the craze with new mobile experiences. There's now a new feature to their popular mobile card app, JustWink, that allows consumers to also add a gift card to their mobile cards from more than 30 retailers.
American Greetings elaborately integrated the mobile phone usage to their greeting cards service by acknowledging the power of receiving a hyper-personalized message. This way the brand continuously makes an emotional connection with their customers.
- Spread the Love with Seamless Brand Storytelling
Specialty clothing brand, Free People, created a special Valentine's Day Short film called "Spark" starring fashion icons Poppy Delevingne and Nicole Trunfio. The video, in partnership with Cameo.tv, highlights the moment when a couple a first meets, and sparks fly. Cameo is a new video sharing app that brings professional grade video effects and all-level users.
The brand asks consumers to respond with their own light-hearted love story video via Cameo by using the hashtags #freepeople, #spark, and #lovestory. Free People not only combines the power of user-generated content, but implements a brilliant way of brand storytelling. Customers automatically engage and interact with the content making it much easier for them to participate in the brand's story.
This article originally appeared on the Engagor blog