Your company anniversary isn’t news… But here’s how it can be
A company anniversary or milestone moment is worth celebrating – but you can’t just send a press release to the media and expect them to care.
Notable events provide an opportunity to reflect with your team and acknowledge your shared history. They also allow you to shift your perspective and honor collective achievements. However, your celebration isn’t newsworthy on its own. Reporters can’t possibly cover every company event or observance.
If your goal is to secure news coverage around a company anniversary, you need to be strategic and creative in your business anniversary marketing ideas. A basic press release won’t cut it. As the media landscape constantly changes and evolves, so must PR and marketing teams + tactics.
The good news: You can turn a milestone moment or company anniversary into a headline, you just need to dig a little deeper.
Business Anniversary Marketing Ideas That Earn Headlines
The earned media strategists at Belle have researched thousands of headlines to uncover what makes for a media-worthy brand moment. Looking through the lens of a company anniversary, we identified the following reframes to help you earn headlines.
Relatability
Yes, your anniversary is important to your company, but why should the rest of the world care? If they weren’t a part of the achievement, they have no stock in the celebration. For your company anniversary or a milestone business moment to become newsworthy, it needs to become relatable to the greater public.
For example, to celebrate the opening of their 100th store, The Halal Guys, the fast-casual American restaurant famous for pioneering halal fare in America, challenged their fans to the ultimate test. The first person to eat at all 100 locations of The Halal Guys would receive free food for life. Some customers have been around since 1990 and are the epitome of a loyal fan base. Getting them involved in the milestone was paramount.
Your company anniversary or milestone moment needs widespread relatability to catch media attention. It needs to be big enough to impact everyone in the country. Media look for stories that apply to or affect all readers or viewers.
Surprise + Delight
The reason you’re able to celebrate another year of company success is because of support from customers and stakeholders. Who better to join the festivities than your biggest cheerleaders?
A company anniversary can extend to outside parties, like Sandals Resorts did for their 40th anniversary. They held 40 days of prize giveaways including an all-expenses-paid, all-inclusive week-long getaway for two. They wanted to thank their guests for traveling with them for the past 40 years and celebrate new guests to come in the next 40. Creating something memorable and positive to generate buzz is a great way to grab the media’s attention.
Cultural Relevance
Another way to make your milestone newsworthy is to join a cultural phenomenon that’s bigger than your company anniversary. What trends or cultural moments can you strategically jump into? Resist the urge to simply latch onto the latest craze. Instead, focus on cultural tie-ins that resonate with your brand values and speak directly to your target audience.
For example, leveraging nostalgia has become a widely embraced and highly successful strategy. McDonald’s leaned into its influence for a recent marketing campaign during an anniversary celebration of their own. To celebrate Grimace’s birthday, McDonald’s launched an LTO giving the purple icon his very own moment on the menu. The Grimace Birthday Meal offered the choice of an entree and a limited-edition purple shake. The celebration went viral across social media partly due to the nostalgia many fans have for childhood birthday parties at McDonald’s with Grimace. Grimace is also the perfect pillar for nostalgia because he helps Millennials relive the idealized past of their youth.
Gen-Z joined the social conversation to put their own spin on the trend creating videos where users sip on the shake before mimicking death scenes. Gen Z excelled at their trademark: their innate ability to turn buzz into virality.
Backed by Data
Throughout your company’s history, you’ve generated data on customers, competitors, financials, employees and more. This rich repository not only reflects your commitment to understanding your market but also positions you strategically in an era where data-driven insights rule. According to the 2023 Cision report, journalists are increasingly looking for compelling data to inform their reporting, and 68% want to see original research and trend data in stories.
Find stories within the information only your business has access to. Maybe that’s a unique story that emerges from customer buying habits or expert commentary and hacks that only your brand can provide. What data have you gathered over the years that you can find a story within?
For Google’s 25th company anniversary, they shared fun facts based on data they had collected over the past quarter century and told unique stories to national news outlets. Did you know that the company credits Jennifer Lopez’s green Grammy dress as a turning point for the birth of Google Images? That the number of photos edited in Google Photos every month is 1.7 billion? Or that the company has featured more than 5,000 Google Doodles? Google uncovered stories like these within its data, noting that each chapter of its history was co-authored by the general public.
Human Interest
What personal interest stories from employees and customers does your company have to share? Is there anyone who has been there since day one? A client you’ve grown with step-by-step? A customer who claims your product changed their life? These stories can help a company anniversary stand out by reflecting on the people behind the brand.
When Facebook turned 20, it took a trip down memory lane and went all in on human interest stories. News coverage reminisced about how the company got its start in a college dorm room and chronicled its growth from “frat-house dream to tech empire.” Looking beyond the stories of its creators, articles also dove into how Facebook’s original users literally grew up alongside the platform.
And when hip-hop celebrated its 50th anniversary, it took a more serious tone by joining conversations about inequality and women’s struggles in the industry. Fast Company interviewed individuals who helped shape the genre’s early days and the hardships they faced. Rather than just speaking to the anniversary, hip-hop used the moment to pay tribute to the individuals who elevated the industry to where it is and the accomplishments of these women.
Finding inspiration for your company anniversary
Now that you know your company anniversary isn’t newsworthy on its own, what will you do to increase its relevancy? Although your milestone may be important internally, bigger thinking is required to garner headlines. Your business anniversary marketing ideas must be relatable, offer a surprise + delight, have cultural relevance, be backed by data or offer a human interest angle to make a splash. Whatever you decide to do, remember:
