National days and awareness days: Should your brand be posting?
It can be hard to know what your brand should and shouldn’t engage with online. Many brands create content for certain National and awareness days, but is this social media best practice or just a brand preference?
With thousands of national and worldwide awareness days, it might be easy to overlook and ignore incorporating these days into your paid social strategy. However, your brand can benefit from engaging with awareness days; it can help you increase reach, and brand awareness and build connections. However, you need to evaluate whether the pros outweigh the cons and which days are of the most value to you and ultimately your audience.
We have outlined the key benefits, and five considerations to help you decide if you want to post on national and awareness days and some top tips to help you create great content.
Why should your brand post on national / awareness days?
We have outlined the 3 main benefits posting on national / awareness days can have on your brand. By getting involved, you can:
Reach a wider audience
National days and awareness days are often associated with a trending hashtag. Including the relevant hashtag in your post(s) effectively increases reach and engagement. They are great opportunities to get in front of people who wouldn’t normally view your content. Users can then explore your brand further from your national and awareness day post. If they find your brand interesting, they could follow your profile, engage with more content and become a potential customer.
Build a connection with your customers
Finding times to communicate and actively build a customer relationship on social media can be tricky; other business responsibilities often get in the way.
You can use these national and awareness days to connect with your customers and showcase your brand values. National days can also act as a conversation starter between brands and customers, which can help you build connections with your customers. If customers resonate with your brand and what you stand for, they are more likely to engage and remain loyal to your business.
Remain relevant
Brand reputation is important in ensuring you attract new customers and retain previous customers. You want your audience to have the best possible impression of your brand from your content.
When you engage with national and awareness days, you are showing your audience that your brand is relevant, active and aware of the societal climate. Posting on these days shows you care not only about your brand but also about the wider picture.
Despite the benefits, you may be wondering if posting on national / awareness days is right for your business; we have broken down 5 key considerations to help you come to a decision.
What things do you need to consider before posting on national and awareness days?
1. You need to understand your audience
If your audience is passionate about or interested in something, you should consider if you can provide content that relates to that. As mentioned above, you can build connections with your audience when posting on national days, so if you fully understand your audience, you can identify key national / awareness days where you could create content. Some audience members might even expect your brand to engage with certain national / awareness days, depending on your brand values and message.
The better you know your audience, the more relevant your content will be for them and you can decide which (if any) national and awareness days will be of interest and importance to them.
2. Does it feel right for your brand?
There is no benefit to posting on national and awareness days just because you think you should. You need to decide which of these days aligns with your brand goals, strategy, values and personality. Ultimately, you need to ask yourself ‘Does it make sense for our brand to be posting about this?’, ‘Will this improve our brand reputation?’ and ‘Is this national day aligned with our values?’. If your audience feels you are posting for the sake of it, you can lose brand trust and credibility. Therefore, it is important to be selective about what national and awareness days you are going to engage with.
3. Can your brand add value by positing on these days?
If you find national and awareness days that are relevant to your brand, you need to consider how you are going to share content that has a purpose and adds value. Deciding whether your content is going to inspire, educate, inform or entertain is essential. Like any other content you create, national and awareness day content needs to have a purpose. Without a clear content strategy, posting on these days may drive insignificant results and therefore can be a waste of resources.
4. Can you make your content stand out?
Content created for national / awareness days can look very similar. For users, it can become hard to identify brands within the sea of content. That is why you must create distinctive, unique content. A good way to test this is to view your content without a logo or handle and see if it is still clear that the content is yours. The better you stand out, the more attention you will attract and the higher your engagement rates will be.
5. Do you have the time?
Your final consideration should be whether the pros of posting on national and awareness days outweigh the cons. If engaging on these days will use \ time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere, it might not be the best idea.
If you have never posted on national and awareness days before, it might be worth giving it a go (taking into account the considerations outlined above) and seeing what results you get. You can learn from mistakes and build on your wins.
You should also consider if the timing is right. For example, if you are in the middle of a large promotional campaign, posting ‘randomly’ about a national awareness day might not be beneficial and could negatively impact your ongoing campaign. Make sure you pick a time in your social media calendar that doesn’t interrupt your other content efforts.
Three top tips for creating National / Awareness Day content
Prepare
You should incorporate these posts into your content strategy. Giving yourself and your team enough time to plan, create, edit and post amazing content is important. You don’t want your content to feel rushed, as this gives the impression your brand doesn’t care about the message. Take some time to research the content from previous years by competitors and understand the theme for the current year!
Get your team involved
Encourage your team to share, repost or even become content creators themselves for national and awareness days. This showcases your brand and the team behind it as authentic and genuine. If your audience gets the impression that you are posting as a marketing tactic, it can put them off. Having team involvement combats that as it presents the brand as a community and shows the team truly care about the topic.
Make sure the national and awareness days are relevant
Sometimes national days peak in popularity one year and the next they don’t get the same traction. Before you invest time and resources into content for a national day, be sure to research whether the national day is still popular and being engaged with.
