Ready for National Banana Cream Pie Day? Holiday Content Ideas.

Did you know that there’s something that makes every day or month special as declared by some entity? Actually, it’s usually not one designation. For instance:  March 2nd is National Banana Cream Pie Day and Dr. Seuss Day. It’s also the second day of National Frozen Food Month and National Cheerleading Week. By my count, there are 25 different calendar events that can be celebrated on March 2nd.

But what do these obscure holiday celebrations have to do with your business? Quite a bit if you are in need of a topic for digital marketing or an upcoming promotion.

However, just like banana cream pie, try to avoid too much of a good thing.

Your content must always be of value.

Filling up your content calendar with blog posts about holidays will saturate your followers with useless information and they will notice — and not in a good way. There are just so many ways to shoe-horn your business with a tie-in to national frozen food month without coming across as off-putting to your audience.

Your audience is the priority when creating great content.

Focus on brand awareness — not sales messaging — when leveraging calendar events.

These days, weeks, and months are an opportunity to relate your brand to a topic that is trending. Having a New Year’s sale is common but why not just take it as an opportunity to celebrate with your followers?

That’s not to say that a sales message is out of the question. If you are a bakery, promoting banana cream pie day is a sales opportunity to be optimized. Just give it some thought and look to match up organically with the celebration rather than challenging your audience to find the connection (explain to me again why President’s Day is a reason to go buy a mattress?).

I’ve put together a few lists that you can download of various calendars.

Warning: Do not upload these to your existing Outlook or Google calendar. Create new calendar files first — i.e., Weekly Calendar Events, Monthly Calendar Events, and Daily Calendar Events. Then import each of these files to their specific calendars. You will then be able to layer your calendars and turn them on and off as needed.

Or, if you download and double-click on the .ics file, it will launch Outlook and install it as a new calendar. If you are not comfortable with this, check with your IT person before installing.

Below, you will find links to Excel files and .ics (calendar) files. For security reasons, I am unable to upload .csv files so if you need to import as a .csv file, you will need to open the Excel file and save it in a .csv format.

These files will provide you with close to 2,000 calendar events that you can use. For the most part, the Icalendar dates are set to reoccur but some are outside of the rules that can be set for dates in the future and will need to manually update for 2019.

Daily Holiday Events 2017-2018 (.ics)
Weekly Holiday Events 2017-2018 (.ics)
Monthly Holiday Events 2017-2018 (.ics)

Combined Holiday Events 2017-2018 (Excel)