Brands Discuss Mother’s Day Marketing on Facebook

Earlier this year, Facebook polled 1,000 users on what they were planning to buy as Mother’s Day gifts. Flowers topped the list, with jewelry tying clothing in the number-three spot. Another major part of Mother's Day gifting? Facebook. Adweek talked with 1-800-Flowers.com and Zales about the role the social media giant plays in their Mother’s Day marketing strategies.

Zales’ “SuperMom” campaign spans TV, print, catalogs, online display, email, Zales.com, Twitter and Pinterest, but Facebook is the “anchor for the overall campaign,” said Matt Kennedy, the brand’s director of e-commerce marketing.

For what it’s worth, Facebook also anchored Zales’ Mother’s Day campaign last year, but this year the brand is using Facebook as a destination as well as a redirection hub. When users visit the SuperMom Facebook app to nominate their mom and enter a sweepstakes for a $2,500 Zales gift card, they can also click over to a Pinterest board aggregating gift ideas or Zales’ Twitter feed.

1-800-Flowers.com is using Facebook a bit differently for its Mother’s Day marketing. Before the “real marketing for Mother’s Day” kicks off, the brand uses Facebook to get the conversation going, said 1-800-Flowers.com president Chris McCann. The social network is a critical campaign component not only as a standalone channel but also as an optimization analysis tool.

“It’s a way for us to start learning and testing with our consumers what they will respond to as [we] move into the marketing of the holiday,” McCann said. “From a product point of view, from a message point of view, it allows us to really tweak and optimize the marketing messages and the products that will be featured throughout the rest of our marketing program as we get into the full swing of the holiday.”

1-800-Flowers.com is running the “Make Moms Proud” photo contest on Facebook that asks users to vote on user-submitted photos of consumers with their moms. McCann said the brand will post those photos to its Facebook page “but then we’ll pull them into Sponsored Stories ads that we’ll run.” 1-800-Flowers.com deployed that strategy last Mother’s Day and saw one Sponsored Story ad featuring a military mom stationed in Afghanistan reach “three times the engagement level of any other ad that we ran,” he said.