Mother’s Day may not generate the massive influx in revenue that Christmas does, but in a lot of ways, this spring holiday is just as important to Americans. That’s why you need to come up with stellar Mother’s Day marketing ideas to boost your sales.
It's important to keep in mind that your campaigns should not be just about driving sales. Offering an opportunity to your customers to pay homage to the special moms in their lives can go a long way in solidifying their brand loyalty.
This Mother’s Day, we hope to inspire your marketing strategy for the occasion with tasteful, thoughtful, and sentimental ideas. Each of the ideas mentioned in this post offers unique benefits and is versatile enough to promote any business or product.
So, let’s find out how you can leverage these holiday marketing ideas to attract shoppers.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
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Mother’s Day Marketing Ideas You Should Leverage in 2023
Here are the most useful Mother’s Day marketing campaign ideas that every entrepreneur should consider implementing for their business to attract more shoppers.
1. Run a Photo Contest
One of the best ideas you can implement to make your Mother’s Day marketing campaigns impactful is to run a photo contest.
You can ask potential customers to post a photo of a special memory with their mother, of a family recipe their mom used to make, or of something that represents why their mother is the best.
What makes this one of the best marketing ideas for Mother’s Day is that your customers can relive their best moments with their moms.
For example, the contest here not only asked for photo submission but also provided users a chance to write about what the photo represents and why it is special for their mom. The idea is to build an emotional connection with your audience.
Image via ShortStack
As mentioned above, Mother’s Day marketing ideas like this are not just about driving sales. Instead, each photo that’s uploaded is a valuable Mother’s Day gift too. Photo contests also allow you to collect valuable marketing data such as the name and email address of each participant.
And that’s not all.
You can do a few more things to boost brand awareness on the occasion of Mother’s Day. For instance, you can offer extra winning chances or a discount on your products to those who attract referral entries to the contest.
Good contest software solutions should give you the tools to do this. You could also enable voting to draw more eyeballs to your contest’s page and introduce your brand to new shoppers.
2. Run an Instagram Giveaway
Despite their simplicity, running an Instagram giveaway on Mother’s Day offers loads of benefits. For starters, they’re quick and easy to set up.
Also, they’re incredibly versatile and can be tailored to fit your business goals. And that’s why they’re one of the best Mother’s Day marketing ideas for brands. For example, if you’re looking to increase your followers, you can ask participants to follow your profile.
On the other hand, if you’re hoping to expand your reach, you can ask participants to tag a friend. If you’re just looking to foster a little interaction with your audience, you can ask them to add a comment to share a funny moment or express their feelings.
Let’s take a look at how Laderach used this marketing idea. They asked users to follow their brand if they want to participate in the giveaway and win Mother’s Day gifts. Such ideas can help you get new followers and increase your reach.
Image via Instagram
3. Use a Link in Your Instagram Bio
An even better way to create a Mother’s Day Instagram giveaway campaign is to provide a link to your landing page in the bio.
By linking to a landing page, you can use the giveaway to collect data (email addresses, birthdates, etc.) of your customers and potential shoppers. It can also help you drive traffic to your website. That’s the reason why running a giveaway for Mother’s Day campaign is one of the best lead generation hacks.
Additionally, creating a landing page will allow you to display terms and conditions, encourage sharing, and trigger an autoresponder sequence as a follow-up to each giveaway entry.
On your website, you can give your shoppers the link to download a free Mother’s Day gift guide. You can also display relevant products that can be great gifts for their mothers and offer free shipping and gift wrapping services.
Here’s an example where a gifting brand, Forgot or Knot, used this marketing idea. They included a link to their Mother’s Day landing page in their Instagram bio.
Image via Instagram
4. Offer a Free Mother’s Day Gift
Free gifts are great ideas for driving loads of traffic to your ecommerce business website or brick-and-mortar store.
By offering gift samples, greeting cards, or relevant products or services as gifts, you’ll be able to grab the attention of your regular shoppers and attract new potential customers.
Joe’s Italian Ice is a long-standing Orange County icon that has created a special Mother’s Day marketing tradition. Families from nearby and faraway places drive to Joe’s to have their mothers get free Mother’s Day gifts.
And since the mothers wouldn’t share their Italian Ice (the gift), everyone else in the family will end up spending money to buy their own stuff. This marketing campaign helps make Mother’s Day a lucrative business day for Joe despite all of the free gifts they give away.
Image via Facebook
5. Distribute Redeemable Codes
If you’d like to take a page out of Joe’s book and give away a free gift but would like to control the number of freebies you give away, you should use a discount code distribution method.
Code distribution offers other benefits as well. For starters, using codes allows you to track data such as how many codes were distributed vs. how many were redeemed. This type of data can tell you how spicy your Mother's Day gift offer was.
With a limited number of codes, you can also increase the sense of urgency for those looking to get their hands on whatever you’re giving away.
For example, if your offer said something along the lines of, “The first 100 mothers to enter will receive a code that can be redeemed for a free ____,” you’ll be driving a flock of excited mothers to your business.
You can collect the email addresses of the participants and send gift cards to them with unique, redeemable codes. The idea is to collect user data for future marketing campaigns as well.
6. Run a Facebook Giveaway
Much like running a giveaway on Instagram, you can use Facebook, the biggest social media platform, to run a giveaway campaign as well. What makes these social media marketing tactics even more interesting is the fact that you can directly include website links in your posts.
Chicken Salad Chick hosted a Facebook giveaway and used a video in their post to draw attention. The video featured the restaurant’s founder and owner, Stacy Brown, and her mom, “Nutty Nana.” She shared a few ways in which her mom has encouraged her over the years.
Participants were asked to enter the giveaway by commenting on the post with words of encouragement their moms have shared with them.
Image via Facebook
7. Run a Hashtag-Based Giveaway Contest
Running a hashtag-based giveaway contest will allow you to encourage people to create Instagram posts or Tweets as entries using your unique hashtag. You can round up the entries and display them as a gallery. You can also enable voting on the entries to drive more engagement.
For instance, the baby products brand, Chicco, ran a hashtag contest, asking participants to post a photo of their babies using any Chicco product with the hashtag, “#ChiccoMomsDayContest.”
Image via Instagram
Chicco offered a gift voucher to make mothers end up spending more on buying their baby products.
The main benefits of running this hashtag contest were two-fold – Chicco generated great engagement from brand loyalists and increased the brand’s exposure on Instagram. But even better, they were able to generate a lot of user-generated content (UGC).
UGC can be used for future marketing efforts and can go a long way in helping businesses boost sales and get social media followers. When people see other customers use your products or services, it can help you gain the trust of new consumers.
8. Run an Omnichannel Giveaway
As mentioned above, running Instagram and Facebook contests is one of the best Mother’s Day marketing ideas.
But what if you could run a contest across multiple platforms?
To take your Mother’s Day promotion to the next level, you should consider leveraging omnichannel marketing. You can run your Mother’s Day promotion on multiple channels, including your website and the right social media platforms for your brand.
The cosmetics brand, Benefit Cosmetics, figured out a way to tap into their audiences on both platforms while running a giveaway. To explain the rules of their Mother’s Day gift giveaway campaign, they created a landing page that funneled visitors into one place and allowed participants to choose how they would like to enter the contest.
Image via Benefit Cosmetics
9. Run a Story Contest
Marketing ideas that include giveaways, prizes, and discounts can go a long way in garnering your audience’s attention. However, offering a way to allow your audience to tell a meaningful story or share a fond memory with their mother is one of the best ideas for Mother's Day.
You don’t even have to launch a contest and give away a free product or gift. The idea is to encourage users to create content, collect their entries, and display them in a gallery as a digital homage to moms.
If you’d like to choose a winner, you can select a panel of judges or choose a winner randomly and give them a gift. However, a better strategy will be to send all participants a Mother’s Day gift card or promo code in exchange for their time and willingness to share photos.
Ready to Launch Your Mother’s Day Marketing Campaign?
No matter what type of business you run, don’t pass the opportunity to let your customers celebrate Mother’s Day by shopping from your brand.
By running a photo, story, or hashtag contest on social media and distributing discount codes or freebies, you can capitalize on a number of benefits, including:
- Enhanced brand loyalty
- Increased brand awareness and exposure
- More UGC
- Greater lead generation
- Valuable data collection
- Increased traffic to your website and brick-and-mortar store
- Greater sales and revenue
You should also offer free shipping, gift wrapping, and a Mother’s Day gift guide with more ideas on how to make the day special for a mother.
So, what are you waiting for?
Mother’s Day is right around the corner. Start promoting your brand to attract new customers and compel them to buy a gift for their mothers. Leveraging these ideas will help you drive more traffic, engagement, and sales, leading up to Mother’s Day campaign success.
Do you have questions about getting more customers for Mother’s Day sales? Ask them in the comments below.
P.S. Don’t limit these marketing ideas to Mother’s Day. They are likely to work equally well for your Father’s Day promotions as well. 😉
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
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