With Christmas and New Year's celebrations behind us, Valentine's Day is the next big holiday marketers can use to attract new users, engage existing audiences and improve ROI. Since 2017, Valentine's Day has generated year-over-year revenue growth. 2019 saw beloved shoppers spend $20.7 billion on Valentine's Day. By 2020, U.S. Valentine's Day sales reach approximately $27.4 billion, an increase of $6.7 billion.

For marketers, Valentine's Day is a great opportunity to reach new users, engage existing users and maximize ROI. Global installs across all verticals grew 8.7% on Feb. 14 compared to the monthly average. This also includes video streaming, food delivery and recipe apps.

1. Define your target audience for Valentine's Day campaign

Many people think Valentine's Day is only for couples, but that's not the case. While it is most popular among couples, many other consumers use this time to give gifts to friends, family and even their pets.

Valentine's Day is increasingly being promoted as a day for more than just those who are already in love. For those who are single and ready to date, it's also a great opportunity to meet new people and make connections. This is one of the driving factors behind the growth of dating apps on the day. It has become a habit to give gifts to loved ones on Valentine's Day, perhaps to buy something for yourself to show your love or just to take advantage of promotions and sales. on February 14, 2021, the number of installs of shopping apps was 9.5% higher than the monthly average and the number of sessions grew by 3%.

On the eve of Valentine's Day, one in five people will buy gifts for their furry, feathered four-legged companions. To meet this demand, retailers are offering products such as heart-shaped snacks and chewable rose bouquets. BarkBox, a pet subscription service, is releasing a special "Valentine's Day" collection in 2019. In fact, people spend billions of dollars on Valentine's Day for their pets.

Identify the people among your prospects who are most likely to use your app to make a purchase and target them with your Valentine's Day ad campaign. To determine what types of creative elements and messaging to use in your campaign, initiate A/B split testing to try out different marketing materials. For example, you may want to target singles with an ad that encourages people to show love to their family in one image and friends in the other. Depending on which of the different segments performs best, you can determine which to use and which to remove or modify.

Pro tip: When selling regular products for single adults, try using a tagline such as "Treat yourself this Valentine's Day" or "Delicious treats for you and your friends. If you're considering an alternative Valentine's Day campaign for young singles, Instagram is a great place to start. Make sure you create posts with catchy headlines full of Valentine's Day puns and lots of hashtags.

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2. Send Valentine's Day-themed push notifications

You can generate a lot of excitement around Valentine's Day with push notifications. These messages can create a sense of urgency in your audience. So let them know they have a limited amount of time to buy gifts and benefit from Valentine's Day sales. You can also send these in advance to encourage people to interact with your app before Valentine's Day.

Your push notifications should include Valentine's Day-related messages and visuals, such as heart emojis and other designs. Again, you can A/B test these notifications to see which ones drive the most in-app interaction.

3. Create Valentine's Day vibe on social media

Social media is a great channel to use for promotion before Valentine's Day. Engage your social media following on platforms like Facebook and Instagram with post-Valentine's Day-themed social media posts that include plenty of colorful visuals to get people in the mood for this special day. In the process, you can direct people to download and install your app through social media platforms, which is especially important if your offer is app exclusive.

The key to creating relevant content is to understand your audience and be able to determine their needs and preferences. Creating personas is an important first step to understanding the different demographics and personalities that make up your social followers. 

Use your insights to really talk to your audience through the content you post. Remember that they are real people and create posts that match their tastes, interests or sense of humor. 

Valentine's Day related content

You can also share useful content about the holiday. For beauty businesses, it might be a series of posts with tips on great skincare regimens or instructions on how to put on makeup for date night. Similarly, for Pinterest Valentine's Day ideas, you can create inspiration lists on Pinterest - from unusual gift ideas, romantic restaurants or the best deals on local leisure activities - and share them with your readers. If your business is food-related, you can choose to share useful recipe videos such as Woolworths South Africa. it's simple, but really engaging and shareable. As a bonus, it can generate a lot of user-generated content.

Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to promote any business on social media. You can easily track how many people are sharing your campaign based on who is using the hashtag. We recommend that you use a combination of themed hashtags, one unique to your company and another popular hashtag used by others.

But don't just throw hashtags out there randomly! Try asking meaningful questions and combining them with relevant hashtags. On Twitter, you might ask for a short description of the best Valentine's Day a person has ever experienced. Or on Instagram, you might ask followers to post a beautiful picture of a Valentine's Day dessert using your hashtag for a contest.

You can even use hashtags on LinkedIn to expand your reach and spread the love this Valentine's Day, while also participating in current trends!

• In 2021, cosmetics company The Body Shop used the #SelfLoveUprising hashtag in combination with the traditional #ValentinesDay hashtag to engage with the inspiring and ongoing trend of self-love and self-care. In doing so, they shifted the focus from couples to celebrating all people as individuals, while emphasizing the importance of loving and taking care of yourself.
• One of the best mediums for Valentine's Day advertising is social media. Thus, the photo site PIXERF launched a campaign called #PandemicRomance with poems that acknowledge the changes that the pandemic has brought to singles and couples in Singapore. Everything is done in a very tongue-in-cheek way - through poetry. The lyrics contain local references for creating relevant romantic scenes. The entire Valentine's Day marketing campaign also demonstrates how stock photos can be used successfully on social media.
• One such example is Tiffany's Valentine's Day Tattoo Shop. The idea is simple - create your own unique sticker with a transparent background, add it to your photo, and share it on Instagram using the relevant hashtag (#BelieveInLove). This, along with some impactful marketing magic, can do wonders for brand awareness.

4. Use in-app stories to connect with users

If you want to promote your Valentine's Day campaign to existing users, you can resonate with them through the use of in-app stories. These include engaging content that is personalized for each user and shows that you care about your audience.

Using Valentine's Day-themed stories, you can promote deals that appeal to users based on their interests or previous purchases. You can also include clear CTAs that make it easy for users to perform the desired action, resulting in significantly higher conversion rates. As with other marketing content, stories can have plenty of engaging visuals. Interactive stories can also engage users with polls, questions and other ways to further connect with them.

5. Don't forget the promos and discounts for Valentine's Day special

To ensure that your business attracts and engages people in the days leading up to Valentine's Day, determine what types of giveaways, promotional offers and discounts to offer. You need to choose offers that will produce the best results in terms of both user engagement and sales.

With $21.8 billion in spending on Valentine's Day in 2021, "online" is considered the top destination for shopping. February 14, 2022 is just around the corner and sales are expected to be similar - which means mobile app marketers can take full advantage of this The opportunity to reach both celebrating and non-celebrating audiences. Apps across all verticals can capitalize on this day by choosing posts. Recipe apps might take the easy way out and advertise themselves as a place to find Valentine's Day-friendly recipes, while streaming apps might choose the "singles" approach.

We recommend using different types of discounts, offers, giveaways and promotional deals to increase installs, engagement and ROI. For example, if your app is profitable through a subscription model, you can offer a "premium" service for free on the same day. For e-commerce apps, it may be advantageous to offer a quick delivery option for those making last-minute purchases, while for food delivery apps, free delivery may be a differentiator.

6. Partner with non-competing brands

If you find an opportunity to partner with another brand that doesn't compete with you, take it. If your app experience, product or service complements another app, this can allow you to use this to showcase yourself to another brand's audience. You can even market it as a couple of "matches" at this time of year, since the two brands are a good fit. 

The Valentine's Day partnership between YouTubers and ProFlowers is an example of success. ProFlowers offered consumers a 15 percent discount in its app when using the promo code "Uber" for a limited time. In addition, ProFlowers provided approximately 150,000 flowers to Uber riders in 28 different cities for Valentine's Day. In turn, both ProFlowers and Uber benefited from this partnership, increasing brand awareness and sales for both companies.

Tinder has found that if users add anthems to their dating profiles, it enhances their swiping experience and gets them more matches. So last year, they partnered with Spotify on a Valentine's Day marketing strategy to create playlists with popular love-themed tracks and podcasts. This was also a plus for Spotify, which saw a 49% increase in love-themed global listeners compared to last year. Needless to say, the campaign was a success, showing that matching two apps can be as good as matching two people.