Breast cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer. By spreading awareness about it, the aim is to make men and women more attentive to its signs and symptoms. The earlier you get diagnosed, the better chances you have at treatment.
As a business, it’s vital to wholeheartedly support the cause before running a campaign on it. In the past some brands have been accused of “pink washing”, which means profiting off of victims’ suffering by marketing pink products with no actual intention to help.
Keeping this in mind, here are some ways you can promote your breast cancer awareness campaign on Instagram.
Curate a pink feed
October is called Pinktober for a reason. Your Instagram profile should show a clear and obvious color theme for the entire month. Make sure your stories and posts are designed using the right color palette.
Don’t have the time or resources to design social media graphics from scratch? Then just take the easy route and use breast cancer awareness poster templates that are available online. You can browse through hundreds of professionally designed templates, customize them to your requirements, and get attractive social media content in minutes.
Host a giveaway for a good cause
Giveaways are a great way to gather traction, spread the word, and contribute to a greater cause. For each entry you can announce a prize for the winner and a donation in their name to a cause supporting breast cancer prevention and treatment.
There are a number of different types of giveaways that you could implement. Here are the most popular ones:
- Like, comment, follow: Each user who does all three will get added to the entry list.
- Tag a friend: Ask people to tag their friend(s) in the comments section in order for them to get added to register an entry.
- User-generated content: Ask users to post content on their own profiles while following your guidelines. This could be a story, picture, or video. Usually stories are the better option to go with.
- Collaboration: You could also host a giveaway in collaboration with other businesses, so you can grow your accounts together, supporting a good cause with a sense of community.
Once you have all your entries, you can use any online giveaway winner selection tool to help with the randomized selection. Easy peasy!
Collaborate with influencers
Influencers aren’t only a viable marketing tool when it comes to fashion and lifestyle. There are influencers for everything, even healthcare and fitness. Look into popular influencers from relevant niches and reach out to them for collaborative work. But be careful to not make the collaboration all about your brand and its products. The point is to raise awareness, keep that in mind.
Sometimes it’s important to invest in building trusting relationships with your customers instead of just making sales. If you genuinely care about such an important cause then your customers will value and respect you even more for it.
Make sure you work with credible influencers who also vouch for the movement. Reach out to breast cancer survivors and share their stories too. Use your platform to give them a voice and spread the message.
Use a consistent hashtag
Whenever you’re running a campaign, be it a social campaign or a marketing campaign, hashtags matter!
Using a consistent and easy to remember hashtag across all your social media posts will help filter them out. It makes it much easier to track progress and popularity, and people love to hop on the bandwagon and play their part. You click on a hashtag and all the public posts using that hashtag appear on one page for you to scroll through. It sort of creates an album you can sift through whenever you want to see it.
Breast cancer awareness month already has a bunch of hashtags of its own that you should include. These include #pinkarmy, #bccww, #pinktober and #pinkribbon to name a few. Also remember to use the basics like #breastcancerawareness and #cancerawareness.
Wrapping it up
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. It’s important to run campaigns for important causes and movements as long as you truly care about them. Never use a sensitive issue as a marketing tactic, it is bound to backfire eventually if that’s your course of action.
Breast cancer is a terrifying illness to cope with, and cancer patients are nothing short of warriors. Make sure your campaign honors their strength and resilience in a way that reduces stigma surrounding open discussions on this topic. Pinktober is a sensitive time.
