Mother’s Day is one of the most lucrative holidays for retailers, ranking third in consumer spending for a seasonal event. Typically, consumers spend more than $20 billion each year on Mother’s Day gifts – and online shoppers tend to spend significantly more than those who shop in brick-and-mortar stores.
Interestingly, studies also show most wait until the very last minute to buy gifts. This procrastination can benefit online marketers, as millions of perplexed purchasers turn to the internet for advice on what to buy. With this in mind, here are six ways you can use social media marketing to give your Mother’s Day sales a lift.
1. Let Pictures Do the Talking – and Selling
Nothing promotes a warm and fuzzy feeling like family photos, and most people love to share pictures of their mom with friends and family online. This year, invite your Facebook followers to post their favorite pictures of mom on your Facebook page. This will generate plenty of engagement and shares, and you can leverage the boost in traffic by offering special gift promotions for Mother’s Day.
In a similar strategy, you can also invite your social media users to post fun pics of their mom using one of your products. For example, if you sell clothing, ask followers to post photos of mom modeling purchases from your store; if you sell soft drinks, ask for pictures of mom enjoying one of your drinks. You can offer prizes for the best (or funniest) photos. This campaign is sure to generate a huge buzz, as well as plenty of shares, among your social network followers, and can be used with equal success across all your social media sites.
According to Bing Ads and Yahoo, the most popular offers on Mother’s Day include free shipping, discounts and coupons. As people visit your Facebook page to see mom’s photo, you can engage them with attractive, eye-catching promotions that will encourage them to buy.
2. Customize Your PPC Campaigns
If you’re already using a PPC strategy on your social media pages, then you can customize it for Mother’s Day with plenty of relevant keywords. Studies show that people don’t just shop for mom on Mother’s Day; they also use the holiday to buy gifts for wives, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, godmothers and friends. Be sure to utilize these specific keywords in your PPC campaigns during the weeks before Mother’s Day. Likewise, when you create your PPC budget for the month, be sure to save extra money for a bit more expenditure during the week leading up to the holiday, because that’s when the majority of people will be buying their gifts.
3. Run Multi-Site Contests
Social media pages provide an ideal venue for online contests, and the week before Mother’s Day is the perfect time to create a fun daily giveaway for each of your social media channels. For example, on the first day you can offer prizes for the best tweet about mom, and the next day you can award the best Instagram photo. For the following day, you can give prizes to the best post about mom on Facebook or Twitter (be sure to come up with an engaging hashtag for Twitter), and you can continue with a contest on a different site each day until Mother’s Day. Each contest should suit the characteristics of the social media channel it’s on – for example, Snapchat and Facebook are ideal for posting photos and videos, while Twitter is perfect for short, sweet epigrams or jingles about mom. If you’re really creative, each day’s contest can lead up to the next day’s installment – for example, Monday can be “Best Mom Photo” on Snapchat, while Tuesday can combine the two elements in a Facebook contest for “Best Mom Photos with Captions.”
This type of cross-channel marketing will not only generate lots of shares; it will also encourage your followers to sign up for all your social media sites, especially if you make it clear to followers that they’ll have to jump from one channel to another for each daily contest installment.
4. Create a Pinterest DIY Board for Kids
Studies show that Pinterest is the No. 1 social network for Mother’s Day-related searches. If you’re marketing a business that sells crafting materials or decorative items, you can leverage this popularity by creating a special Mother’s Day board on your Pinterest page with DIY gifts for kids to make. Everyone loves to help their kids choose a Mother’s Day gift; and it’s even more fun to encourage them to make something themselves. Your page could include step-by-step instructions for making a kitchen chalkboard menu or lavender bath salts – or anything else that’s fun and easy for kids to put together. This same strategy would also work well on YouTube. If you have the tools and resources, you can make an engaging five- or 10-minute DIY video showing kids how to make gifts that any mom will love.
These DIY photo pages and videos are ideal for driving sales, because you can link them to complementary items on your website. For example, if you sell crafting items such as beads and yarn, or decorative items such as ornamental glassware that can be painted or embellished, you can post a DIY project that utilizes these items, then post a link to your site for the necessary supplies.
5. Feature a Week of Top Five Gift Ideas
During the week leading up to Mother’s Day you can use Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media site to post a daily list of Top Five Gift Ideas for mom. Be creative in your choices, and highlight things that are more likely to be shared – either because they’re trendy or because they’re unique and eye-catching. If you have multiple social media sites, this is the perfect time to engage in multi-site marketing by posting your list across your entire social media network.
6. Showcase a Daily Theme
This is really a fun twist on a traditional daily gift list; but it adds an element of the unexpected. Each day, your social media pages can feature a theme, such as “Things that Mom Does For Me” or “My Mom’s Favorite Perfume” (or flower, or type of clothing). You can invite followers to post a paragraph on each theme, and then include a short gift list that complements each theme, with each gift linked to your site. For example, for “Things that Mom Does For Me” you can post a list of gifts that will make mom’s life easier, such as convenient appliances or comfortable bedroom slippers. For “My Mom’s Favorite Perfume/Flower/Type of Clothing” posts, you can include lists of popular perfumes, floral-themed accessories or clothing. With each day featuring a different theme, you can keep followers engaged and interested enough to participate all week – and best of all, this campaign can be formatted for most social media sites.
Social media marketing lends itself to anything that’s fun and imaginative, because people turn to these sites to be entertained. Anything you can do to make your Mother’s Day campaign more entertaining will add to its success, so don’t hesitate to use your creativity to the hilt. Mom-themed limerick contests, wacky mom photo contests and anything that generates laughs will generate more shares and attract more followers to your site – and with the right marketing strategies, you can turn these followers into loyal customers for your brand.
Also read:
A Roundup of the Best Mother’s Day Ads of All Time
6 E-Commerce Marketing Tactics Proven to Pay Off
Facebook Successes: BestSecret triples Creative Volume for E-Commerce Growth
