It seems there’s an ‘awareness day’ for pretty much everything these days! Alongside the ones for charities and celebrating major events in history, there’s also the likes of ‘Go to work naked day’, ‘Hug a ginger day’ and days to celebrate everything from chocolate cake to pizza.
Although it’s tempting to jump on every one of them as they trend on social media, there’s some rules to follow and some advice we want to share, so stay fully clothed for now!
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Go niche:but not too niche.
Identify awareness days that relate specifically to your brand. This way there’s a genuine reason to be talking about it. This means your existing audience is likely to be receptive to the day your bringing to their attention.
Although it’s nice to wish everyone a Happy Halloween and a Merry Christmas, millions of other people will be doing the same, so your post might fall on deaf ears.
The trick is to find the awareness day that’s not so common everyone is talking about it, and not so niche that no one is bothered. The holy grail is identifying the popular ones in your industry – the days where you might just catch the attention of a wider audience that’s interested in what you’re offering.
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Have fun and be creative
Get stuck in, don’t just post one tweet hoping everyone has fun playing their kazoos – (yes national kazoo day is a genuine awareness day.) *facepalm*
Develop multi-layered campaigns, invite influencers to join in on your behalf, host events, make your posts relevant across the different social media channels, produce fun graphics and most importantly add value.
There’s loads of ways you can join in and actually, you know, ‘raise awareness’.
For instance, for ‘computer security day’ we helped a client who specialise in I.T. solutions, produce a series of informative graphics featuring tips and quick wins that people could easily do to improve their own online security. These posts joined the debate, utilised the existing hashtag and received great engagement.
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Go back to school for a geography lesson
Don’t waste your time and effort planning for National Gardening Week in June only to realise the UK version was 6 weeks previous.
The USA and many places around the world have different awareness days to ours, make sure to do your research.
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Don’t make it sales-y
These days are there to raise awareness, they’re not an opportunity for you to convince people to buy your products. People often don’t want to be constantly sold to, and, it can be seen as a blatant attempt to ‘jump on the bandwagon’ to peddle products – avoid the temptation to ‘take advantage’.
Keep it fun and informative, leave the selling to another day.
Unless of course it’s ‘national sell me something on social media day’ (we’re not actually sure if that’s a genuine day, although there’s one for everything so it probably is).
So, those are our top tips for awareness days, if you’ve spotted an opportunity to utilise the perfect awareness day but are stuck for ideas, get in touch – we’ll help get you noticed!
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