How To Use National Awareness Days to Generate PR for your business

Food, Drink and Lifestyle businesses can use national days of celebration or special days as an excellent tool to boost sales.

If you’re looking for inspiration see how many opportunities there are on our Media Planner.

Here are PR Toolkit’s Top Tips for food, drink and lifestyle brands:

1. Produce a special limited edition product or range in honour of a special day. This product could be a genuine one-off only available for Christmas or summer or whatever suits your production capabilities.  Ideally you would do this at your quietest time of year to perk up your turnover and ease cashflow. Customers who are already loyal to your brand are likely to take it up and you might even find that you attract customers outside your usual target market, giving you a chance to convert newbies or trialists to brand loyalists.
2. If producing a new product is not possible for your small business then consider repackaging. Choose one of your current product lines and repackage it in line with one of the Special Days; for example your men’s shower gel range could become ‘Champion Dad Shower Gel’ or ‘Mother’s Perfect Pamper Gift’ for Mother’s Day. This is a great way to encourage customers looking for gift ideas.
3. If you can’t afford time or finances to repackage, why not print a simple sticker to add to the outside of your packaging which states; ‘Perfect Gift For Mother’s Day’. You can be as random as you like. Just because your business doesn’t make chocolate-based products there’s no reason that you can’t make suggestions to potential customers such as: ‘Easter treat for non-chocolate lovers’, it will appeal to someone.
4. Perhaps you sell a service rather than a product range; you can still use special days to your advantage. Special Days provide a fantastic way of offering a limited period deal i.e. 20% off until Easter.
5. Get the word out there, use Social Media to your advantage whilst your special offer or product is available, remind your customers daily; tweet it, retweet it, Instagram it, Google+ it, talk about it on LinkedIN and share it with your Facebook fans.

From a PR point of view there are lots of publications which will plan a special day feature such as ‘Ideas for Mother’s Day’, ‘Gifts for Father’s Day’, ‘Picnic Ideas in Summer’ etc. If you have produced a special range for an occasion you can put your product forward to be considered for inclusion. Publicity in the media can make a huge difference to the sales of a small business.