How to create an Easter marketing campaign to boost spring high street sales

Easter marketing provides one of the best opportunities to boost high-street sales in spring. Out of Home advertising is a great fit for the occasion, offering an excellent way to capture your audience’s attention and drive more foot traffic during the Easter season. 

These Easter advertising ideas will help you make the most of the biggest seasonal event in the first half of the calendar through the power of digital billboards and multi-channel marketing.

Setting the Stage for Your Easter Campaign

Seasonal marketing is all about creating the right atmosphere to excite and encourage shoppers. That applies to Easter advertising just as much as any other seasonal occasion. These are some of the best ways to set the stage for your Easter marketing campaign.

Digital Billboards to Set the Mood

Digital billboards are a hugely effective channel for setting the right mood for your broader marketing campaign, offering great visibility when you’re targeting high-street shoppers. Create your Easter-themed campaign – focusing on high-impact visuals and concise, attractive messaging – and build an effective distribution strategy by taking advantage of a variety of different billboard formats.

Interactive Easter Elements

Interactive features on your Easter billboards provide opportunities to create even more engaging experiences. You can use a live countdown to create a sense of anticipation in advance of Easter sales, for example, or QR codes to direct billboard viewers to digital content they can view on their phones.

Crafting Compelling Easter Messaging for Shoppers

Your messaging strategy plays an important role in the success of your Easter marketing campaign, whether you’re using billboards or social media. Try these messaging techniques to get better results.

Highlighting Special Offers

Focusing on special offers, discounts, promotions or sale periods in your Easter advertising messaging is one of the best ways to capture demand. It helps create a sense of urgency in your target audience, who want to get the best deal possible on their purchases. 

You can do this effectively in a range of Easter marketing mediums, including billboards. Pair special offer details with Easter-themed images of the relevant products to highlight deals for your customers.

Using Storytelling to Engage

Storytelling is a powerful technique that can boost audience engagement, keeping people interested in your Easter advertising campaign for longer. During Easter, there are some widespread storytelling tropes you can integrate, including Easter-themed characters like bunnies or chicks. Use relatable scenarios and remember to make your adverts fun.

Creating a Sense of Urgency

When crafting messages for your Easter advertising campaigns, aim to use concise, action-oriented language that creates a sense of urgency and encourages immediate action. “Easter Deals Ending Soon” works better to get people in-store quickly than “Easter Deals Available Now”, for example. 

You can try to make these messages thematically relevant to Easter, too, by telling your audience to “Hop In Today!”, for example.

Designing Eye-Catching Easter Digital Billboards

Out of Home advertising relies on eye-catching designs to capture attention. Regardless of what billboard environment your ads are deployed in, these design tips can help maximise the number of impressions your Easter ads generate. 

Seasonal Colours and Festive Designs

Using pastel colours and spring-themed imagery on digital billboards helps capture the Easter spirit and attract attention. Soft pinks, blues and yellows are all associated with Easter from a colour perspective, so prioritise those in your designs. Choosing the right palette of colours will make your ads unmistakably Easter-themed, boosting their impact when they’re deployed at the right time.

Incorporating Easter Symbols

Similarly to colours, there are some symbols that are deeply connected with Easter. Including bunnies, flowers, baby chicks and eggs in your billboard ads will resonate with Easter shoppers, making your designs easily recognisable and reinforcing the seasonal theme.

Balancing Design and Readability

Design is an important part of creating powerful, attention-grabbing and engaging ads, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of readability. Make sure your messaging is always clear and legible, playing with font sizes and contrasting colours to balance attractive design with an ad that’s still easy to read and understand.

Multi-Channel Integration to Maximise Easter Campaign Reach

Digital billboards are great at capturing attention and promoting your Easter products or offers. Combining them with campaigns on other channels can boost overall effectiveness, creating multi-channel experiences that help your brand stand out.

Social Media Amplification

Social media campaigns can act as a natural extension of your Out of Home campaigns. Use consistent messaging and design themes across both to create cohesive multi-channel coverage that boosts overall awareness of your campaign. 

You can also use targeted advertising to prioritise serving ads to social media users in the regions where your billboard campaign is deployed to maximise effectiveness.

Mobile Marketing Tie-Ins

Out of Home connects naturally to mobile marketing, and you can create multi-channel experiences by tailoring your billboard ads to suit mobile users. 

Adding QR codes to ads, for example, gives your audience the chance to engage on a deeper level. You can program these codes to take users to videos covering your Easter promotions, for example, or digital storefronts tailored to suit the Easter theme.

In-Store and Online Promotions

During seasonal periods like Easter, adopting consistent messaging across all of your channels can help to create a unified campaign that drives better results across the board. Synchronising your billboard creative with your in-store and online promotions helps to establish a campaign that engages audiences equally effectively across digital, Out of Home and in-store environments.

Inspiring Easter Marketing Campaign Examples

There are plenty of powerful examples of Easter marketing campaigns to draw inspiration from. These are some of our favourites.

High Street Retail Success Stories

Cadbury leveraged digital billboards to launch a campaign promoting a new Crème Egg design and competition. The ads used dynamic location-specific callouts on Clear Channel’s Adshel Live format to highlight when somebody in the local area had found a “winning” Crème Egg, creating a sense of “FOMO” that prompted action.

Creative Campaigns That Stood Out

Kryo Distillery promoted the Waitrose launch of a new cream liquor beverage through an Out of Home campaign, making use of Clear Channel’s Adshel Live, Billboard Live, Storm and 48-sheet formats. They utilised RADAR to identify locations that would help them target consumers who shopped at Waitrose, alongside proximity criteria that targeted people near pubs.

Lessons Learned from Successful Campaigns

There are lots of ways to make an Easter Out of Home campaign successful, and what constitutes the “right” approach depends on your business and your objectives. However, the two campaigns above have some valuable lessons which you can learn from to ensure your campaign is a success.

The key is to focus on combining Easter-themed messaging, a strong campaign angle and an effective targeting strategy. Don’t rely solely on good visuals or a powerful hook. Also think about where your ads will be seen, and how you can use creativity to maximise the contextual relevance to the ad site. 

Measuring the Success of Your Easter Campaigns

Like any marketing campaign, Easter marketing campaigns should be tracked and analysed comprehensively. This helps ensure that you get insights into the campaign’s impact which you can later use to refine your approach. 

Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

There are diverse KPIs you can consider measuring, depending on the specific objectives you’ve set for your Easter campaign. However, fundamental engagement and sales metrics like foot traffic, campaign engagement rates and sales increases should be at the centre of your measurement strategy as they represent some of the most important marketing outcomes.

Tools for Measuring Effectiveness

Accurately tracking your Easter marketing campaign’s performance relies on having the right measurement tools set up. These will vary depending on what channels your campaign uses, ranging from automatic footfall counters to social media analytics hubs and website analytics platforms like Google Analytics.

Adapting for Future Campaigns

Not only does analysing data from your Easter campaign give you critical insights into how it performed, it also provides plenty of information you can use to refine your approach next time. Look out for the parts of your campaign that had the biggest impact and the parts that fell short of expectations. Then, refine your strategy to improve your results next Easter.

Have some Easter marketing ideas that you want to use to make the most of the seasonal marketing opportunities that Easter presents? Get in touch with us to start planning your Out of Home Easter campaign.