Social Media Holidays: How to Use Niche Celebrations to Engage Your Audience

It’s an average day—you hop on social media and you see someone post that it’s National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. Who decided that today was National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day and, more importantly, how do people even find out about this stuff?

As a business owner or marketer, you probably see a few of these days pop up that would be great opportunities to take advantage of. A bakery can make a lot of use out of National Chocolate Chip Cookie day, but only if they know it’s coming.

These holidays are prime marketing opportunities for the first two stages of the Customer Value Journey. In the first stage (Aware), a customer avatar becomes aware of your business. This is like somebody walking past your bakery for the first time or finding it in the search results for “bakery near me.” In the second stage (Engage), a customer avatar walks into your bakery or decides to check out your online menu.

By using these holidays to your advantage, you can create marketing campaigns that build brand awareness and engagement. For example, the bakery could put a sign outside that says, “It’s National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day! Buy one, get one free!” or they could run a social media campaign that tells their followers they’re giving away a free cookie to anyone that comes into the bakery today.

Aside from niche celebrations, you can also use experiences that your customers are going through to drive awareness and engagement in the same way you would these holidays.

Here’s an example of how we created a campaign based on National Pet Day and another that related to our audience recently…

Examples of Niche Holidays and Relatable Experience Campaigns

On National Pet Day (April 11th for those who didn’t know this existed), we put together a Facebook video of our pets doing their part to help us with our work. This is a post with the goal of awareness—getting customer avatars not familiar with DigitalMarketer to say, “who are these people making their pets do their jobs for them?!”

Our goal was also to get people to engage with the post by liking it and thinking, “these people are pretty funny…”

We also created a video series called Coping in Quarantine that featured our team members.

In this video we had our team talk about their favorite copywriting books they’re reading during the quarantine. This post linked to our article called DM Reading List—11 Copywriting Book Recommendations from Engage Members, which we hoped our audience who watched the video would click on.

Once they clicked on this post, we’d be able to pixel them and then continue to show them our top-of-funnel ads that helped them get to know us better.

How You Can Create Niche Celebrations or Relate to Your Audience’s Experience

We can promise you—there’s a social media holiday for everything, and you’re bound to find one that relates to your business somehow. And you can definitely (definitely, definitely) find experiences your customers are going through that you can create content around.

The most important part of this entire process is knowing what your end goal is (sorry to go full marketer on you). If you’re running a campaign for a social media holiday or for an experience your customer avatar is having, you have to know if you’re trying to get awareness or engagement so you can build your campaign around it.

Depending on what you’re going for, you want to have a direct call to action for it. For example, our post on 2 Copywriting Book Recommendations was created to get viewers to want to read the other 9 copywriting book suggestions we have.

Here’s our secret location for finding all the obscure holidays you didn’t know existed (trust us, National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day will be the LEAST surprising thing you find on a list like this).

Once you’ve got your goal and your holiday or experience ready, it’s time to put together your campaign. You can do what we did in the above examples and use your employee-generated content, or you can make it fancier with After Effects motion graphics or royalty-free stock videos (we use Storyblocks).

Time to get that creativity flowing…

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