Google’s tips on how brands can pull the bunny out of the hat this Easter
Google’s Alison Lomax offers brands advice on how to discover their playful side and sweeten Easter shoppers.
Alison Lomax
As we near our favourite spring holiday, Google searches for ‘easter marketing’ are already surging. Easter will be a key event for brands to increase their market share and prioritise mobile. Here’s how brands can tune into key consumer trends and discover their playful side.
1: Play around
Easter is a playful time, so brands should be playful, too. To prepare for this fun family holiday, parents are looking for new ideas for spending time with their kids. Brands can be present here by sharing helpful content. For example, popular content on YouTube includes how-to footage on decorating Easter eggs (more than 240,000 videos) and Easter eggs hunts (over 260,000 videos and counting).
Speaking of egg hunts, these are becoming more and more popular, with UK searches on Google for “Easter egg hunt ideas” growing by 75 per cent from 2013 to 2014. So far Cadbury is still going strong with its Easter egg trail campaign coming up as a top result in searches. It’s a great example of how brands can embed themselves with loved traditions.
A tip from us: old traditions die hard: “Easter bonnet” remained a surprisingly popular search term in the UK in 2014, and looks like it’s up for grabs for nimble brands out there!
2: Join in for the first BBQ of the season
Warmer weather and additional hours of sunshine mean UK consumers are keen to spend more time outside. For brands out there that are looking into building relationships with their audience by aligning with their passions, the first spring picnic is a great opportunity. BBQs will be an increasingly popular activity this spring, with searches set to increase by 140 per cent [Google Trrends, 2015].
Easter BBQ-themed competitions are a great opportunity for reward prizes or using this theme for creative content marketing. After all, food and drink is the fastest growing category on YouTube, for both men and women, with 2.4x increase in subscriptions to the top 20 cooking and food channels on YouTube [YouTube Insights, 2014].
Our tip – why not tap into this growth by partnering with famous creators such as Jamie Oliver or the up-and-coming YouTube stars like DJ BBQ who have a direct connection to loyal and engaged food lovers?
3: Sweeten the deal with chocolate
Easter provides the ideal excuse for buying, giving and devouring chocolate. So while we all expect chocolate searches to increase around this time, what is surprising is the boom of queries coming from mobile devices. These have gone through the roof last year, increasing by 88 per cent [Google internal data].
For brands that specialise in chocolates and sweets, this makes a mobile-friendly online presence absolutely essential. Being available on all devices and making ads actionable with click to call buttons will bring cocoa-craving consumers closer to your products, at every point along the path to purchase.
“Easter eggs online” is always a popular search around this time of year, but it seems many consumers are looking to go bigger and better. Our tip – get an egg-celent search presence by optimising for the more ambitious keywords like “luxury Easter eggs” and “giant Easter egg” [Google internal data].
These are a just a few of the ways brands can pull the bunny out of the hat and reach their fun-loving audiences. Easter is a great opportunity to inject creativity into your marketing, super-sizing search terms, experimenting with creative formats on mobile and curating great content.
Alison Lomax is head of brand solutions at Google