Need a marketing hook? Try Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day

As a general rule, it’s better for small businesses to do more marketing rather than less. 

But there needs to be a point to all this marketing; consumers need to think you have a good reason for interrupting them.

Otherwise, your marketing will be seen as annoying spam rather than helpful content.

Good marketing always has a pretext. “We’re not interrupting you just to hit our sales targets,” the pretext suggests, “but because of this perfectly valid reason.”

Some pretexts are obvious – Christmas, Easter, Halloween, end of financial year, footy grand finals and the like. 

Because they’re obvious, consumers will accept marketing based on those themes.

But what happens when your small business wants to do some marketing and you don’t have an obvious pretext?

Every business has its day 

One solution is to conduct marketing based on a designated ‘international day’. For example, your small business could target International Women's Day, which is held on March 8 every year, or World Environment Day, which is always held on June 5.

Now that we’ve jogged your memory, you can probably recall other small businesses running campaigns or posting blogs based on those prominent international days. 

What a lot of small businesses don’t realise, though, is that there are literally hundreds of these international days – many of which are obscure, but all of which offer potential marketing pretexts:

• Gyms could target Personal Trainer Awareness Day on January 2
• Financial planners could target Laugh & Get Rich Day on February 8
• Medical centres could target Doctors’ Day on March 30
• Cafes could target Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day on April 12
• Cycling shops could target Bike to Work Day on May 17
• Gardening centres could target Gardening Exercise Day on June 6
• Travel agents could target Hammock Day on July 22
• Pubs could target International Beer Day on August 2
• Book shops could target Read a Book Day on September 6
• Pet stores could target Cat Day on October 29
• Outdoors retailers could target Take a Hike Day on November 17
• Pawn shops could target Re-gifting Day on December 19

If you’re feeling more adventurous, you could target entire months – Hot Breakfast Month in February, for example, or Photo Month in May.

To find your own day or month, click here and here.

Previous posts:

• Stop asking new customers to marry you!
• Repeat after me: repetition is one of the keys to succeeding in marketing
• Being different is the safe option, not the risky option
• Why you need to turn your small business into a media company
• The small business that helps the most people wins

Need help with your content marketing? Hunter & Scribe specialises in writing about cheese sandwiches, hammocks and beer. Contact us at [email protected].