Heartfelt Valentine’s Day marketing tactics and OOH inspiration for retailers
Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns help brands stand out during one of the most significant commercial events for retailers across the UK. Throughout the season, consumer spending reaches almost one billion pounds annually as members of the public take to the streets in search of cards and gifts for their loved ones.
This provides a huge opportunity for retailers to captivate and inspire shoppers with Out of Home (OOH) advertising. Through targeted seasonal advertising, you can reach potential customers and influence purchasing decisions at the pivotal moment.
Understanding Valentine’s Day OOH Advertising
OOH advertising is perfectly placed to drive brand consideration in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day. There are billboards, digital signage and other OOH formats in almost every retail location up and down the country that can be used to broadcast your Valentine’s Day marketing messages to varied audiences.
By placing your brand in front of consumers while they’re out and about, you can gain maximum visibility and create impactful touchpoints that propel footfall and sales.
According to a YouGov survey, a quarter of Brits seek Valentine’s Day inspiration from in-store advertising. The message this sends is clear; consumers are not just ready to be influenced – they actively want to be.
Whether you’re promoting gift ideas, dine-in meal inspiration or a Galentine’s pamper box, OOH lets you display your brand in the right place, at the right moment.
Emotional Connection
When love is in the air, generic promotional messaging just won’t cut it. You need to create an emotional connection with your audience if they’re going to say yes to your offer.
Some Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns use romantic imagery, while others focus on heartfelt messaging. But it doesn’t all have to be about romantic love – these days, plenty of people celebrate Valentine’s Day with friends and family.
Whatever your messaging angle, the aim is to evoke an emotional response. It could be anticipation for an evening with that special someone, a touching memory of familial love or a smile brought on by a humorous anti-Valentine’s Day pun.
Benefits of Valentine’s Day OOH Advertising
OOH advertising offers multiple advantages to retailers during the Valentine’s Day season. Here are some of the key benefits that will make it a great addition to your seasonal strategy.
High Engagement
Outdoor advertising has a unique advantage over digital advertising – it’s a far less saturated medium. Unlike ads within the online landscape, billboards and other forms of OOH inherently stand out within their environments, allowing your Valentine’s Day marketing campaign to capture the attention of thousands of passersby every day.
Because of its unmissable visual impact, OOH drives high levels of engagement. This is emphasised when strategic placement comes together with the right moment – such as placing Valentine’s-themed advertising in key retail locations with the aim of targeting shoppers who are short on ideas.
When OOH combines relevant content with relevant moments (what we call contextual relevance), overall ad effectiveness increases by 17%. Valentine’s Day offers a natural opportunity to implement contextual relevance and foster engagement with targeted OOH advertising during one of the biggest retail events of the year.
Enhanced Brand Affinity
Consumers are 36% more likely to engage with brands they trust, and 57% of people trust in outdoor advertising. Trust plays a big part in brand affinity among consumers, so this is a solid starting point – but there’s more OOH can do to help brands build an emotional connection with their audience.
The consistent presence of OOH advertising on the audience’s local high street, supermarket or shopping centre can create a feeling of familiarity that enhances brand affinity during Valentine’s Day marketing. This consistency combined with the visual impact of a large billboard or bold creative forges a lasting impression, which builds stronger connections.
Visual storytelling can tap into important emotions, especially around Valentine’s Day. Creatives that resonate with the viewer and call to mind feelings of love, excitement or joy will help cultivate a positive brand association.
Localised Impact
When advertisers use OOH, they choose specific locations to target. But the most effective location-based OOH goes one step further by also targeting local communities with personalized messaging.
Incorporating local customer stories or cultural references into campaigns can make OOH ads feel more authentic and relatable. For example, for Valentine’s Day, a jewellery brand could highlight a local couple who recently got engaged using one of their rings. A more light-hearted example could be a card shop using local phrases in their Valentine’s Day promotional messaging.
Another effective tactic is to use local buying to target shoppers with Valentine’s Day products that are popular in their area. After identifying the most-purchased products, brands can tailor their messaging to suit the needs and preferences of the local community and consequently increase sales.
Creating Valentine’s Day OOH Advertising Strategies
Crafting a compelling Valentine’s Day OOH advertising campaign requires a few key components. The location, creative and messaging need to work together to catch audiences’ attention and sustain their interest. Here are a few Valentine’s Day advertising ideas to get you thinking.
Selecting Prime Locations
Selecting the right locations is vital to the success of any OOH strategy. To decide where you’ll run your ads, you should consider who you’re trying to target and what action you want them to take.
High-traffic areas are ideally suited to Valentine’s campaigns where the aim is broad reach. But if your aim is to increase footfall to a specific store, then it’s more important to choose an OOH advertising site that’s nearby.
You can also analyse traffic patterns and local demographics to decide where the best place to reach your audience is. With OOH environments spanning everything from train stations to supermarkets to shopping centres, there are plenty of options to help you reach your goal.
Designing Romantic and Eye-Catching Creatives
The best Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns are eye-catching and instantly recognisable as Valentine’s-related. Take this advert from Waitrose, for example. The striking colour pulls attention while the simple imagery and messaging remind the audience of the day’s importance.
Using traditional Valentine’s colours like pink and red in the creative is another way to quickly convey meaning. You can also opt for romantic photography or get creative by using 3D billboards to ensure classic symbols like hearts and roses stand out.
In the midst of all this romantic imagery, don’t forget that your brand and product need to be clearly visible too. They should work in harmony with your Valentine’s Day theme so that the design doesn’t become cluttered and hard to take in.
Crafting Heartfelt and Memorable Messages
Once you’ve hooked your audience with an eye-catching creative, you need to win them over with impactful messaging. A great unconventional example comes from wine brand 19 Crimes.
Their advert plays on the idea of a traditional two-person Valentine’s Day with a photo of a woman kissing herself in the mirror. The messaging reinforces the idea that you can still celebrate Valentine’s on your own, and speaks to an audience often forgotten about during the season.
If you’re looking for more conventional Valentine’s advertising ideas, heartfelt messaging is a safe – but effective – bet. For most people, Valentine’s Day is all about showing your love for someone. If you can tap into this desire through your messaging, you’ll benefit from the powerful influence that these emotions have.
Integrating Digital and Traditional Approaches
Traditional and Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising both have unique advantages – so why choose? Integrating the two offers you the benefits of both to enhance your Valentine’s Day campaign’s overall effectiveness.
Traditional OOH is ideal for making a bold brand statement. It lets you occupy the same billboard for multiple days or weeks, ensuring that your brand becomes cemented in the minds of regular passersby.
It also offers you a wider variety of locations to choose from than with DOOH alone, so that you can always make sure your brand is being seen by the right people in the right places.
Digital Billboards
Digital billboards have advanced capabilities that make them highly effective at driving engagement. Digital displays facilitate dynamic content, which means you can adapt your messaging, creative or scheduling to target different audience groups.
Dynamic content also makes it possible to update your ads in real-time. You can quickly change your messaging to include a last-minute Valentine’s Day reminder or reflect a new promotional offer.
Interactive displays encourage viewers to actively engage with adverts, whether through the use of touchscreens, voice commands, or one of the many other types of interactive DOOH. The creative flexibility this offers retail brands is especially useful around Valentine’s Day, as interaction helps to forge a feeling of intimacy.
Budgeting and Cost Considerations
OOH is one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising and during a significant retail period such as Valentine’s Day, the opportunity to drive sales is high. However, there are some factors to consider when planning your budget and campaign in order to maximise ROI.
Location, size and duration all have an impact on cost – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that choosing to run a three-day campaign using a small billboard in a low-footfall area is the most cost-effective solution.
Instead, focus first on who it is you’re trying to reach. You can then identify the best strategy for achieving the desired results while staying within budget.
To find out more about OOH advertising costs or discuss Valentine’s Day marketing tactics, please get in touch for a friendly, no-obligation chat.