A guide to using awareness days in your photo marketing content

As you’ll likely know, you need to keep your photography blog and marketing channels fresh and up-to-date in order to stay visible online.

Continually coming up with new ideas for content can be a huge struggle though, right? Well, awareness days and campaigns can help!

Use them to inspire content ideas for the months ahead and to help you get your content planned out in advance, saving you time and hassle.

Why and how to use awareness days to inspire photography content ideas

Essentially, with a list of national awareness days at your disposal, I believe that you should easily be able to generate hundreds of marketing content ideas.

OK, you’ll also need a bit of imagination, a proactive attitude and some time dedicated to planning your content too. But, it really shouldn’t be too hard to fill your calendar with creative content ideas if you try!

What are national awareness days?

National awareness campaigns can include special days, weeks or month-long initiatives. You know the ones…World Book Day, Mental Health Awareness Week or National Share A Story Month.

There are national awareness campaigns for almost everything, from the serious to the ridiculous! Yep, there’s World Introvert Day, Hat Day and even Chocolate Cake Day! You can have some fun with this!

Access my FREE lists of national awareness days

I’ve created a blog series about national awareness days. In these, I’m sharing some of the awareness days, key events and charitable campaigns that are happening in each month of the year.

My intention behind creating these monthly guides is to help you kick-start your content ideas brainstorming and ensure that you never run out of content inspiration again!

To access my FREE lists of hundreds of national awareness days and campaigns, click on the links below.

Related: How to use awareness days to inspire photography content ideas

Awareness Days can inspire topical photo marketing content ideas

National awareness days have long been used by PRs working in the charity sector as a means of generating interest around a cause or campaign, as well as by marketers and business owners in a wide variety of industries.

I’ve been using them since I started in PR over 20 years ago, and I believe that they are still a great way to inspire fresh and engaging content that will help you promote your business.

Importantly, journalists, bloggers, influencers and content creators around the globe also use them as the basis of news articles and social media marketing content. That’s because awareness campaigns are timely events and initiatives which, by their very nature, are topical and newsworthy.

Awareness Days and campaigns create talking points and bring people together.

Whether you go on to discover awareness campaigns that last a day, a week or an entire month, if they somehow align with your business or personal life, these can be a great way to forge a connection between you and the wider news agenda.

Using Awareness Days for PR: An Example

Before I set up my PR consultancy business, one of my former roles was PR Director for the British Tinnitus Association. This involved me promoting the charity’s annual Tinnitus Awareness Week.

The awareness campaign was a tool my team used to get the media talking about tinnitus and to put the condition firmly on the news agenda for the duration of the campaign.

My team and I shared news, updates and case studies, hosted events and worked with celebrities and social media influencers to create a buzz around the awareness week. The valuable publicity we created allowed us to reach many more people about how the charity helps those who experience tinnitus.

Do you need to be affiliated with an awareness day to use it in your marketing?

But, while the above is an example of how awareness campaigns can be used, just to be clear…You do NOT need to be affiliated with the awareness days or campaigns in any way to use them in your own marketing!

If they relate to you or your photography business in some way, then you can use them to inspire your blogs, social media content, videos and podcasts.

The key to their effectiveness is in how you interpret them.

You can use an awareness campaign as a prompt to create content that’s aligned with your brand and key messages. Simply, link the theme of the event or campaign to your own business or identify a relevant personal experience that you could share.

Ultimately the potential success of this approach is limited only by your imagination!

How can awareness days and campaigns help you market your photography business?

1) Media Publicity

Well, there’s nothing the media love more than a timely, relevant story. So, if you’re interested in securing media publicity, this could be your way in!

Promote your photography business in a way that connects with newsworthy topics, events or campaigns and you can potentially increase your chances of getting interest from journalists. This is a technique called ‘newsjacking‘.

Related: How to use newsjacking to promote your photography business

Quite literally, if you’re able to identify an awareness campaign that’s relevant in some way to your business or to your personal story, then you’ve identified a potential PR angle.

2) Social media content, blogs, newsletters and more

Awareness days are also brilliant for inspiring content ideas for your blogs, social media posts, videos, podcasts and newsletters. You just have to look for the relevant opportunities and piggyback on them.

There are literally hundreds of national awareness days and campaigns (plus international awareness ones too) so, honestly, you shouldn’t ever be short of content ideas!

They are useful prompts that anyone can use to chat about something topical. Simply relate the topic to a story you can share in your marketing content – whether it’s a business or personal story, something serious or something funny. Anything goes!

How to use awareness days in your photo marketing content: A step-by-step guide

Step 1: Create A Shortlist

Review the list of awareness days relevant to the months ahead that you have, by now, hopefully, downloaded. Then, determine which of these awareness days could be useful prompts for your content.

Tip: You don’t need to just use the photography-related awareness days. For example, yes, World Marriage Day would be ideal if you are a wedding photographer, but don’t be afraid to pick out other awareness days too – even the ones that don’t immediately seem relevant. You can use some of the more trivial topics to create light-hearted content that helps show off your personality.

Remember, through what you share online, you can help your audience to get to know you on a personal level. It’s important to build that know, like and trust and forge a connection with your ideal clients.

There’s no better way to do that than with a story that reveals an insight into who you are, how you like to spend your time outside of work, and experiences you’ve had or hope to have in the future, for example.

People buy from people, so don’t be afraid to talk about yourself in your marketing and use some of the awareness days as prompts to share personal stories and anecdotes that will help build a sense of connection and rapport.

All the better if you can use them in a way that encourages your followers and fans to share their stories and experiences too. Getting a conversation going is a great way to connect with your audience.

Step 2: Add Your Shortlisted Awareness Days/Events To Your Diary

Armed with a list of relevant national awareness days, the next step is to mark in your diary the relevant awareness days that you plan to create photo marketing content around.

You may not end up creating content around every date that you identify at this stage, but add them to your calendar so at least you’ll have a bird’s eye view of when they’re happening and where they fit in relation to other key dates in your calendar.

Step 3: Verify The Details

Next, and very importantly, do a quick Google search for the awareness campaign or event you’ve identified as relevant. You’ll want to verify the dates and source more information if you need it. You could also look up any associated hashtags that you could use on social media when sharing your posts on Instagram.

(Although the dates in my guide are correct at the time of publication to the best of my knowledge, and are collated in good faith, please do check to confirm before you use them).

Also, please note that the guide features mostly UK-specific dates, with some from other countries sprinkled in. Do be sure to check the dates for your specific country if you live outside the UK, as they may vary.

Just in case you’re wondering though, there are no rules around how you can use awareness days. If you’re based outside of the U.K., you can certainly still use awareness days or events happening in the U.K. to inspire content ideas, and this applies to campaigns happening elsewhere in the world too.

My advice would be to be inspired by the general theme of the event/campaign, rather than get hung up on whether it’s specific to your country or not. You may choose not to even mention the awareness day specifically in your content – you certainly don’t have to!

Step 4: Plan Your Content Creation Time

Now, plot out your content ideas into a content plan.

Working backwards from each particular awareness day you’ve shortlisted, plot in a date for creating that content.

You may be the kind of person who likes to batch create your photo marketing content a month or more in advance, in which case you may choose to have a set day – such as the first day of every calendar month as your content creation day.
Or, you may prefer to allocate a day per week or fortnight to creating content for the weeks ahead.

Whichever way you operate, ensure that you are setting aside enough time in advance of the event or awareness day to do everything you’ll need to do to get that piece of content ready for publishing.

I’d recommend that you plan and create your content at least 1-2 weeks before the awareness day, as a general rule of thumb. That’s because you need to come up with the blog copy/social media captions/video script, and image/video assets and schedule the content too. Don’t forget how long this can all take!

N.B. If you are planning to use an awareness campaign as a prompt for PR pitches to the media or for guest blogs, you’ll also want to be mindful of the lead times that the media and others work to. It’s better to make your approaches well in advance rather than be too late! The media often produce their content well in advance, so last minute submissions are less likely to prove successful.

Step 5: Brainstorm Content Ideas

With time set aside in advance to create your content, now is the time to brainstorm ideas and draft the copy and other assets you’ll need. What will you share?

Is the day/campaign led by a charitable cause you are passionate about supporting? Why is that? What personal story could you tell to your audience?
Does an awareness day relate to an experience you’ve had (serious or funny)?
Does the general topic of the awareness day spark a memory of something, or of a life or business lesson you’ve learnt? If so, share what you know now as a tip.

Visit this blog on my website for more content ideas.

The content opportunities are endless if you don’t overthink this!

Step 6: Create, Schedule & Engage

The final step is to create and schedule your content for publication to tie in with the awareness day, and then to engage with any comments and positive interaction on the content on the day it’s published, and beyond.

Plotting the content ideas into your calendar will give you structure and clarity on what content to create each week. Then, simply bulk out your content plan with other types of content including client testimonials, personal stories, business updates, authority or opinion pieces and more.

If you’re short of social media content ideas, don’t miss my article with 33 social media content ideas for photographers.

How can you make unique content based on awareness days?

Let me assure you, it’s entirely possible to use awareness days to create unique content (even if awareness days are universally used)!

Even if you’re in the camp who thinks they’re overdone, I believe that how you decide to apply them to your photography marketing can still be unique. You just need to think creatively and use them as prompts to come up with content in YOUR inimitable style.

Remember, use awareness days as prompts to add variety and personality to your marketing. Allow yourself to be inspired by the general topic, and then get creative with your interpretation of the theme. There is no right or wrong as to how you choose to use them in your content.

Which awareness campaigns are relevant to you?

There are plenty of photography-related national awareness campaigns that you could mention in your content, but you needn’t stop there. There are lots of awareness days, unrelated to photography, that likely also have some relevance to your business and your life.

Whichever you deem to be relevant, my advice would be to use these to your advantage. Get your creative juices flowing and plot any relevant awareness days into your calendar. This is then the start of your content plan!

Related: Content planning tips for photographers

While I’m not suggesting that all your social media or blog content should be linked to national awareness days (that would be really quite tedious for those following you!), you can drop them into your content every now and then.

How many times you choose to mention awareness campaigns will be a personal decision. But if you genuinely feel it’s relevant, have something to say about a topic, or feel some affiliation for the cause associated with it, then go for it!

After all, if you can shoehorn them smoothly into your content, they can be a great way to generate engagement on social media and get you noticed.

No relevant awareness days to your photography business? Create your own!

There’s even the scope to create your own awareness campaign if you find that there isn’t anything relevant to your particular photography niche. That’s exactly what dog photographer Kerry Jordan did! In 2018, she established National Dog Photography Day on July 26th.

Despite this being her first attempt at creating a national awareness campaign, it was a huge success and went viral, leading to national and international media coverage! Her hashtag for the campaign also went viral online.

What a huge win for an independent photographer who simply took the initiative and created her own awareness campaign, and in doing so generated valuable publicity for her photography business. Well done Kerry!

It’s entirely feasible that you could create your own awareness campaign too. If there is something that you are passionate about which is aligned to your photography business, then the possibilities are endless.

Why not take a look at the already established awareness days and see if there’s a gap in the market for something new that would help you to promote your genre of photography?

Now you know how to use awareness days, coming up with content ideas will be so much easier!

When it comes to planning your marketing and PR activities for the months or year ahead, I highly recommend that you consider using awareness days to inspire photography content ideas. They will give you a topical hook which you can use to create timely conversations and generate valuable engagement with your audience.

Have a go and let me know how you get on! Good luck!

P.S. If you’re thinking of using national awareness days in your content this year, do let me know in the comments below (or come over and share inside the PR-Savvy Photographer’s Facebook group) which awareness days you’re planning to create content around. I’d love to hear from you!

A Step-By-Step Guide To Using Awareness Days In Your Photo Marketing Content