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It's an average day – you hop around on social media and see someone write that it's National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. Who decided today was National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day and, more importantly, how do people even find out about this stuff?

As a business owner or marketer, you are likely to see some of these days offer great opportunities to take advantage of them. A bakery can make a lot of use of National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. but only when they know it's coming.

These holidays are prime marketing opportunities for the first two phases of the customer value journey. In the first phase (Aware), a customer avatar becomes aware of your company. It's like walking by your bakery for the first time or finding it for “bakery near me” in search results. In the second phase (Engage), a customer avatar enters your bakery or decides to check your online menu.

By using these holidays to your advantage, you can create marketing campaigns that will increase brand awareness and engagement. For example, the bakery might have a sign that says "It's National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day!" Buy one, get one for free! "Or they could run a social media campaign letting their followers know that they are giving away a free cookie to everyone who comes to the bakery today.

Aside from niche celebrations, you can also use experiences your customers have to promote awareness and engagement the way you would on this vacation.

Here's an example of how we created a campaign based on National Pet Day and another that recently focused on our audience.

Examples of niche vacations and assignable experience campaigns

On National Pet Day (April 11th for those who didn't know this existed) we put together a Facebook video showing our pets doing their part to help us in our work. This is a post with the goal of awareness – getting customer avatars unfamiliar with DigitalMarketer to say, "Who are these people who get their pets to do their job for them ?!"

Our goal was also to get people to engage with the post by liking it and thinking, "These people are pretty funny …"

We also created a video series called Coping in Quarantine that featured our team members.

In this video we let our team talk about their favorite books they read during quarantine. This post was linked to our article called DM Reading List – 11 Recommendations for Writing Text by Engage members. We were hoping that our audience who saw the video would click on it.

Once they click on this post, we can pixel them up and keep showing them our top of funnel ads that have helped them get to know us better.

How to create niche celebrations or relate to your audience's experience

We can promise you there's a social media vacation for everything, and you're sure to find one that is somehow related to your business. And you can definitely (definitely, definitely) find experiences your customers are having around content creation.

The most important part of this whole process is knowing what your end goal is (I'm sorry to be fully marketed). If you're running a campaign for a social media vacation or an experience your customer avatar is having, you need to know if you're trying to get attention or engagement so that you can base your campaign on it.

Depending on what you're up to, you might want to receive a direct call to action. For example, our post on 2 Text Writing Recommendations was created to get viewers to read the other 9 Text Writing Recommendations we have.

Here is our secret place to find all of the dark holidays you didn't know existed (trust us, National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day will be the LITTLE least surprising thing on such a list).

Once you have your destination and vacation or experience ready, it's time to put your campaign together. You can do what we did in the examples above and use your co-created content, or you can make it fancy with After Effects motion graphics or royalty-free stock videos (we use story blocks).

Time to get this creativity flowing …