Let’s face it. February is going to be a very fulfilling month.

With Chinese New Year happening right on the first day of the shortest month of the year, and following very closely from then, Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. But perhaps we could look at it from a marketer’s perspective – more fun opportunities to optimise our marketing efforts to stand out from the crowd!

Oftentimes, cultural festive campaigns seem to be too obvious to miss, but perhaps this year, you can take a step back and focus your brand’s marketing effort on Valentine’s Day – and surround your campaign with fun and emotional-driven thematics that can create a stronger and memorable brand campaign. The best thing about Valentine’s Day campaigns is that you can take this opportunity to champion purpose-driven brand messaging surrounding topics like self-love, gratitude, a celebration of love and all things sugar and spice. Here are some ideas your brand can explore in conjunction with Valentine’s Day – from simple activations to grand and impactful ideas that can create a memorable experience for your audience.

1. Surprise Giveaways

As a way to show your appreciation towards your community, Valentine’s Day could be a great time to spring a surprise giveaway for your audience.

A few things to note to ensure your giveaway runs successfully:

• Simple and easy to follow mechanics (complicated mechanics will create more hesitation among your audience to participate)
• Choose your bestsellers or exclusive gift kits as your giveaway prizes (it’s important to make the prizes worth your audience’s effort to encourage them to participate)
• Incorporate influencers to shout out about your giveaway (Especially if you are a newer brand, having influencers to get the ball rolling on your giveaway can help you gain better traction).

Remember, everyone loves free stuff, but what matters most is how you can optimise the giveaway to create a strong brand awareness that sticks – and not something that gets drowned among other giveaways happening at the same time.

2. Curated Valentines Day Gift Kits

In the season of love, many people are looking to show their love in the form of gifts to their loved ones.

With the current trend of gifting moving towards a more thoughtful and personalized approach, take this opportunity to create exclusive Valentine’s Day themed gift kits that highlight your products perfectly.

The best thing about this season is that consumers are actively looking for gifts to purchase for their loved ones. You could be conveniently there at the right time to provide them with a solution.

Some pointers to note while creating your own gift kit:

• Aesthetically pleasing gifts are the way to go (after all, it has become quite a norm for people to show off their gifts on their social media platform; so it’s crucial to have your gift kits looking Instragrammable).
• Take the opportunity to send it as gifts to influencers as part of a PR approach (who knows, they might like it enough to share it on their platform)
• Always do your research to figure out what your competitors are doing, and position your gift kits to create more value for your target audience.

With these pointers in mind, it’s time to start working on your very own set of Valentine’s Day gift kits.

3. Strategic Brand Partnerships

This could be the start of something new, as Troy and Gabriella would say.

Instead of just showing love to your consumers, kickstart a strategic love affair with another brand this Valentine’s Day!

By having strategic cross-collaboration with brands that share similar values or perhaps explore a brand new angle to your products and services, you are able to strengthen your product positioning, create an element of novelty towards your audience; all while tapping into the audience of your brand partner. We say it’s a win-win-win solution. If you don’t know where to start, we are more than happy to help you find the right match. You can drop us a line at [email protected] and we will reach out to you.

4. Authentic User-Generated Content (UGC)

Sometimes the best stories are real-life stories.

Without having to invest too much into high production quality, perhaps take this Valentine’s Day to zoom into the stories of love within your community.

Go against the grain of curated storylines and create a space to encourage User-Generated Content to bring a human touch to your campaign. These authentic stories will spark emotions and tug the heartstrings of your audience – and improve brand recall.

Here are some pointers to ensure the content is sharable and still aligned to your brand:

• Create visual guides and content briefs that your audience can easily follow
• Incentivise their efforts – feature their stories, provide prizes etc
• Get influencers on board to set examples for other submissions

It’s important to closely monitor these content submissions to ensure that it all aligns with your brand messaging so we can safeguard your brand.

5. Experiential Event Activations

To top of the list, the best way you can create an impactful campaign is to have an experiential event activation that can bring to life your brand and product value in a tangible manner.

With onground events bouncing back from a long hiatus in this endemic state, this is a good time to optimise an on-ground event activation to impact your audience.

Explore utilizing influencers to be your mouthpiece to share about your brand through an exclusive event that highlights your products in a relatable and thematic manner.

Not only are you able to stand out among other brands during this Valentine’s Day, but you could also nurture a community of brand ambassadors that will believe in your brand and products via an impactful event activation.

With that, we wish you the best of luck with your Valentine’s Day campaigns! The most important reminder of it all – have fun exploring these ideas. Don’t be afraid to experiment with what would work best for your brand.

Happy Valentine’s Day in advance!