When it comes to consumer spending, there’s no doubt that Christmas is the dominant holiday period in the UK.
However, Brits also spend huge amounts during the Easter festivities, with customers buying a staggering £395 million-worth of Easter eggs alone in 2018.
This is part of a wider and more diverse spend too, so there’s ample opportunity for small businesses to promote their products or services and increase turnover significantly during the upcoming Easter period.
In this post, we’ll look at how you can promote your business on social media this Easter.
Getting Started – How to Plan Your Strategy
Modern advertising campaigns tend to be integrated and built across a diverse range of channels, with social media marketing representing a particularly specialist niche.
However, there are a number of universal rules to keep in mind when planning your campaigns, which we’ve outlined below:
Define Your Target Audience
Accurately defining a target audience can be challenging, even when using accessible and high-traffic channels on social media.
The good news is that most social channels enable you to micro-target your audience in tremendous detail, affording you in-depth understanding about both existing and new customers.
Of course, retaining existing customers is thought to be at least five-times cheaper than acquiring new ones, so you should start this process by compiling and analysing data on your current consumer base.
You can then use various social media analytics to drill deeper into this data and create an accurate buyer persona, which can also be utilised to help understand the motivations and behaviours of those most likely to purchase your products and services.
What Social Platforms do Your Target Customers Use?
This will also afford you an opportunity to see which social platforms are used by your audience, enabling you to structure your social campaigns, optimise their efficiency and increase the ROI on your overall marketing spend.
While you may consider resources such as Facebook and Instagram to be universally popular and key staples of your campaign, for example, social platforms such as Pinterest are considerably more niche despite boasting more than 416 million active monthly users.
To this end, 71% of Pinterest users are female, while a further 35% are aged between 35 and 49. This represents a clearly defined audience, and one that may only offer value to certain brands.
To offer some context, the Imperfect Foods brand utilised Pinterest to gain crucial audience insights and market their unique selling features as part of a wider social campaign.
This was built on the premise that women remain statistically more likely to perform tasks such as grocery shopping in the US and the UK, with figures also suggesting that the female demographic will control 75% of all household spending by 2028.
Pinterest’s female dominated user base was therefore highly valuable to Imperfect Foods, who produce and sell boxes filled with so-called “ugly” fruits and vegetables that don’t meet the visual standards for sale in grocery outlets.
So, they launched a series of Pinterest ads targeting relevant and insightful keywords such as “healthy eating” and “sustainability”, raising significant awareness of their brand while simultaneously optimising engagement and online conversion rates.
During the course of the campaign, they also discovered that their target audience was interested in personal finance, enabling the brand to tailor future content and messaging promoting the affordability of their products.
Set Clear Objectives and Make Use of KPIs
In addition to identifying target customers and understanding how your audience uses social media, you’ll also be required to set key campaign objectives.
These should be underpinned by relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which refer to critical indicators of progress towards an intended result. These can be used to measure the success or otherwise of your campaign against a number of key metrics, from a desired number of new sign-ups or leads to increased sales and conversions.
The key is that your objectives are clearly defined and attainable, while the KPIs that you use to measure them should be able to provide objective evidence of progress and accomplishment.
For example, let’s say that your social campaign is intended to drive sales through an exclusive, limited-time promotion.
In this instance, you can attribute a unique hashtag or promo code to the promotion, utilising this across relevant social channels and offline alternatives such as billboards (so long as they’re used as part of the same campaign).
The hashtag or promotional code can be used to track the number of customers who engage with the content and subsequently convert, creating an estimated conversion rate that serves as an insightful KPI.
This may also indicate the quality of the opportunities and leads generated through the campaign, helping to improve campaigns and your primary messaging going forward.
This is certainly more effective than counting likes or viewing how many people have retweeted your content!
Carry Out Competitor Research
Finally, it’s important to conduct competitor research, in order to determine how rival brands are using social media and interacting with their target audience through this type of channel.
The aim here isn’t to copy your competitors or mirror their social campaigns, but instead to learn from brands that operate in a similar market and avoid the type of seismic mistake that can undermine your company’s marketing spend.
You can even carry this out as part of a wider competitive analysis, which seeks to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals and how these compare to your own.
One element of this may compel you to carry out research into the keywords used by competitors as part of their social media campaigns. We’ve seen how important keywords can be when targeting customers through social channels, with Imperfect Foods utilising simple relevant and simple phrases to engage users on Pinterest.
With competitor keyword analysis, you’ll identify the main keywords that your competitors rank for, while attempting to calculate how they achieved their rankings.
More specifically, you’ll be able to identify any keywords that you’ve failed to rank for and your competitors subsequently have, while also assessing potentially valuable content topics and discovering relevant longtail keywords.
There are a couple of excellent tools for this purpose; namely SEMRush’s Competitor Research tool and Moz’ Keyword Explorer.
The former analyses a raft of domain metrics such as traffic, organic rankings and keyword gaps, while the latter is great for finding new keywords and drilling down deeper into competitor strategies.
What are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing?
It’s also important to understand the benefits of social media marketing, particularly if you’re to leverage these fully and make the most of your advertising spend.
So, here are three of the biggest advantages of social media marketing in the digital age!
Increased Brand Awareness
We’ve seen something of a sea change in the field of marketing over time, particularly when it comes to the best channels for driving increased brand awareness.
Historically, it was television that was the most widely used channel for achieving this objective, but the landscape has shifted markedly as technology and the way in which we consume content has changed over time.
In fact, television is no longer the ‘go to’ advertising tool for building brand awareness offline, with Nielsen revealing that out-of-home (OOH) media is now more effective at target customers and driving increased activations through Twitter and Instagram.
From an online channel perspective, social media definitely has a natural advantage over television, especially when you consider its accessibility and capacity for connecting billions of people from across the globe in real-time.
For example, Facebook currently has in excess of 44.84 million active users in the UK alone, while the platform is accessed on a daily basis by 44% of the total population.
This affords brands instant and optimal exposure levels, unlike traditional television which imposes cost, regional and time slot restrictions on advertisers while also suffering from a sustained decline in viewing figures.
This decline is particularly pronounced amongst 18 and 34 year olds, who spent approximately 15.3% less time watching live and time-shifted TV in Q1 2020.
Conversely, the same demographic spent three-times as long consuming content on web and social apps through their smartphones, highlighting a seismic shift that should pique the interest of brands.
Overall, 91% marketers who create dedicated social media pages and spend regular time each week on sharing content see increased levels of brand exposure over time, and there’s no sign of this trend abating anytime soon.
Engage Customers and Build Relationships
It’s thought that the average US adult spends 38 minutes per day on Facebook, while 16 to 24 year olds spend a median amount of three hours a day browsing social media channels as a whole.
These are telling statistics, as they suggest that customers are increasingly willing to interact with brands on social media.
As a result, you can leverage social channels to connect with customers at a time when they’re most likely to engage with sponsored and promotional messaging, so long you’re not overly intrusive and rely on high quality content.
This also supports the use of sites such as Instagram to target younger audiences, with 58% of Millennials admitting that they don’t mind watching ads to support their favourite digital personalities or influencers (despite being increasingly inclined to use ad-blockers on at least one of their devices).
80% of Millennials and younger social users also think that ads are necessary for brands, so there’s clearly an opportunity for brands to engage users and encourage further interaction within this space.
This also translates into far higher levels of brand loyalty on social media, as customers generally consider social platforms as service channels through which they can interact directly with brands.
Once again, this trend is particularly prominent amongst younger audiences and Millennials, with the latter widely considered to be the most loyal consumer demographic in history.
Studies also show that this particular segment is 62% more loyal to brands that regularly engage with them directly through social media, so platforms such as Facebook and Instagram can clearly enable you to build sustainable relationships with your customers.
Drive Traffic and Increase Sales
We spoke earlier about how social media channels can boost exposure and brand awareness, so it stands to reason that it can also drive increased traffic online.
More specifically, social media allows you to build awareness and recognition outside of your core demographic and existing customer base, who are used to searching for your brand using the same keywords that you already rank well for.
As a result of this, you’ll incrementally increase traffic volumes with every relevant social channel that you add to your marketing mix, while creating a comprehensive content strategy (that also features syndicating content across as many platforms as possible) organically optimises the reach of your business.
As we’ve already touched on, social media can also help you to optimise your sales conversion rates.
This has much to do with increased levels of exposure and visibility, of course, while the deployment of campaign specific hashtags and promotional codes also drives improved and measurable results.
Another key element of this is social media’s innate ability to promote positive messaging and ensure that your consumer interactions are warm and humanised.
This applies to both the type of content that you publish and your real-time conversations with customers, the latter of which provide unique opportunities to engage individuals when they’re taking an active interest in your company.
Our Top Ideas for Easter Social Media Campaigns
Finally, it’s time to consider some specific Easter ideas and inspiration that can fuel your social media campaigns, as you look to create engaging content that leverage the holiday season.
So, aside from creating limited-time, Easter-themed promotions, what steps can you take to launch a successful social campaign this April?
Create Themed and Seasonally Relevant Content
While your brand may not sell products that have a direct affiliation with Easter, this doesn’t mean that you can’t leverage the holiday to your advantage.
One of the most obvious ideas is to update your social media cover photographs with seasonal images, whether this is playful or something as simple as capturing a meadow or garden during springtime.
Obviously, it’s better to use an engaging, fun and colourful image where possible, as this will help to capture the attention of customers online.
Easter is also synonymous with various foods, traditions and cultural events, which you can leverage to create innovative and relevant content that ties directly into your brand.
For example, let’s say that you’re a food-oriented business that sells items such as ingredients or cooking equipment. In this instance, you could publish delicious Easter-specific recipes that share step-by-step instructions for recreating them, while subtlety reinforcing your brand’s identity and the products that it sells.
You can leverage a similar hook even if you sell practical items such as kitchen utensils or cordless vacuum cleaners, so long as you use primary messaging or imagery that can be linked to your visual branding.
To make this creative process easier, we’d recommend creating a comprehensive 12-month content calendar, which allows you to identify key events and generate relevant content ideas. These can then be pencilled in and created ahead of time, allowing you to focus on aspects such as quality and delivery.
Encourage User Generated Content
If you intend to target young families this Easter, you may find that user generated content (UGC) offers the best potential outcomes.
This type of content has universal value all year round, of course, with studies proving that ads based on UGC receive four-times higher click-through rates. They also produce a 50% decline in the cost-per-click compared to average ads, enabling them to really optimise your marketing spend.
UGC also tends to be organic in its nature and highly engaging, while it also enables you to interact directly with customers and encourage them to send in their own content.
From the perspective of the Easter holiday, you could encourage parents to send in their kids’ Easter drawings, or ask customers to send photographs of them using your products within an Easter context (such as families utilising a branded whisk to make a seasonal Simnel cake!).
The key is to encourage engagement and creativity within a broad Easter theme, while ensuring that you utilise your branding and its core colours to drive recognition amongst consumers.
Hold Competitions, Giveaways and Virtual ‘Egg Hunts’
On the topic of engagement, you can also utilise social media to host interactive competitions and digital egg hunts across a range of channels.
For example, you could create image-led social media posts (on Facebook or Instagram) that feature hidden Easter eggs, before asking customers to locate them. This can be used to underpin a limited-time competition online, which will see the winner awarded with a prize or tangible discount.
You could also use egg or Easter-themed imagery to drive a caption competition, with the most creative or humorous entry also receiving a prize that serves as an incentive for further brand interaction.
Encouraging customers to send in fun Easter eggs is another great idea that ties into the notion of UGC, while this introduces a fresh dimension to your marketing campaign and truly captures the excitement of the holiday.
Ultimately, the key is to create competitions and promotions that drive high levels of interaction and actively engage customers, with a view to either optimising short-term sales or driving awareness amongst new consumer demographics.
The Last Word
There’s no doubt that social media marketing offers an affordable and accessible way of promoting your business in 2021, while it also provides you with access to a potentially huge target market.
You should definitely look to leverage this during Easter, which drives increased holiday spending and allows brands to create unique and relevant content that taps into this trend.
By following this guide, you can hopefully optimise your sales this Easter while also increasing awareness of your brand across new demographics!
