November 13th, 2024
Leveraging the Benefits of an Awareness Day
Have you ever considered an awareness day as part of your marketing? One of Catapult PR’s most successful tourism PR and heritage-sector public and media relations campaigns has been conducted with an awareness day as its catalyst – World Topiary Day.
It is this huge success by virtue of an awareness day that has inspired the latest YouTube video from managing director, Jane Hunt, on the Catapult PR channel.
In the video – roughly six minutes long – Jane talks about the use of awareness days, not just in tourism PR or cultural and heritage PR but in any sector where this sort of tactic could be useful within a marketing campaign.
Reasons to create an awareness day
Jane discusses the different reasons why a business – of any type – might want an awareness day. If you are not familiar with the term awareness day, necessarily, you will probably have noted that various dates in the calendar are noted as being ‘the day of’ something or other. Some of those that immediately spring to mind in the UK would be Red Nose Day or Children in Need Day.
In fact, charities have been big adopters of ‘days’ like these, because one of the main advantages of such an awareness day, as Jane explains in the video, is to provide a focus for an issue of some sort. Naturally, a need to ‘give’, or a need to be aware of a health condition, is a very natural basis for an awareness day. It mobilises people. Would so much money be raised for charitable causes without Red Nose Day?
But that’s quite a good example of another aspect of Jane’s video, where she talks about needing to build on the awareness day. You can’t just have an awareness day and do nothing around it. Enter the plastic red noses, in Red Nose Day’s case.
Tools to assist with awareness day planning
The fact that there are so many awareness days perhaps hints at some of the other reasons for founding one, as discussed in Jane’s video. There are literally thousands and we tend to import plenty of these from the USA, as well as having our own.
Anyone can base PR activity around an existing awareness day and there are tools that will help you know what days exist, so that you can find out what awareness days are available for PR hooks – and by a PR hook, we mean something to hang a story or piece of activity around.
The website Awareness Days, does what it says on the tin, for instance, providing details of some of the many awareness days available. In the USA, there is the Days of the Year website.
Using awareness days as a PR hook
If you use an awareness day as a hook, you should really create some activity of your own around it and reference it on social media, by using the hashtag that has been created by the ‘owner’ of the day. That hints at another part of Jane’s video.
If you are going to piggyback on someone else’s awareness day, you need to do some due diligence. Frequently, online sites that reference awareness days will get things wrong, merely duplicating the date from a previous year, blissfully unaware that the owners of the day have actually moved the date and that it is not necessarily the same date in the calendar each year. And we need not just be talking days here, as there can be whole awareness weeks too.
So, it is important to check things out, by going to the horse’s mouth – finding out what the organiser of the day is saying is their specific date or dates for that year. After all, you want to be part of the conversation around the day, or you would not be piggybacking on it in the first place. There’s nothing more embarrassing than getting the date wrong!
Do also check that the day still exists. If the day’s owner wasn’t very successful in their efforts to have an awareness day, they may have dropped it. Or, it may have taken too much effort and energy, currently unavailable to them. Or they may have changed the timing from annual to biannual, perhaps.
The benefits of creating an awareness day
Being the ‘owner’ of the day comes with a plethora of other advantages over and above those described here, if you get things right. As Jane states in the video, that starts with PR strategy – again, regardless of whether we are talking tourism PR or cultural and heritage PR or something else. If an awareness day does not fit into your strategy, you shouldn’t create one. If you don’t have the time or energy to do more than stick a label on a date in the calendar, don’t bother with this marketing tactic. It takes effort and expenditure to make it work.
However, as Jane explains, if you get things right, it can be fantastic. In fact, your day could become the envy of those who didn’t think of it and who would love to claim it for themselves. On that basis, beware. If it truly successful, make sure you protect it through a trademark. A company such as the fantastic Roome & Associates can help you with that.
So, if this has whetted your appetite, it’s probably time for you to head to the video and find out more about awareness days – https://youtu.be/TCO5XWs2ils?si=it7HpmuCdZ27vQRt
If you then want some of the Catapult PR magic behind this strategy, email jane@catapultpr.co.uk
