Valentine’s day and International Women Days’ is upon us. This means you as a brand have a great opportunity to shake your customers up, bring in new ones and increase your sales. Slowly pictures of rival brands are going to fill up the feed of consumers who are very active searching for gift ideas. 

So, how do you grab the attention of your current and potential customers, while trying to get the upper hand over your rivals? So, here are 8 ideas for you all of which will provide great efficiency and also effectiveness mixing with your creativity. 

#1 Giveaways

Engagement and traffic of your followers are lower than expected? 

Then on special days, you can come up with something fast and effective to activate your audience. One of the best ways to interact with followers and build a strong community is to conduct giveaways. On holidays this will have a double effect compared to ordinary days. 

This can be the most common social media campaign as it reaches a tremendous amount of people because it is up to the brand to determine the conditions of the contest. They are determined in a way that it reaches as many people as possible. But you should be careful not to push people away with your tough conditions. When giveaways are done right, they can bring impressive results and even make your brand go viral. 

Here is a very great example of giveaway for Valentines’ day by Treedom with more than one prize and also easy conditions. 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Anna Masiello (@hero_to_0) on Feb 6, 2020 at 12:05pm PST

Key points you need to focus on:

•  focus on visuals as this is the first step to get the attention of consumers and make them believe in the contest
• indicate your prize and brand‘s logo clearly. 
• define multiple prizes over multiple days for making people more engaged and make them believe they have a high probability of winning.

Giveaways can immediately increase awareness of your brand and can bring new followers. 

#2 Designing gift guides and wishlists 

Special days are very active shopping days as people are occupied with buying presents for their beloved ones. Therefore, they are hustling on social media for ideas of gifts. So, here is your chance to reduce their struggles and suggest great shopping guides or wishlists by putting together your best products. You will promote your products and at the same time get their respect by helping them. If they are not your followers, you can make them your new followers. 

Easiness and effectiveness of the wishlists depend on the holiday. Let’s assume that it is Valentine’s day. If your products are already relevant for Valentine’s day, then it will be very easy for you to decorate the wishlist. The visually pleasing and proper wishlist can even make your sales rocket. If your product is not much relevant for Valentine’s day, you can still use the special day as a way of increasing your brand awareness. You can use other ideas indicated below.

Hutspot created 4 gift guides just before the holiday season to make things easier for its customers and shared the news through Instagram post.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Fashion, interior and art (@hutspot) on Dec 6, 2018 at 11:14am PST

#3 Help others by supporting the good cause

One of the best parts of the holidays is giving rather than receiving. During the holiday season, caring for others becomes very vital. You can either partner with a charity or non-profit organization or alone for assisting those people who are not able to buy presents for their beloved ones.

You can either donate your own products or assist financially. Use your social media accounts to spread the message. Be careful not to look like you are bragging about the help you made. Do not forget the message here is really helping the people not promoting. 

#4 Make impressive visuals

If you think that your online community is not active, then sharing user-generated holiday-flavored content on your brand profile would be a great way to activate them. Rewarding their engagement and creativity by sharing the best user-generated content about the holiday to your social profiles will make them encouraged to use your brand’s hashtags. They will appreciate your interest and care in sharing the voices and unique interpretations of them about your brand. 

Starbucks encourages its followers by posting their pictures in which they used seasonal elements and also Starbucks coffee cups. Check this user-created Instagram post of Starbucks on Halloween.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Pumpkin on our mind. #PumpkinSpiceLatte ? Regram: @meleerah

A post shared by Starbucks Coffee ☕ (@starbucks) on Oct 18, 2019 at 8:27am PDT

#5 Share user-generated content (UGC)

It can be such a powerful tool to increase your brand awareness. During the holiday season,  people are so busy reading text on social media. Instead, they are just looking through posts. Also, people want to share the holiday-related post in their profile. Eye-popping images related to the holiday can be very attractive and exciting. They do not have to contain any promotional case. They can simply celebrate the holidays. People even may send this type of post to their relatives or friends to celebrate their holiday. Can you imagine how it would be for your brand awareness? 

Check this very interesting Instagram post of recreation of romantic movie moment of Lady and the Tramp which Frankie & Benny shared on Valentines’ Day. 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Happy Valentine’s Day ? Can you name the films that inspired our 4 romantic movie recreations? ?? Comment below! #FrankiesFilms #ValentinesAtFrankies

A post shared by Frankie & Benny’s (@frankienbennys) on Feb 14, 2019 at 12:46am PST

#6 Create engaging videos

Gladsome and uplifting videos cannot get the attention of people more other than the holiday season. Videos are great in terms of showing the resemblance between your brand identity and the values of people. Pay attention not to get over-sentimental or over-promotional which will make the people repel rather than love the video. Be sincere and use simplicity as a key to the heart of consumers. 

eHarmony created this heart-warming video of kids who are sharing their views on love and Valentine’s day. eHarmony is giving an important message in this video which may encourage its followers to buy their cards and send them someone they like.

#7 Special Holiday deals

And of course, the deals are an essential part of the holidays. Offer discounts, promo codes or prepare special holiday-themed bundles for your customers. Promote those deals on your social media accounts with a visually attractive appearance indicating the promotion more clearly. Use large promotions if possible. Otherwise, you can lose the interest of people and hence, waste your effort designing the post. 

Papa Johns offered this special heart-shaped pizza and brownies with a special deal on Valentine’s’ Day and not only targeted the couples but also singles.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Romeo & Juliet. Tristan & Isolde. Heart-Shaped Pizza & Brownies & You. Celebrate Valentine’s with the perfect couple for $16.

A post shared by Papa John’s (@papajohns) on Feb 11, 2019 at 3:00pm PST

#8 Creative Influencer marketing campaign

Last but not least, a much more effective method than others is turning to influencers on special days to promote your product. People who are searching for gifts often visit their favorite influencers’ profiles to get an idea of the present. 

The easiest way of finding and reaching out to the ideal influencer is by using influencer marketing platforms like Keepface. It’s very handy as it does everything for you. There is a considerable amount of information in the database on each influencer, so you can find the best fitting influencers for your brand. This will have a huge impact on your sales and audience building while helping you to save time and effort for generating more creative ideas. 

Once you found the relevant influencer(s) let them take the lead and create the desired content according to their unique viewpoint and style, give them as much creative freedom as possible to ensure a fun, thoughtful result. Just like in this cute example.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

“‪Better than roses‬” -Doug

A post shared by Doug The Pug (@itsdougthepug) on Feb 14, 2017 at 9:07am PST

After finishing the list, here are some little tips (can be called first steps) in order to make your social media more holiday-flavored along with your campaigns.

• Change your logo temporarily to something holiday-themed by adding festive attributes and make them your profile picture in every social media you have
• Also change your cover image on social media like Facebook, Twitter or others.
• Create new hashtags related to holiday which also contain your brand name and use them in your every post and also make people use them in order to reach to more people

Along with all the ideas and tips above keep on researching more. There are various weird holidays that are unique for every day of the year. People are strongly attracted to different things and they notice the odd immediately. Search for the holidays that are related to your brand. This is a wonderful opportunity to make them yours by using all the ideas and tips above and stand out from rival companies. 

In an era of social media, having knowledge about how to find the right influencers who can help you to introduce your products to your ideal audience is the best way for generating sales. It is very rewarding to put your time in building a bond with high-quality influencers and getting their help in building your community. 

If you can’t keep up with this latest trend in digital marketing, you sure are going to lose some shares in the market against your competitors. Therefore, you should be agile to find the best influencer for your brand before your competitors do. There are multiple tips and tools to find the most relevant influencers. Some of them can be very time consuming and ineffective. So, here are some most useful tips and tools for you which you will need for audience building, increase your social following and getting more shares in the market.

Social media

Be aware that there are already some people who talk about your product or products that are complements or substitutes for your product. Posts or social media mentions about those products can lead you to these people.

Thanks to social media monitoring or listening tools, you can easily find who is a fan of your product or similar products. Mention and Google Alerts can be a great example of these tools, where you can easily track mentions of your brand or product. Once you find those influencers, take your time to get more knowledge about their engagement rate, demographics or reach. If they are suitable in every way, then contact them in the most proper way in order to get their attention.

Hashtags

Hashtags are great because they make the content very obtainable. Almost every social media have hashtags to make the content very achievable for everyone. Also, people, really like to use hashtags in their post which make them even more obtainable. 

You can either search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand or you can search for hashtags like #ad #influencer #sponsored in order to see who is already interested in promoting products. If you are going to search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand, try to be specific, so you can get better results and save your time.

Once you liked someone’s content, do not jump into connecting with them. Review particular metrics that are important to you – check if their audience is ideal for you, assess their engagement level, and see if their other post is also relevant to your brand. When everything is okay, then do not forget to add the influencer to your list in order not to forget about them and keep your bound with them. It is very necessary for turning them into brand advocates.

Advanced search tools

Some social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin have advanced search tools. This is very time-saving as you can dive deeper faster. 

Search for the topic that you are interested in. Once the search results come out, you will have the chance to use filters for people. You will have several filters like location, industry, company, business type and so on. Choose the filter that you need and the search will give you the results that are very close to your need. 

The aim is to reduce the number of results and retain only the most relevant and needed ones. The advanced search tools can give you very specific information and also you can easily contact the influencer through used social media.

Influencer Marketing Platforms

If you want to skip all the steps above, you can use influencer marketing platforms that do everything for you. Keepface Influencer Marketing Platform can be an example of such kind of platforms. It introduces you to its database of influencers with their social media profiles, performance data, audience analysis, and special insights. 

You can get to know the location (country, state, city), demographics (gender, age), score and ranking of each influencer. It also provides you with top-performing posts, estimated impressions, posting frequency and followers growth of the influencer. 

With the Audience analysis tool, you can get valuable information like demographics, languages, ethnicity, interests of audiences. You can also benefit from a special insight that tells you about influencer media value, similar influencers by content and audience, as well as, fake followers. It is a very user-friendly and all-in-one platform. 

You can easily register as a brand, create your own projects, find influencers for these projects from a wide range of influencer database and get the creative help of an in-house project team for briefing the influencers. 

It’s the fastest way of finding the most ideal influencers for your brand 

All the tools above can be very helpful and effective if you use them in the right way. You can try them and choose the most appropriate and effective one for yourself. But do not forget that if you want to add influencer marketing to your strategy then you better learn how to use Influencer Marketing Platforms because they are the most time-saving and cost-effective way. 

Also, bear in mind that these influencers are getting various offers from different companies. Therefore, you should come with the best offer in order to get their attention. Once you find the fitting influencers for your project that would be a huge mistake to lose contact with them when the project ends. The more you build closer relations with them, the more they will be willing to promote your product.