You don’t have to sell chocolate eggs to ride the wave of optimism arriving with the spring sunshine. Easter is a sales opportunity across industries, and social media is increasingly important in how brands drive engagement.
A recent US survey shows social activity has risen to the top of Easter shoppers’ reasons to spend. At 31%, it is equal with sales and second only to tradition. With social media relevant in every aspect of marketing, this is unsurprising.
There’s a huge spike in Facebook engagements around the holiday. And the same is true on other social platforms, especially those with a visual focus like Instagram and Pinterest.
It’s important to be part of the conversation if you don’t want to be left behind. But what’s the best way to engage social audiences around Easter, especially if your product doesn’t directly relate?
Well, here are six examples of successful Easter social campaigns to give you some inspiration.
6 Easter social media campaign ideas
1. Happy Egg Co. Chick Cam
The Happy Egg Co. tied its key message of valuing chicken welfare into Easter in a uniquely engaging way. It offered a Google+ Hangouts and YouTube live stream of a brood of eggs, from incubation to hatching.
Like the most popular reality shows, the seemingly dull stream had viewers enraptured, eagerly awaiting the moment a beak would poke through the shell.
Happy Egg Co. drove engagement through Twitter and Facebook by asking its followers to name the newborns. This idea caught the public’s imagination and made it one of the top trending videos on the day of the hatching.
By leveraging the popularity of live streaming, and the ‘cute’ factor of chicks, the brand cleverly drove engagement to its social media accounts without spending a dollar on advertising.
Key takeaways and suggested actions
Granted Happy Egg Co. is uniquely positioned to take advantage of Easter hysteria, but this idea could easily be extrapolated across industries.
Live-streamed videos on Facebook and Instagram are promoted above other content as a way to encourage the use of the feature, so it’s a great way to drive engagement. Users can like and comment in real-time which means you can gauge interest and take questions live, and adapt your live stream depending on what your audience wants.
Try some of the following strategies:
- Live stream at an Easter event to connect with your customers and show them you are part of the conversation.
- Use live streaming to offer product tutorials. Whatever product you sell, you can put an Easter twist on the video. The videos can be saved and posted on your website for future use.
- Show what your product can do in real-time by live streaming product demos. Again, leverage the Easter sales boost by giving your video an Easter backdrop. If you sell kitchen equipment, make an Easter recipe. If you sell t-shirts, print a special Easter design.
2. The Co-op’s Good Egg Campaign
The Co-op tugged at the heartstrings with a series of videos using hidden cameras to search for ‘good eggs’ among the public. Actors played out scenarios giving do-gooders the opportunity to help out in various situations, like helping a man with two broken arms eat a sandwich, or returning a lost wallet.
Shared on its social channels, these videos had a wide appeal, piggybacking on the trend of real-life prank and hidden camera videos but with a more positive angle. The broken arm ‘eggsperiment’ video has over 800,000 views on YouTube.
The public not only got involved by liking and sharing the videos on their social feeds but nominated their ‘good egg’ friends by tagging them in the comments. This campaign cleverly played on the public’s fondness for random acts of kindness and the viral popularity of hidden camera videos, tying all of this in with Easter for maximum impact.
Key takeaways and suggested actions
You can see how the idea of using real-life public reactions could be used across many industries. People are more likely to trust what you are saying if you can demonstrate the positive impact of your product on real people.
Brainstorm creative ways to take your product to the people. What you’re aiming to do it tie your product to an emotion. Post videos to your social feeds and find a reason for people to nominate their friends so they will tag them in the post, sharing it further and wider.
If you retail reading eyeglasses online, for example, you could set up some hidden cameras in a grocery store. Your stooge has dropped his glasses and so can’t find his way to the checkout to pay for his kids’ Easter eggs and gifts.
His Easter will be ruined if he can’t find them to put them back on. Luckily a helpful member of the public helps him out and saves the day, the implication being that his glasses are an integral part of his life and well-being. Cue product close-up, tagging of friends and sky-rocketing of social shares.
3. Cadbury’s White Creme Eggs
Cadbury’s Creme Eggs are by their nature a clever Easter marketing tool. Only available for a short period leading up to the holiday, scarcity is used to drive sales of this Easter favorite.
The brand has a good social presence, with over 2.4 million followers on Facebook and 200,000 on Instagram. This year it launched a countrywide Easter egg hunt with a dedicated website, challenging consumers to find special white chocolate Creme Eggs, and offering the chance to win £10,000.
The hunt has already triggered hundreds of Instagram posts featuring enthusiasts showing off the white creme eggs they’ve found (or bought). This is a good example of using scarcity, gamification, and a big prize to drive social engagement as wells as sales in store.
Key takeaways and suggested actions
Yes, this is an Easter product and works perfectly for this kind of campaign, but this tactic could be applied to any industry. You just have to find a way to relate your product in some way to Easter.
For example, if you’re selling hard-to-find sneakers, the value of the product is in its exclusivity. Set up an Easter egg hunt where the ultimate prize is this rare pair of trainers. This way you tie the feeling of an exclusive product with the innocent joy of an Easter egg hunt, even if it doesn’t directly relate to the holiday.
It’s not so different to the social commerce campaign run by Nike in partnership with Snapchat.
They hid QR codes around the after party for the NBA All-Star game, which, when scanned, would allow the user to buy a limited run, not yet released pair of Air Jordans.
Let’s look at some more examples of how seemingly unrelated products managed to ride the Easter engagement wave.
4. Diesel – Keep the World Flawed
For its Spring/Summer collection for 2018, Diesel launched a video campaign featuring hidden ‘Easter eggs’ that directed users to social and other content.
The video tells a story of lovers who are attracted to each other after both have surgery to remove physical flaws. One of the ‘Easter eggs’ only appears for a split second on screen: @wantedsocks is an Instagram account that celebrates odd socks and features models wearing Diesel denim mismatched in the style of its Spring/Summer collection.
This content does a great job of engaging viewers with a story and letting internet rumors of hidden links slowly propagate and eventually drive traffic to a social account. Any brand could use this technique to increase engagement to social channels, however tenuous the Easter link.
Key takeaways and suggested actions
If you want to create some intrigue around your product, come up with creative ideas to hide messages in a piece of content. In this example, Diesel used a video but it could easily work in an image or a caption on social media.
You could engage readers with an Easter riddle where the link sends them to a hidden landing page. Or post an image with a hidden meaning. People love solving puzzles especially when there is a hidden reward. These kinds of campaigns will never fail to catch the public’s imagination and garner shares.
5. If Carlsberg Did Chocolate Bars
Carlsberg took its famous slogan ‘if Carlsberg did’ to extremes with an Easter campaign in 2016. The beer brand created a giant chocolate bar in Shoreditch, East London, supported on social media by #ifcarlsbergdidchocolatebars. It took 500kg of chocolate to make the lifesize pub, complete with chocolate beer tap and dart board.
The sheer size of the stunt gained huge traction on social channels. What Carlsberg did well here was to leverage an existing marketing slogan that most people are familiar with and repurpose it with a tie into Easter.
Key takeaways and suggested actions
This is a great example of a real-world stunt transferring attention over to social media. You may not have the budget to build a giant chocolate bar, but think about ways to gain people’s attention.
Think about how your brand could make some noise in public. Could your team dress up as giant bunny rabbits and give out free samples to people who post on social? Could you set up a pop-up stall with an Easter-themed photo booth to promote your product with a designated hashtag?
Anything that gets people’s attention so they want to tell their friends. And it always helps when you’re serving free beer.
6. Marmite’s Happy Yeaster Egg
One way to leverage social media is to cause controversy. While you don’t want to anger people on any serious issues, having a bit of fun with them can lead to massive engagement and shed loads of shares.
Undoubtedly that was the plan when yeast extract purveyors Marmite launched the Yeaster Egg. Playing on the brand’s ‘you either love it or hate it’ slogan, the Yeaster Egg was a Marmite-infused chocolate egg, complete with bold black packaging and the tagline “Love it or hate it, you just have to try it!”
It certainly ruffled a few feathers. The Sun newspaper picked up on it and ran a story based around the Twitter reaction to the product. Although the article was completely trivial and not in any way newsworthy, it was seen by a lot of people.
This campaign shows the power of courting controversy. You can see how this idea could be leveraged to drive sales on social media.
Key takeaways and suggested actions
People are so bored of being told that this product will change their life or that product is the best or most delicious thing ever invented.
Sometimes to cut through the noise, it helps to be more honest and to subvert perceptions. After all, you don’t need everyone to love your product, just your target audience. The idea of broadcasting that some people hate a product might seem insane, but Marmite has been successfully marketing in this way for years.
The power of the ‘love it or hate it’ idea is in the debates that it produces between two sides. Sure, you have the people going around bad-mouthing your product, but for every one of them, you have a true brand evangelist, fervently promoting your product. How many other brands can say they have such avid fans.
Brainstorm ways you can polarize your audience in order to create truly obsessive fans who will shout your praises from the rooftops. Perhaps an outrageous Easter design if you sell clothing.
If you sell a meaty food item, court controversy with an Easter veggie line. See how many conversations you can generate and make sure to capitalize on social media with a strong hashtag.
A word of warning though. As successful as this campaign was, this can be a risky tactic, so make sure that you don’t go too far and damage your product’s image.
4 Top Takeaways
- Get in the spirit of the season
Aside from clever marketing campaigns, you can get seasonal by doing something as simple as switching your cover image. Celebrate Easter with flowers, eggs, and pastel colors to engage more users during the holiday.
- Avoid lazy egg puns
Try to avoid overused egg puns like egg-celent and egg-citing. They’re not surprising or clever. While researching this article, one of these two appeared on every single article I read, and it got pretty boring. If you must use puns, try some more inventive, like Carlsberg’s ‘chocolate bar’ double meaning.
- Easter is an opportunity in any industry
As we’ve seen, social content for Easter isn’t limited to chocolate egg makers and toy bunny vendors. Harnessing the increase in commerce of the season is relevant for companies in any industry, as long as you’re willing to get a little creative.
Diesel, Marmite, and Carlsberg all found clever ways to get into the spirit of the season even though their products have no genuine relevance. By using hidden links, large stunts, or generating controversy, each drove engagement in different but just as effective ways.
- Use a social commerce platform to capitalize on increased engagement
You’ve put your creative energy and a load of time into creating an engaging social campaign for Easter, so it makes sense to make the most of any increase in engagement on your social platforms.
Jumper is an all-in-one social commerce solution allowing users to checkout without leaving their social feed. With the ability to post to all the major social networks from one dashboard, it saves you the time and effort of switching between accounts.
Sign up for a free account today to see how Jumper can increase conversions and help grow your e-commerce business.