Easter is one of the most important commercial highlights of the year for brands. Celebrated by adults and children alike, it’s the ideal time to raise brand awareness and boost communications by offering original interactive marketing campaigns.
Easter is not just a commercial celebration reserved for chocolate brands. It is also a symbol of spring and the return of fine weather, as well as a time for indulgence and sharing. These are all values that brands can mobilise to engage their audience and achieve various commercial objectives (from generating leads to collecting customer data).
In this article, we’ll be sharing some practical advice on how to come up with distinctive promotions in the run-up to this highlight of the marketing calendar. We also give you 3 ideas for Easter competitions that you can use as inspiration for your future campaign.
Easter: a highlight not to be missed
Along with Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Easter is undoubtedly one of the most popular holidays in France (and internationally). It’s synonymous with chocolate egg hunts, but also with big family meals to celebrate the arrival of spring. So it’s hardly surprising that more and more brands are taking advantage of this date to strengthen their relationship with consumers, showcase their products and boost sales.
If Easter is a date to mark with a red cross on your company’s marketing calendar, it’s because it’s associated with strong purchasing intentions. Starting with the traditional chocolates, 129,000 quintals of which were sold this year.
But Easter also means Spring, the time of year when retailers release their Spring/Summer collections. The Easter holidays are also an opportunity for companies in the cultural, travel and entertainment sectors to appeal to families.
So all businesses, whatever their vertical, can take advantage of Easter as a springboard to stimulate their customer community or boost their profile with new prospects.
Marketing objectives for Easter
Marketing highlights such as Easter enable brands to achieve different strategic objectives. Depending on the stages in their sales funnel that they want to optimise (from discovery to loyalty), they can launch a campaign to generate leads, increase sales or strengthen their customer knowledge.
1. Generate new leads at Easter
Generally speaking, marketing games are a powerful way of raising brand awareness among a wider audience. It is a viral mechanism that is particularly attractive to consumers, as it gives them the chance to win attractive prizes.
This is especially the case for sales promotions that are shared on social networks, particularly in partnership with another brand (this is known as co-branding) or a content creator (this is known as influencer marketing). The company can also organically boost the reach of the campaign by encouraging participants to re-share the competition on their profile. To increase their chances of winning.
Our advice: opt for an attractive prize fund, which will automatically boost the participation rate.
Engage your customer community with fun and interactive games
Brands are also seeking opportunities to engage their customers in order to multiply touchpoints and increase the time spent with the company. Engaging your audience is indeed a crucial element for strengthening brand attachment and building customer loyalty.
Easter is a key marketing period particularly suited to this engagement objective. The holiday provides an opportunity to re-engage customers during this relatively quiet commercial period (midway between the Christmas holidays and summer sales).
A contest game allows interaction with your community through engaging and participatory mechanics, such as a quiz to test their knowledge about Easter or a gift rain to reward customers with prizes.
Our advice: a photo contest can be an excellent way to engage your community with a creative challenge centered around the Easter theme. It’s also a great tool for generating UGC—authentic user-generated content that the brand can later share on its social media platforms.
Boosting sales during Easter
Organizing an Easter contest also allows brands to showcase their products in a more playful way and thereby drive sales. Gamified marketing campaigns are an effective way to capitalize on this key period by engaging prospects and customers, for example, by offering purchase incentives (such as discount coupons).
Our advice: a game mechanic like Memory can be a great way to actively engage customers and present Easter-related products interactively. Brands can also opt for a format like the Psychoquiz, which allows them to share personalized Easter gift ideas. These targeted recommendations are highly effective for driving more sales.
Collecting Data and Better Understanding Your Customers
Finally, Easter can also be an opportunity for collecting customer data. The game here allows brands to learn more about their audience by:
- Directly sharing a data collection form to be completed before or after the game;
- Opting for a mechanic that encourages customer insights, such as an interactive quiz, for example.
Our advice: share a relatively short form that won’t deter participants, thus increasing the completion rate. Companies should focus on data that will help them better segment their customer base, as well as information they can leverage in future campaigns (product preferences, consumption habits, etc.).
3 Tips for Running a Successful Campaign and 3 Contest Ideas for Easter
Finally, here are 3 best practices to keep in mind for a successful Easter marketing campaign, along with 3 examples of successful contests to illustrate them.
1. Tailor your contest to the Easter theme. This is, in fact, the best way to attract participants by immersing them directly in the magic of the holiday.
Example: Antares’ campaign adapted the traditional Piñata by replacing the llama-shaped plush with an Easter egg to be cracked open to reveal the prize inside.
2. Maximize interactions with participants. The more interactive the game is and the more it taps into players’ creativity, the more it will capture and hold their attention.
For example, Weiss Chocolat challenged its community to guess the theme of its new Easter collection via an open quiz.
Example: For its Easter campaign, Janod offered a Gifts Rain: a popular format that makes people want to try their luck again in the hope of qualifying for the prize draw.
Use these Easter competition ideas as inspiration for your next campaign. Choose from our interactive game mechanics according to your sales objectives and offer your audience a memorable gaming experience!
