Innovation-minded marketers should love Mother’s Day almost as much as they love their moms. The mid-May holiday represents a $23 billion market after all, and it’s ripe for disruption—especially when it comes to gift ideas for working mothers, who need all the convenience and relief from the daily grind that they can get.
Further, the latter part of this decade has seen the customer experience reexamined, reimagined and turned on its head by emerging technology and direct-to-consumer brands that think outside the box. It’s become imperative for brands to not simply ask how they can sell more to customers, but to instead focus on what customers actually want and need and how to make it easy for them to get that. Leveraging customer data helps answer those questions, while delivering the kinds of personalized offers that people have come to expect.
With the billions of dollars being spent, Mother’s Day represents a fantastic opportunity for brands to experiment and grow their customization mindset. And it’s going to be worth the effort: Deloitte found that customers are willing to spend 20% more on products if they are personalized. Family members and friends of working mothers are an unusually good demographic to help out this time of year with custom offers.
With that in mind, here are four gift ideas that brands could capitalize on:
The perfect staycation
Mothers don’t want to be too far away from their kids, but at the same time, moms need a break sometimes. With that in mind, not much could be better than a 24-hour stay at a nearby hotel with great amenities.
Hotels could create staycation packages for local Mother’s Day offers, including spa sessions, theater/local event tickets for that day, discounts for breakfast in bed or lunch and dinner at the hotel eateries with drink tickets for happy hour. Hotel brands can purchase Facebook and Instagram ads that suss out the audience of partners of mothers with kids and parents of mothers with the platforms’ data as well as first-party customer data from phone calls, email and proprietary website traffic. The copy and images in the ads could be inclusive to all families while taking aim at users with interest-level data.
For the wheels-up exec
Sometimes staying local just isn’t an option for working moms. Countless mothers are CEOs, vps, directors and managers, and they travel throughout the year. Yet, at the time this article was written, the only brands that had purchased Google ads for “great gifts for an executive mom” were gift basket sellers.
While the digital era has made work travel easier with booking sites and airline apps, it has also introduced pain points—namely, keeping your phone and laptop charged so you can take advantage of all the devices’ perks. More importantly, moms need to be able to receive phone calls, texts and emails from family back home, and a dead battery on their device can be stressful.
Thankfully, battery-packed smart luggage has emerged to alleviate such on-the-go concerns. Brands with this smart feature can plug into this opportunity, using Google and Amazon search ads for people querying relevant keywords leading up to Mother’s Day.
Everything-mom-needs gift baskets
Gift baskets can help make moms’ busy lives less stressful, indeed, but marketers in this category can do better by thinking outside the wicker. Gift baskets for modern moms should feature more than just classic items like wine, chocolate and coffee.
Around those physical products can be gift cards for ride shares or other valuables, like meal kits or coffee. From there, their ad copy and imagery should highlight how these are “ultimate Mother’s Day gift baskets” or “everything mom needs in a gift basket” and different from what is usually seen.
Delight with DTC ease and a chic lifestyle
A gift card at just the right department store goes straight to the heart of almost all consumers, doesn’t it? And whether it’s attire or shoes, mothers always need clothing for themselves and their kids. But professional moms often don’t have the time to even use gift cards for bricks-and-mortar retail shopping, let alone online.
Meanwhile, there are some direct-to-consumer brands that make it easier for women to get new clothes while even offering convenient return policies. This is the new reality of how working moms shop these days. Subscription-based, home-delivery brands already offer gift cards, but they should purchase Google and Amazon search ads for keywords such as “Mother’s Day gifts” and “gift card for mom” for the week leading up to the holiday. The ads can be personalized according to Google and Amazon’s formidable swath of data that they have about customers.
Rewrite this holiday’s playbook
As marketers have focused recently on retooling the entire customer experience in general, it’s time they moved forward and started thinking about specific junctures on the calendar. Mother’s Day is the perfect situation to do so, and brands can help the loved ones of a working mom actually bring value to her gifts.
Interestingly, nearly 30% of Mother’s Day purchases occur online, a stat that’s three times as high as ecommerce’s normal impact. This unusually digital holiday gives marketers a great chance to leverage their available data to find the right audience for the kinds of customized offers I mentioned above. All in all, they can utilize the event to create loyal customers among everyone celebrating Mother’s Day.
