Every PR/outreach/content promotion team will have an event calendar. It’s such an important asset (taken from more traditional PR). But while it’s important to have all seasonal days, relevant events that are happening every year and some upcoming current affairs, we should take more advantage from awareness days.
Take for example Metro, their journalists publish articles covering that day’s awareness day – every day! From national doughnut day to take the dog to work day.
And it’s not just Metro, many publications love talking about some unique and fun days, as well as the more important ones!
So, if you are planning/launching a campaign, keep an eye on awareness days that are relevant to your topic. Make sure you don’t miss it and, for example, launch a Gin related campaign a week after the National Gin Day, and ensure that you can use several awareness days so your campaign doesn’t depend on only one of them.
We’ve done a campaign focusing on Stress (back in 2017) almost two years on, it’s still getting picked up – especially when there is a relevant awareness day, week or month. Here are some examples:
National Stress Awareness Month – coverage in University of Brighton official newspaper
As you can see, the publication used the full image that we featured on our client’s website to show the main findings.
National Stress Awareness Week – Employee Benefits
This publication used the research as a source of data which they linked to on the bottom of their article.
And, for example, National Mental Health Awareness Week.
Using the same approach as the previous publication, this site linked to the findings when using it as a source for their article focusing on Mental Health Awareness week.
When coming up with ideas for your next campaign, don’t think of an idea that will be popular now and will gain links/hit your target. Think of a campaign that will be successful for the next year or two, or even five. The campaign we used here as an example has launched in February 2017, it’s still gaining links every month!
