Easter is the second biggest holiday period of the year behind Christmas, and is a fantastic opportunity to market your business to new potential customers. Combining the Easter holidays with your marketing strategy is a great way to increase the performance of the strategy and bring more customers to your business.
We have four great marketing tips to help you make the most of the Easter holidays.
1. Run A Special Easter Promotion
Having a dedicated Easter offer or promotion on will encourage potential customers to respond immediately and gives them a real motivation to come in and spend money in your store. An Easter promotion can also catch people who are in the spirit of the season.
The benefits of running an Easter promotion are:
- Increase Traffic: Discounts serve as a ploy to attract more visitors to your store, which typically leads to increased sales. So by visually capturing the attention of passer-bys and giving potential customers something to look at, you increase the likelihood of them stopping by to check out what you have to offer.
- Opportunity to up-sell: By packaging or bundling products around an “Easter Theme”, you entice visitors to consider buying other non-discounted items. As such, you create an opportunity to up-sell or cross-sell items where you can charge premium prices, thereby generating sales of multiple items rather than a single (discounted) item.
Here are some simple Easter Promotion ideas:
- Easter Sale – Offer 10% off for the Easter Weekend
- “Egg” Discount – 15% discount on all items marked with an Egg
- Easter Cards – Create Egg-shaped cards with special offers
- Basket Bundles – Bundle several items into special Easter gift baskets
Creating a promotion which has the time restraints gives customers a compelling reason to act quickly and buy from you before the promotion ends. Don’t forget to promote your Easter promotions on all your social media outlets as well as through email marketing and other channels.
2. Embrace and Display Your Easter Spirit
Regardless of what products or services you offer, using the right designs and colours can help you better communicate your offering to potential customers. For Easter, start by etting the proper tone and turn your promotional campaigns into profitable sales by theming your marketing materials to mark the occasion. By giving your business an Easter feel, you can derive valuable benefits including:
- Bridge the meaning of the holiday with your product or service
- Give the bargain you have to offer authenticity and a “reason why”.
- Get your business public attention and maybe even free press.
- Draw potential customers to your store.
If you have a store that allow foot traffic, decorate it in an Easter motif and use symbols or imagery such as eggs, bunnies and pretty pink pastels. Restaurant owners should offer an Easter menu or buffet brunch featuring traditional Easter items like lamb and ham.
Here are some examples:
- Easter Decoration – Decorate front display windows in Easter theme
- Dress Up – Have an employee (or yourself) dress up in a bunny costume
- Play On Words – Get your clients “egg-cited” with “egg-stra” savings
- Holiday Stickers – Free Easter-themed stickers for customers
- Easter Food – Easter themed deserts like Easter egg-shaped cakes or cupcakes
The suggestions above are just the tip of the iceberg and while we hope they will spur your creativity, you shouldn’t be limited to the options listed above. Creativity plays a big role when it comes to attracting business; so make the most of your strengths and think outside the box.
3. Organize An Easter Event/Content
Holding a family-focused event (like an Easter egg hunt or photos with the Easter Bunny) is a great marketing tool that is guaranteed to drive traffic to your door. And while kids always seem to have all the Easter fun, everybody loves Egg Hunts, including adults. So to capitalize on this and bring visitors to your store you can organize one where participants stand a chance of winning a gift certificate or one of the items you sell.
Organizing such an event not only shows appreciation for your customers, but also spurs engagement and allows you to promote your business to new potential clients. Here are just a few of the many advantages:
- Create “Buzz” about your business / products
- Boost traffic to your store or website
- Create a positive feeling towards your company
- Get more exposure for your store
- Strengthen the relationship between you and consumers
- Collect new email addresses for future marketing campaigns
So now that you know the value an Easter event can add to your business; here are a some Sure-Fire Easter contest ideas that can help you expand your client base and get people hunting for your products during Easter and beyond.
- Easter Egg Hunt – Invite clients to search for eggs hidden throughout your store
- Bunny Trail – Partner with local businesses to organise a “Bunny Trail”
- Easter Drawing – Visitors enter their email address for a chance to win a special prize
- Costume Content – Prizes/discounts for most creative bunny costume
- Jump For Discount – Give a discount based on how far customers jump
- Easter Trivia – Contest with questions and riddles related to Easter
Whichever contest idea you settle on for this Easter, you can turn it into a very powerful selling tool by having it take place in-store. This will create more foot traffic down your aisles by leading participants past your hottest products.
Before you hold an Easter Egg hunt / contest though, make sure your promotion is legal and complies with the various laws regulating sweepstakes and contests. Do some research and familiarize yourself with local regulations since each state has its own sets of laws, this way you can avoid any potential legal headaches down the line.
4. Launch An Easter Social Media Campaign
From a marketer’s perspective, Easter is a highly anticipated holiday that offers a great chance to get creative with social content. Regardless of what segment your business serves, social marketing is an “in-eggs-pensive” way to cash in on the excitement of this family holiday and get your message out there to the wider community.
Piggybacking on the holiday spirit provides tech-savvy business with a great way to tap into the buzz this fun holiday generates, and capture the attention of their audiences by connecting with them on a more human level. Posting useful and fun holiday-themed content has a better chance of going viral since it relates to a topic that users are already thinking about.
Here are some examples:
- Display Products – Post photos of your Easter products
- Start A Contest – Fans who share your post get a chance to win a special prize
- Fans Show Off – Have your fans post their favourite Easter photos
- Be “Pinteresting” – Showcase your holiday products on Pinterest
- Post Easter Facts – State fun facts relating to the Easter holidays
You can’t go wrong with playing up the holidays when marketing your business on social media. Celebrate in the spirit of the occasion with social fans by putting these ideas to use so you don’t get left out of the conversation when your followers and potential customers are getting excited about the day.
