Addressing Awareness Days in Your Marketing

Marketing teams are always on the lookout for something to use to enhance their brand awareness.

Awareness days have long been utilised by large and small companies for their marketing, and they can represent a great marketing opportunity for law firms.

Although these awareness days are important, businesses can get it wrong.

Sending out the wrong message about the health condition or community the day is highlighting can cause reputational damage to your firm.

To avoid these mishaps, we’ll look into how to handle awareness days within your marketing and PR.

What are awareness days?

Awareness days are usually created by a charity or other organisation to highlight a health condition or bring communities together.

Some awareness campaigns can take place over a week or a month, such as Pride, which is celebrated across the whole of June.  

Other famous national and international awareness days include International Women’s Day, World Alzheimer’s Day, and World Cancer Day. You might also want to mark more novelty days like International Day of Happiness, National Selfie Day or Love Your Lawyer Day.

The best ways to address awareness days

When a marketing or PR team designs a campaign or a series of social posts around a specific awareness day, they usually have the best intentions in mind.

Sometimes, though, it can come across as the company or brand exploiting the day for their gain or undermining the message of the day itself. This can lead to your brand or company’s reputation being tarnished.

In 2019, Stackla found that 86% of consumers said that 'authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support'. In the same report, they also stated that '57% of consumers think that less than half of brands create content that resonates as authentic'.

Therefore, your brand must come across as authentic.

To avoid looking disingenuous, we’ve compiled some tips to use to make your marketing more genuine and thoughtful of the awareness days you’re highlighting.

• Be selective

The first thing we advise is to be selective. Don’t feel pressured to jump on the bandwagon or highlight an awareness day for its sake.

Make sure to keep in line with your overall marketing strategy and keep your target audience in mind when incorporating an awareness day into your marketing.

• Stay relevant

It is tempting to experiment with your marketing, but it could also rub your target audience up the wrong way and run the risk of looking completely irrelevant to your brand and ethos.

For example, posting about climate change while not enforcing any climate change mitigating policies, such as recycling, could garner the kind of negative publicity any firm would want to avoid.

And don’t forget the power of social media here. Twitter’s Gender Pay Gap Bot recently hit the headlines for naming and shaming companies praising their female employees but maintaining a significant gender pay gap.

Remember to keep your marketing genuine and relevant to your company and your brand.

• Plan ahead

Make sure to research the days of awareness you want to highlight in your marketing and get the dates right. You don’t want to make your company look disorganised with a mistimed post.

It’s also helpful to plan your content well ahead of time, as it could be time-consuming to create the relevant marketing material.

If you’re highlighting an important awareness day, you want your campaign to do justice to the organisation or cause behind it.

• Don’t overdo it

We often see companies, especially on awareness days, drastically changing their branding and social media pages to suit the day itself, but not helping a cause in any tangible way.

To avoid this, the best advice is to not overdo the marketing of an awareness day – especially if you’re not actively doing anything to help the cause.

It can make the company or brand look disingenuous.

We hope these tips will help you include important awareness days in your marketing.

And if you need more help with your client acquisition strategy, then contact us here at First4Lawyers.