Valentine’s Day is today! We’re almost halfway through Black History Month and we are definitely post-Lunar New Year. Next week, we will be celebrating Family Day. With so many holidays and observances in the shortest month of the year, it’s a reminder that holidays are a great opportunity to develop timely and thematic content for your business.
Companies looking to connect with clients and their other stakeholders will often create content around these types of holidays. So, how do companies manage to link all of these very different festivities back to their companies?
The answer is, very carefully! Simply creating content that doesn’t tie back to your company makes the effort feel contrived and fake.
If your company wants to jump on the bandwagon for all of these festivities, it is very important that the content follow your branding messages and links back to your corporate values.
Let me give you an example. For Lunar New Year, we developed a video about business and communications tips that would be helpful for local companies doing business in Asia (see below). This ties back to the fact that PR Consult has vast experience in the Asian market and working internationally with companies around the world. We also felt like it was an opportunity to provide content that was of value to our clients, prospective clients and our partners.
Valentine’s Day is another story. What could PR have to do with Valentine’s Day? Well, it just so happens that we were inspired to write this post to demonstrate how various companies can use holidays to connect with their audiences and their business. Voilà!
There are ways to link the bigger (and not so big) holidays back to your brand, but you have to find creative ways to have it connect with your customers.
Flower and chocolate companies have an obvious connection to Valentine’s Day, but would they have the same connection to another celebration, like Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? They might simply want to note the holiday but not focus any campaigns around it. Trying to create a connection with giant marketing, advertising and media relations campaigns around holidays that don’t make sense for them, just wouldn’t make sense.
While it may be important for companies to respond to trends and what is happening in the world, they need to be careful about how they do it. Our advice: understand the meaning behind various holidays and be careful about jumping onto trends too quickly. Be smart and be strategic when putting your brand out there.
(Happy Valentine’s Day, anyway!)