Strategies for temporary highlighting a tab

I was wondering what strategies can be used to temporarily highlight a tab. With temporarily I mean change its appearance for a week or month or so to notify that something on that tab has changed.

Additionally, I was wondering how the strategy may differ depending on the type of change. Maybe if there is a big new feature you want to emphasize it a lot, although in my particular case I only want to give the user a little nudge.

In my case the tabs look like the picture below, but I'm happy to have a more general answer.

I'm not to keen on changing the background colour as it may confuse on which is the active tab and was thinking more in the direction of an asterisk or something.