Best Easter Marketing Campaigns and Ideas of All Times

A candy-infused, ‘chocolate bunnies everywhere’ holiday, Easter is a joyful theme to herald the arrival of spring! So, let’s take a look at the egg-cellent marketing campaigns of the brands from Ikea to Nestlé.

This joyful and entertaining event directly touches the marketing industry, yet it’s so related to According to the National Retail Foundation, Easter holiday last year raked in estimated $18 billion in sales. This year, the average expected spending of people celebrating this year will increase per person — however, the overall amount spent on Easter will be the same, or less than in 2018.

Even though the industry is covered with full of candy, chocolate and other festive food, marketers can utilize the holiday and roll up their sleeves and create the best easter marketing campaigns. FMCG is one of the top industries when it comes to Easter, and working with an FMCG marketing agency might be beneficial if you’re looking for ways to promote your own brand. Besides FMCG brands, IKEA and PETA also did a good job on highlighting the other important stuff by attributing Easter.

Easter Marketing Campaign Ideas

Easter marketing campaigns often involve creating Easter-themed content or products, running promotions or discounts, and leveraging the holiday to create a sense of excitement and anticipation among customers. It can take many different forms, including easter advertising campaigns, social media promotions, email marketing, and in-store displays. The goal here is to reach and engage with customers who are actively seeking out products and services related to the holiday, and to build brand awareness and loyalty by creating a positive association between the brand and the Easter season. To ace the easter marketing campaign game, we’ve listed a few ideas for you to get inspired:

1. Host an Easter Egg Hunt

Hosting an Easter egg hunt in-store or online can be an engaging idea where your customers can search for hidden eggs to win prizes or discounts. It’s an engaging way for people to spend time and become more involved with your business while you market your brand with an easter campaign.

2. Run a Social Media Contest

When there’s a prize at the end, people love to become engaged with your company! It’s a great way to reach out to your existing and potential customers to make sure they meet with your brand. So, you could run an Easter-themed contest on social media, encouraging customers to share photos or videos related to the holiday for a chance to win a prize.

3. A Limited Edition Product

Limited edition series are always more tempting to consumers since less people could own the products they purchase. That is why, creating a limited edition product or series is one of the crucial ways to create the best easter marketing campaigns for your company. You should undoubtedly consider producing a limited-edition product particularly for Easter. Thought should also be given to the product design, which should be sufficiently distinctive to entice clients to purchase them. This could be an Easter-themed flavor or packaging for your existing product, or a brand new product altogether.

There are numerous successful digital marketing agencies that can develop the ideal plan and campaign for your brand if these concepts intimidate you or you are unsure of which one is best for your business.

So let’s jump up, skip and hop around from one amazing campaign to another. Happy Easter!

Best Easter Marketing Campaigns in 2023

The campaigns listed below all successfully leveraged the Easter Holiday to engage customers and promote their products in creative and fun ways. They also used a variety of marketing channels, including TV ads, social media, and email marketing, to reach audiences across multiple platforms. So without further ado, let’s jump up, skip and hop around from one amazing campaign to another!

Lush | Easter Collection

Not just chocolate companies must produce Easter advertisements! Lush, a popular bath and beauty brand, released a range of Easter-themed products each year. In 2021, the collection included products such as a carrot-shaped bubble bar and a bath bomb inspired by Easter eggs.

Nestlé | Alice

Nestlé, one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, highlighted how the Easter holiday makes you feel, rather than focusing on their specific products but the story in their campaign.

In my point of view, all of us is a potential secret fan of Alice In Wonderland from our childhood. In the 60-second clip, you see an oversized-Alice doing average daily activities like taking a shower, commuting to work, and going out with her friends. Then you see her get a train and arrive at her family’s home (still oversized). As soon as her mother (or family member, friend, etc.) opens the door, Alice suddenly shrinks down to the average human size and tagline comes, life makes us grow up; Easter brings us back.

Ikea | Flat Pack Vårkänsla

The main challenge for brands at Easter is – how do they fit into a market that shouldn’t really be theirs. Universally, Ikea knows what they’re famous for: flat packing! And they’ve introduced their flat-pack chocolate easter bunny called Vårkänsla.

As well as the packaging design is such a creative play, Vårkänsla comes along with the instructions on how to build the 3D chocolate bunny. This campaign has gained big traction on social media and news alike for the humorous creativity, yet driving consumers straight into IKEA’s. It is one of the best examples to IKEA’s digital marketing strategy; it is true to the brand, creative and fun while complimenting what they’re known for. For once this is a flat pack we’d be happy to assemble and that’s why we’ve included it.

Deliveroo | Game of Thrones Dragon Eggs

A very clever and good-looking marketing campaign! These colored, sparkly-ish three limited-ed eggs by Deliveroo will be purchasable through the mobile app in a select number of cities in the UK for a bargain price.

Presumably, the company knows their target audience and guessed out that Game of Thrones fans will enjoy the service while ordering their favourite food. The uniqueness of the idea plays to the hype of GoT, and already multiple national news sites have picked up this story – great visibility for the brands.

This is an ideal follow up example to see how they continue to market this campaign digitally and offline.

Cadbury | Live Easter Egg Hunt

Cadbury makes us delight with their specialty, Cadbury Eggs and of course other Easter-themed treats, and with their digital-concepted, creative holiday marketing campaigns.

Last year, the confectionary brand and Ogilvy Melbourne partnered with Facebook360 to create a VR social media marketing campaign and launched the first live 360-degree Facebook video Easter Egg hunt. Users should log in to Facebook and see the 360-degree video feature to scan the virtual landscape and hunt for hidden eggs. The first person to detect the egg and comment the location was rewarded with real chocolate!

Peta | Baby Chicks

Happy happy very far, this is a dark side campaign by PETA. Back in 2014, they released a 40-sec-long video of baby chicks falling in slow motion into trash. Because so, they wanted to emphasize the holiday marketing potential to focus on the fact that billions of newborn chicks are male, and that those males are killed as a waste product of the egg industry every year.

Although PETA is not selling or promoting anything, the organization brings attention via the short film, because celebrating Easter

Haribo | #HuntTheDoubleYolker

This year’s #HuntTheDoubleYolker competition by Haribo, is easy to participate. Users simply need to pick package of the limited edition Starmix from their local food store and see if a ‘double yolker’ egg exists in the package for a chance to win a UK family holiday.

With this relatively small campaign being marketed across their brand packaging and social media, it’s exciting to see how consumers react and engage with this non-chocolate, ‘eggy’ campaign.

Carlsberg | #IfCarlsbergDidChocolateBars

What does a chocolate bar mean to you? According to Carlsberg, apparently it’s a bar! The brand’s very entertaining campaign reputates in the marketing world, #IfCarlsbergDidChocolateBars is a real witty one. They know that candy and chocolate have a large role in the Easter holiday and wanted to share with the world how it would look if they dabbled in the candy industry. They built a box and wrapped it like a candy bar. And it’s a brewery, pub-alike place, all covered with chocolate. In this way, one of the best OOH ad was made by a liquor brand.

All of these Easter ads did a wonderful job reminding us that sometimes we can get caught up in the materialistic aspects of the holidays and forget what’s really important: being kind and showing love to others; whether it be your friends, and spend your holidays with your most loved ones!