Cinco de Mayo is coming. How will you and your business celebrate the holiday?
While most people in North America think of Cinco de Mayo in terms of margaritas and Mariachis, the annual Mexican holiday is rooted in history. On May 5, 1862 the underdog Mexican army rallied over the French — who arrived to war with an army nearly double their own — in the Battle of Puebla. This victory was not only paramount for Mexico, but also may have rippled into historical significance for the United States and beyond.
Observances surrounding the victory are still celebrated in Mexico with parades, historical reenactments, and feasts. They have also evolved over the last 150 years and spread through North America to the U.S. and Canada as more of a fiesta of Latino food, drink, music, and culture, ranging from street festivals and food and music events to an annual Cinco de Mayo-themed sky dive in Vancouver — complete with mustaches and tequila, of course. With so many people participating in the holiday, there’s ample opportunity for your business to be a part of it as well.
Why Celebrate Cinco de Mayo
The holiday’s broader theme (celebrating the underdog) and cultural appeal (face it, who doesn’t love a taco) has universal appeal and resonates across cultures. It is also likely your audience already has the date circled in their calendar, so why not meet them where they’re already at? This makes the day, and days leading up to it, a perfect opportunity for your business to engage with your audience through relevant Cinco de Mayo promotions that are a natural fit for your brand.
How You Celebrate Depends on Your Business Goals
Do you want people to show up in person, or to flock to your website for special shopping promotions? Are you using the holiday to build your audience, or show off what you have to offer? Your Cinco de Mayo promotion goals will lead you to the type of campaign to facilitate — and there are so many possibilities from hashtag promotions and contests, to Cinco de Mayo sweepstakes offering exciting themed experiences.
Restaurants and Bars
Cinco de Mayo is synonymous these days with tequila, margaritas, Mexican beer, and tacos. If you’re the owner of a restaurant or bar and offering Mexican cuisine is a fit for your establishment, then it’s a natural fit to create a promotion for the holiday. Plan your own fiesta with happy hours, menu spec, prizes, decorations, and more. This year, Cinco de Mayo falls on a Saturday, which means you have the opportunity to build momentum and visibility for your campaign on the days leading up to May 5.
Retail and Clothing
If you are retail or clothing business with brick and mortar and online points of sales, you have double the opportunity to reach out to your audience, entice them to visit you in person, and cultivate a larger following while you’re doing it. Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with in-store festivities, like Mexican-themed drinks (if you can’t serve alcohol, there are plenty of other options like agua frescas and horchata) and traditional foods, music, and decor. You may also have relevant products to spotlight during that time as well.
Highlighting the “cinco” in Cinco de Mayo is yet another angle to take. Try incorporating the number five into what you’re offering, whether you want your social following to tag five people in order to be eligible for a promotion, by offering discounts in increments of five, or by running your campaign on the five days leading up to Cinco de Mayo.
Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with Sweeping Success
It’s never too early to start planning a Cinco de Mayo sweepstakes, whether you’re offing a whole Cinco de Mayo experience or a giveaway of festive items. If you’re a restaurant or a bar, you can engage your audience and attract new followers by creating a package that includes free Mexican food and drinks for the winner and a guest. Gift boxes of holiday-themed merchandise are the perfect prize for retailers. Using Woodbox’s suit of tools to collect entries and pick winners at random makes it easy for you to facilitate branded giveaways of all kind without the hassle of doing it manually.
Engage Your Followers with a Festive Quiz or Poll
Everyone has an opinion, especially when it comes to Cinco de Mayo specific fodder like Mexican food, and places to travel within the vacation destination. Engage your audience by creating polls, quizzes, and games that are themed to the holiday, whether it’s specific to the country or using the number five or both. Woobox makes this interactive marketing turnkey by enabling complete customization for your business, and displaying results in real-time on Facebook. You can even prompt your followers to vote on a specific Cinco de Mayo promotion they want to receive. Creating trivia quizzes is also a way to grab your audience’s attention and entice them to share and spread the word about your business, so you can build your audience.
Entice Your Online Audience to Show Up
Your followers can be anywhere, so engage them to show up in-person and online. One of the best ways to do that for Cinco de Mayo is with giveaways and offers. Woobox builder tools make it easy to create coupons and share unique codes that your audience can redeem in person, on your website, and social channels. You can expand your audience by asking that they like or follow you to be eligible for a promotion, and also keep things at bay by only offering an exclusive amount of them.
Run Your Cinco de Mayo Promotion with Efficiency
Woobox makes facilitation your promotional ideas as easy as pushing a few buttons — all for free.
When you open an account, you can make limitless giveaways, quizzes, contests, polls, and more. You only have to start a subscription if you would like to publish and run your campaign.
It’s easy to try out how creative you can be with a Cinco de Mayo promotion by logging onto Woobox to check it out in person. Why spend hours and the expense of having someone create landing pages and coding contest framework from scratch when Woobox already has everything keyed in waiting to be customized for your brand and campaign.