How to Connect Your Marketing to Special Dates

by Karen Whiting @KarenHWhiting

Every day is a special day, but the ones that relate to your book or ones that can add pizzazz to your posts and memes provide more marketing possibilities. Calendars available online include today in history, holiday calendars, 100+ social media holidays, inventions today in history, science history on this day, this day in literary history, religious history on this day, and more. That’s a lot to connect with in your marketing, so consider all the ways to use the information to promote your book. 

Creative Approaches to Special Days

Create approaches and consider ways to connect the special day images or concepts to a new way to look at your material. That helps create a hook. Be sure to make use of words, images, design, and tie-ins such as fundraising ties, to create a more complete promotion.

Consider, for example, something as simple as national sandwich day. You can share sandwich information with readers where you give them a slice of facts, fill it with tips and top it off with another slice of facts. With a Bible study the slices might be facts about the author and information on how the book impacted readers and the filling can be a bulleted list of important spiritual principles in the book. If your book connects to health share favorite sandwich recipes and ask readers to share recipes; or share alternatives to carb in sandwiches.

Searching for the Best Dates

Another approach is to find special days or months related to your topic. If it is forgiveness for SEO use peace plus day, week, and month. Searching brings up July 7th as the day and the third week of May as the week for forgiveness. Expand searches with the word peace or reconcile to find more days. Searching for peace this day in history will bring up historic dates of peace treaty signings or the 1914 Christmas Eve truce in the middle of WW1. Those dates can inspire posts about reconciliation.

For week or month observances, first create blog posts to share the importance of the day. Then post a tip or information related to the topic every day and link to the post on a few of the days. Create a call to action to go with the special day and ask what each follower will do and request a follow up post to share how it went. 

Connecting to Media for Special Days

Broadcast hosts like to be relevant and enjoy connecting to special topics too. For a special day, like Family Day in September if you write for families, pitch to a radio station to speak about the topic with ideas to celebrate or strengthen family bonds. For writers of books on organizing, provide tips and stats about clean up your desk day in January that includes how much time is wasted looking for an important paper. Or pitch on a monthly topic like breast cancer awareness month, suggest a few topics for a series.

Gifts to Readers

Special days can offer readers a time to remember, celebrate, or bond with loved ones. A special day to commemorate grief or heroes can be a day to prompt readers to write about a lost loved one and how the person was a hero to them.

Friendship day can be a day to inspire followers to boast about a special friend or do something special for the friend as well as a day to provide ideas of how to honor friends. If you write about relationships, create friendship cards for followers to print with quotes from your book.

When we share how to express gratitude or share memories it’s a gift for readers to express their feelings or act on them to sprinkles joy into someone’s life. It gives them permission to recall a loved one or an action that impacted their lives.

Social Media Holiday Decorating

If a day is relevant to your book or brand, create a few memes with images that celebrate the day. For Christmas and Easter that are relevant to the Christian faith, add symbols connected to the day to a popular meme with notes that share the relevance to the book.

For social media days, you’ll find the most used hashtags for the days to connect with others posting about the date. For national meme (November 15) or social media day (June 30), post your most popular meme or post of the year. Add a trophy image to say it’s the winner!

In social media, any relevant day might also be a day to give your readers a sale or special freemium to celebrate with hashtags #specialday #sale.

Planning your special dates calendar

On a spread sheet or digital calendar, note any special dates on the at the beginning of each month. Or create a word file with the dates and ideas of how to use them in marketing. Choose what offer or gift you will use with the date.

Keep notes of what worked well to apply the concept for other dates. Check out what authors with similar books do on special dates for more ideas and add that to your file for next year.

A little research and ingenuity around dates will provide many ideas for marketing. Have fun as you commemorate the days.

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Karen Whiting (WWW.KARENWHITING.COM) is an international speaker, former television host of Puppets on Parade, certified writing and marketing coach, and award-winning author of twenty-seven books for women, children, and families. Her newest book, The Gift of Bread: Recipes for the Heart and the Table reflects her passion for bread and growing up helping at her grandparent’s restaurant. Check out her newest book Growing a Mother’s Heart: Devotions of Faith, Hope, and Love from Mothers Past, Present, and Future. It's full of heartwarming and teary eyed stories of moms.

Karen has a heart to grow tomorrow’s wholesome families today. She has written more than eight hundred articles for more than sixty publications and loves to let creativity splash over the pages of what she writes. She writes for Crosswalk. Connect with Karen on Twitter @KarenHWhiting Pinterest KarenWhiting FB KarenHWhiting