Valentine's Day is less than a couple days away and customers have already started searching online for gift ideas, as seen on the graph below:
Canada:

US:

It is now time for Marketers to roll out their marketing initiatives and capitalize on Valentine's Day’s popularity. If you haven't yet identified the right marketing activities for your business, then we have some recommendations.

The article is divided into 2 sections:
-    the first one focusing on the advertising activities that will allow brands to raise awareness about their marketing initiatives, campaigns and content created for Valentine’s day, and is accessible here
-    the second one focusing on activities such as content creation, social media marketing and web analytics

1. Focus your content creation on the most popular keywords

   Whether you plan on writing articles or creating landing pages, you should focus on the most popular keywords in order to benefit from an optimal organic reach. The charts below give you the most popular search engine queries and a representation of the regional interest. We strongly encourage to dive deeper into this analysis and identify the most popular keywords in your target area.

   Canada:

   US:
   We should also mention that Google's latest algorithm update Hummingbird impacted the search engine results pages (SERPs) by focusing on long-tail or conversational keywords. In other words, Google wants to provide content relevant to sentences and answer questions. In Valentine's Day’s scenario, the query "what is the best gift for valentine's day" might end up being quite popular and could bring lots of traffic.

    

2. Focus on the most effective social media to drive organic traffic

   Facebook and YouTube have been the top social referrer for the last holiday season, with Facebook accounting for over half of all social traffic directed towards retailer websites, according to Experian and Marketing Land. The table below provides an overview of the social referral shares by social media:
    

   
   We can notice that all social channels referrals are increasing, with the exception of Yahoo! Answers. We however recommend focusing your efforts on Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Twitter in order to maximize your ROI.

    

3. Grow newsletter list

   With Valentine’s Day being just a couple of days away, you won’t be able to effectively generate sales through email marketing if you haven’t started your campaigns yet, but that doesn’t mean that you should completely ignore email marketing. Valentine’s Day is actually a good opportunity to grow your newsletter / emailing list by providing an incentive to the newsletter subscription, such as a free delivery or a small discount.

   We recommend tagging every email addresses gathered during this Valentine’s Day special offer as they represent qualified customers who have already made a purchase for this special occasion.  You can then reach out to these customers all year long as any other customers, but the value will be even greater for Valentine’s Day 2015. Because these customers have expressed a need for a Valentine’s Day related products in the past and have already purchased online, they are a lot more likely to repurchase through your website.

4. Leverage popular products

   Statista has created a chart summarizing the findings of the study conducted by the National Retail Federation to identify the most popular Valentine’s Day gifts in the U.S.:

    

   
   
   If you don’t actually sell any of the most popular gifts, you can still leverage their popularity by offering them as a price for a contest or a reward for a specific action. You don’t even need to physically purchase these items as long as you offer gift cards allowing your customers to get these items. Some retailers are open to partnership on such initiatives as it provides brand exposure and ensures that the customers will shop at their retail store, so you could probably get a deal on the price of these gift cards.

    

5. Setup a referral program

   Your customers might be pleased by the products or services you offer, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to recommend them. In fact, a study conducted by Advisor Impact reveals that out of 83% of satisfied customers expressing their intent to recommend the products or services to others, only 29% actually do. In other words, your customers need to be incentivized to promote your products or services.

   A good way of creating value in promoting your products for your customers is to introduce a referral program. An important factor of success for referrals is the attractiveness of the offer for the referrer and the referee, who both need to benefit from it. To do so, you could offer a gift card or a discount on the next purchase for the referrer, as well as an immediate discount for the referee. And because gift cards and discounts often have a limited validity, it usually generates quick repeat sales.

This concludes the second article of our Valentine’s Day series; feel free to refer back to the first article which covered the advertising activities.  If you would like to hear more about any of the mentioned recommendation, get in touch with us through Twitter or our contact page.