Eleven Must Read Tips for Effective Mother’s Day Advertising

We have a newer Mother’s Day marketing post– check out all the latest tips here!

While most of us know that Mother’s Day is coming up on May 13^th, many advertisers don’t seem to take full advantage of this big day. Mother’s Day has become the second largest shopping holiday, with many people not only shopping for gifts for mothers but also wives (19.6%), daughters (9.6%), grandmothers (8.0%), sisters (8.4%), friends (7.3%), and godmothers (1.8%) as Allbusiness.com states. But advertisers not only forget to take these target audiences into consideration in their advertising strategy, but also don’t speak to the emotions that are surrounded by this holiday. Instead, they take ads that would usually be used to promote other holidays and replace the words “Christmas” and “Halloween” with “Mother’s Day”.  Moreover, they use phrases like: “Don’t forget it’s Mother’s Day” or “Mother’s Day Specials”. While most of us have a strong bond with our mom, we also want to give her a gift that emotionally connects us with her and that shows her how much we really love her. Therefore, the advertising strategy needs to tap into the emotions of the customers and promote the product as the emotional bond between the customer and the recipient.

So what should you consider including for an effective advertising strategy for Mother’s Day?

Gift Suggestions: Create a Mother’s Day category on your website with gift suggestions to help buyers decide on how to show their love. These suggestions should include the bestselling products for women, Mother’s Day specials etc.

Upselling, Cross-selling & Bundles: It can be hard to sell additional products or services to your customers when they are only looking for one certain product/service on your website. Therefore, you should use emotional holidays like Mother’s Day to promote higher priced items and combine products/services to one special offer. You never know, those ideas may become customer favorites and a bestseller, not only on holidays.

Timing: While most retailers don’t get their Mother’s Day promotions up and running until two weeks before the big day, you can use this time to get the attention of buyers, using gift suggestions, incentives, contests and giveaways.

Contests and giveaways: In these times of social media, it is relatively easy to promote contests for free products or service giveaways via Facebook, Google+, Twitter as well as on your website. Ask people to write a short story about their mothers, wives, sisters, grandmothers, etc. and explain why they deserve to be appreciated on that day above everybody else. With potential buyers sharing contests and giveaways with their social network, your company will get some welcomed and (virtually) free exposure.

E-mail: Focus your email marketing/newsletter on Mother’s Day – include ideas of how the reader can make their Mom feel special and how your products or services can be of help in doing this. If you know your email recipients’ demographics, you can also send out specifically targeted offers such as: “How [Your Company Name] can help make your Mom feel special!” And don’t forget to highlight other fun and interesting things to do on Mother’s Day so your readers can surprise their Moms.

Partner with other businesses or applications: Include a link or application on your website, social media, and newsletter to help your customers create an ecard or let them write a short story that they can send to their special someone on Mother’s Day. Think about partnering with daily deal companies, like Groupon, LivingSocial, etc. to offer discounts on your product offerings.

If you have a local store, partner with other local businesses to create a special deal that attracts customers to shop your store and create advertisements in the local newspaper that highlight “How to Celebrate Mom”.

Get customer’s opinions: Conduct an online survey or use your social media channels to get ideas on what customers would like as Mother’s Day gifts. Combine it with a giveaway or contest and you will get an additional opportunity to collect customer information you could use for your newsletter list.

Common Theme:  Implement a common Mother’s Day theme in all your online channels as well as your offline Marketing efforts. Make sure that people know that you are offering a Mother’s Day special or specific gift ideas for Mother’s Day on your website. Don’t make them have to click through your whole website to find the information they want.

Pay attention to the audience: As mentioned above, customers are not only looking for gifts for their mom but also their wives, sisters, grandmothers etc. Be sure to have specific ad copy written to all these audiences and don’t just take the easy way out with replacing other holiday ad copy with “Mother’s Day”. Also don’t forget about the Mom’s themselves. While they might hope that they get the gift they deserve, they will also search for ideas on how to best treat themselves. So create advertisements specifically targeted to the Mom’s in the audience and use their special interest sites to do so, ie Pinterest, Blogs etc.

Last minute buyers:  Depending on which stage of the buying cycle the customer is in, advertising should be coordinated to these stages. A last minute buyer is certainly looking for a gift idea, he/she can purchase right away. Special deals and offers will help to make the decision for him/her in your favor. Also be aware where buyers are looking for ideas. As last minute customers don’t have much time to research ideas, think about advertising on daily deal websites.

Display efforts:  Use the Display Network to get the attention of your buyers with emotionally designed image ads. Advertisers should also use the opportunities of a Remarketing campaign. Not only can they follow their visitors around the net to keep a permanent presence with them. But they can focus on special promotions to catch the eye of the customer on other websites.

While Mother’s Day is a great opportunity to say thank you to your mom’s, advertising efforts should be aimed at establishing a continuous relationship with these customers year-round. Let the emotions speak to separate your efforts from the usual Mother’s Day advertising crowd.

What are your experiences? What advertising efforts were most successful for you? Let us know in the comment section below.