Just a few days after the Valentine’s day and the excitement about the day is long gone. Other than some selected businesses like jewelry shops, flower delivery services and chocolate makers few other businesses benefit from this or try to benefit from this event. But any business with some imaginative thinking can benefit from this day or any other special event. Lets explore few things you can do when the next special event comes along.

Highlight Your Capabilities

Although it’s important to take advantage of these events you shouldn’t do things for the sake of it. Any promotion should be done to highlight your business and it’s capabilities. Relevance is also very important when taking advantage of special events. Below is an email I got from a company that owns a diagram software.

Poor Valentine Day promotion
A Valentine promotion for the sake of doing it

Although they have included a diagram it isn’t valuable to their users. It’s not the sort of thing you would want to see in Valentines day and some might find it offensive as well. While they were doing this one of their competitors, another diagram software provider created Valentine day cards using their software and shared them with their users. Now that is something people will find useful on Valentine’s day and it highlighted the fact you can create Valentine cards using their software. Your capabilities will only be highlighted if it’s relevant.

Nothing to Highlight ? Stay Relevant

Not all businesses can highlight their capabilities while staying true to a specific theme. If that is the case with you then staying relevant is the next best thing you can do. For example if you’re selling cameras you can create a photography contest. Cute couple contests are very popular, especially during the Valentine period.

If you’re a chat software, greeting card company etc. you can publish a list of Valentine day quotes. Millions of people are looking for them during the Valentine period. Some companies take this even further by providing localized Valentine day quotes for their global audiences. Not suited for everybody but worth a try for companies serving a global audience.

The number of possibilities are almost limitless.

Timing is Everything

Timing is very important if you’re targeting special events. In most cases it is a good idea to start the promotion well before the actual event. Let’s take the previous Valentine day card example. If they published those cards the day before the Valentine day then people hardly get a chance to see the before the actual date. Also they might have already bought a card for the special day. And without time on your side chances of any promotion going viral is considerably reduced.

In more general terms your marketing team will have little to no time to come up with a promotional campaign. If you have invested significant amount to time preparing the content for the campaign then you wont be able to reap the maximum benefit from it. Considering all this it’s always a good idea to start promoting at least a week before the actual event.

Are you taking advantage of these special events ? What are the methods you use to get the best out of these situations. Share your ideas with others using the comment section.