Australians will spend $1 billion on Mother’s Day. Here is how SMEs can earn a slice of it on social
There are three weeks until Mother’s Day and if you run a consumer-facing business, that window matters more than it might seem. Australians spent approximately $1 billion on Mother’s Day gifts in 2025, with an average of $141 per person, according to research from the Australian Retailers Association and Roy Morgan.
Flowers led at 37% of gift choices, followed by food and beverages at 20%, with experiences, gift vouchers, and personal care items all featuring strongly. The spend is there. The question is whether your business is visible when people are looking.
For most small businesses, the honest answer is that social media content for occasions like Mother’s Day still looks the same as it did five years ago. A graphic with some flowers, a discount code, maybe a post reminding followers that Mother’s Day is coming. It is not wrong exactly. But it is increasingly easy to scroll past.
Why the old approach is losing
The shift in how Mother’s Day content performs is not subtle. Campaigns launched too late with little time to build momentum struggle to cut through. Overly polished content that looks like an ad tends to underperform against content that feels like something a real person made. And a focus on discounts alone, turning the occasion into a sales push rather than a moment, tends to generate less genuine engagement than content that creates or captures something meaningful.
Keith Kakadia, CEO of Sociallyin, a social media agency, puts it plainly. “Honestly, the posts that take off during Mother’s Day are usually the simplest ones,” he said. “It’s when people see something and think, ‘yeah, that’s exactly how I feel,’ and they jump in. Brands don’t need to force it. If the idea is easy to respond to, people will do the rest.” The flip side of that, he says, is that controlling the message too tightly tends to kill the participation that would have otherwise happened naturally. “On Mother’s Day, people already have something in mind they want to say or share. The brands that stand out are usually the ones that tap into that instead of trying to control it. If someone can respond to an idea in a few seconds, that’s when you start to see it spread.”
What is actually working
The content formats generating the most engagement for Mother’s Day right now tend to share a few characteristics. They are easy to participate in, they reflect something familiar, and they invite a response rather than demand attention.
User-generated content campaigns are performing well across industries. Tag-a-mum giveaways, prompts asking followers to share a memory or a photo, and requests for a message to their mum are all low-barrier formats that extend reach organically because participants share them with their own networks. For a small business with a modest following, this kind of participation can deliver reach that paid posts cannot easily match.
Behind-the-scenes content highlighting mums on your team, or a genuine story about what the occasion means to someone in your business, tends to land better than polished campaign imagery. People respond to content that feels like it came from a real person in a real situation, which is a genuine advantage for small businesses over larger brands that have to manufacture that authenticity.
Gift guide content, particularly in carousel format, continues to perform well because it is genuinely useful. A carousel framed around a specific type of mum, one who loves cooking, one who needs a self-care moment, one who is hard to buy for, gives people something to save and share because it solves a problem they actually have. According to data from Sprout Social, 61% of TikTok users discover new brands and products on the platform, which means well-executed short-form content in this format can introduce your business to people who have never encountered it before.
The format breakdown
Short-form video remains the highest-performing format across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts for this kind of occasion content. Product demonstrations, simple unboxing moments, a day-in-the-life clip, and team storytelling all work because they show rather than tell. Content that teaches or demonstrates something tends to be saved and shared at higher rates than content that simply announces something.
Interactive story content, polls, countdown stickers, and question prompts, is worth running in the lead-up to the day itself rather than on the day. Asking your audience something simple, spa day or brunch, best advice your mum ever gave you, generates low-effort responses that keep your account visible in the days before the peak spending window. It also gives you a sense of what your audience is thinking, which can inform the promotional content you run closer to the date.
For promotional campaigns, the formats that create urgency without feeling like pure sales content tend to perform best. Flash sales with a clear time limit, discount codes with a name attached like MOM20, and digital gift cards promoted as a solution for last-minute buyers all convert well because they remove friction at the point of decision. The key is timing. Running these in the final four to five days before Mother’s Day, when purchase intent is highest, is more effective than spreading them across the whole campaign period.
What to do this week
With three weeks to go, the priority is getting participatory content running as early as possible so it has time to generate organic reach before the peak buying period. A user-generated content prompt posted this week will have more time to spread than one posted the Thursday before Mother’s Day. Story polls and interactive content can run continuously through to the week before. Promotional content and gift guides work best in the final ten days.
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