12 Easter competition ideas to help you crack your springtime marketing campaigns

When you think of the big-hitting holidays, what comes after Christmas? If you’re not thinking about Halloween, you’ve gotta be thinking about Easter, right?

Well there’s no better way for your business to make quarter two count than by using gamification and online contests to complement the playful nature of Easter. Playing games and pageantry are hardwired into the cultural juggernaut that is this holiday, with the first associations for many being Easter egg hunts, decorating eggs, egg tapping, and depending on what country you’re in, Easter parades.

Quite how Easter became the chocolate and bonnets holiday is an article for a different channel, all we’re going to concern ourselves with here are original contest ideas and marketing games you can use to connect with audiences this Easter.

Warning: While there are, by necessity, some positively rotten egg-based puns in this article, because we value your happiness, every effort has been made to spare your eyes from the bottom-of-the barrel ones you’ll be used to and expecting: your egg-cellents, egg-ceptionals, and suchlike.

1. The Easter Bunny’s Big Score (Pacman)

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Customising a classic arcade game like Pacman to the tropes of Easter is a sure fire way to captivate your audience whatever your business.

Meet a rabbit called George, AKA the Easter Bunny. He’s got chocolate eggs to hand out, and a gifting schedule to keep, but a skulk of foxes have stolen his basket and scattered its contents to lure our hero into trouble.

Invite your audience to hop a few pixels in George’s paws, as he risks life and limb to retrieve as many of his chocolate eggs as possible without being eaten by the foxes, and ultimately save Easter. Include a leaderboard to add a competitive element to your contest, and you can put the top 10 at the end of your campaign into a prize draw.

Pro tip: A fun concept and a seasonal twist on a classic game is great, but gamification is all about engaging audiences to achieve specific business goals. Are you collecting data? Distributing promotional codes? Or using the intermediate screens on Drimify to share your branded messaging?

Start with your goal, and adapt your concept to support it.

2. Hardboiled Detectives (Photo Contest)

Why not turn your audience into amateur sleuths by customising a Photo Contest around Easter and its traditions?

Let’s say you’re launching a new product or new line in your store(s), and to encourage footfall, you create a story about a criminal mastermind trying to sabotage the holiday. Every day on your social media you can drop clues to the villain’s activities, and every member of your audience able to visit your store, solve the clues, and submit photographic evidence that leads to the ultimate arrest earns a ticket into a prize draw.

The best part of the story? Once all the evidence has been collected, it comes together to form a final riddle, the solving of which will lead users to a hidden page on your website where they’ll find a form through which they can collect a unique discount code.

An adaptation of this concept is a great way to create a phygital campaign around your store, departments, shopping centre, or mall this Easter, using the clues to drive footfall to strategic locations and displays.

Pro tip: Such a concept can sound fanciful written down, but when you go hard on the attention to detail, audience’s will suspend their disbelief. Make it fun, make it user-friendly, tell a story, offer tangible prizes and promote it, and there’s a high chance people will play along and form a real connection with your business.

3. Hot Cross Bundles (Slot Machine)

Line up 3 hot cross buns on the Slot Machine, and win a bundle! Metaphorically of course!

Whether the prize is the latest product you’ve released, or a unique discount code, the Drimify Slot Machine can be customised as a visually compelling experience that can distribute multiple prizes over a single campaign.

Tailor it in any number of ways to best serve your Easter campaign.

4. Eggheads: The Big Easter Quiz (Quiz)

Easter can seem simple on its surface, but how did we get to chocolate eggs? Where did the bunny come from? Why is a 15,000 egg omelette being thrown together in southern France? And how come in Norway it’s become associated with crime novels and TV shows?

People love trivia and interesting facts (the pub quiz is beloved the world over), so build one around this holiday to engage your audiences to learn about their preferences and direct them to your targeted messaging.

Pro tip: Know your audience. If your customer base is academic faculty members and PhD candidates, by all means challenge them, but making your quiz impossibly hard will likely disengage your audience. The Quiz format is so versatile you can adapt your creation from an open answer format to something as simple as true or false scenarios about wacky global Easter traditions.

5. Easter Parade (Voting Gallery)

Speaking of Easter traditions, one way fashion brands can use gamification to tap into the spirit of Easter is by customising a Voting Gallery around the Easter Parade concept – essentially an Easter procession where people stroll along in all their finest attire.

There are a couple of ways you could do this. The first would be to start by customising a Photo Contest where you invite users to send in their best looks incorporating your clothing, then connect it to your Voting Gallery, inviting your audience to vote for the most creative and innovative, with the winners being treated to an expenses paid shopping spree or a generous voucher.

The second way would be to use the Voting Gallery to display innovative new styles and concepts you’re looking to introduce to next year’s line, with the votes counting towards your new line, essentially giving your audience – the people who buy your clothing – an input in how you take things forward. As well as ensuring your new line is something your audience wants, you’re gathering information on customer preferences and tastes.

6. Conneggt Four (Connect Four)

Swap the counters for Easter eggs with an Easter-themed and branded version of the classic Connect Four game!

Challenge your users to play 3 games against the computer, and use the intermediate screens to collect data, preferences, and even include branded messaging like videos.

Including a leaderboard adds an extra competitive element – not only, can they win 1 out of 3, 2 out of 3, or do a clean sweep, but how spectacularly can they win? Getting into the top 40 at the end of your campaign gets them entered into a prize draw.

Pro tip: Your leaderboard from your Drimify can app can exist wherever you have an internet connection. During your campaign have it as a link in your bio, and have it displayed on a screen in stores or other physical locations.

7. Fitter & Faster in 40 Days (Advent Calendar)

Just because most people are using Easter as a good excuse to go into a sugar coma doesn’t make it the exclusive playground of confectioners and chocolatiers. Brands operating in the fitness industry have ample opportunities to subvert the tradition to boost brand awareness and build connections with their customers.

Take the concept of Lent as your Easter holiday hook: people traditionally give up some vice or bad habit for 40 days from Ash Wednesday to the week before Easter, but if the name of the game is self-improvement, why not turn it into a digital calendar where people can embark on not just a fitness journey, but a 360-degree levelling up process to form the habits of a healthy, sustainable lifestyle.

On specific dates over the course of 40 days, you can release new games and pieces of content that educate people on how to live healthier lives, how to build exercise routines, and how to stay injury free in the process, and how to eat better and what the food they’re eating actually means.

Including instant win games at various intervals allows you to distribute discount codes and prizes like exercise equipment, kit, or a free subscription to a healthy eating meal-kit service.

8. Easter Egg Hunt (Dynamic Path™)

The classics never die, they just evolve…

Utilising Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ you can gamify a physical space like a shopping mall, a department store, or a public attraction like a Zoo or a theme park with a multi-level playable experience.

You put passwords in different locations to unlock the different levels and games, which in turn allows players to win prizes while they absorb your branded information and head to the strategic areas of your physical space.

9. Egg Smasher! (Bubble Shooter)

If you don’t hard boil your eggs or eat them fast, they get smashed, and if they’re part of this customised Bubble Shooter, they’ve got no chance!

Upload 9 different egg designs and invite your audience to group them in 3s or more to smash them open and earn points!

Pro tip: Gamification is about pulling on psychological levers, with a major one being the innate human desire to compete. Include a leaderboard at the end of the experience and encourage your audience to do their level best to rise to the top.

10. Easter Beaster (Combo™)

Why not not go super hard on Easter and hit your audience with a customised Combo™? This is where you engage them with an initial experience – maybe the Eggheads Easter Quiz, then send them to a round of The Easter Bunny’s Big Score, and finally, onto a customised Spin the Wheel where they have a chance to win a prize. You can use the Combo™ to make all sorts of combinations, long or short, for sustained user engagement and data gathering.

If you’re including a data collection form at the start of your Combo™, this information will carry on to each game, and because they go directly from one experience to the next, you can space out more branded content while still delivering rapid-fire experiences.

11. So Many Eggs, Only One Basket (Basketball)

Quite literally, invite your audience to put all their eggs in one basket with a customised Basketball Game!

Okay, so it’s a doomed buzzer-beater attempt from full court for an Easter game, but Easter’s not quite like Thanksgiving or Christmas with their sporting traditions, so the closest we can get would be customising a Basketball Game a little bit earlier as a promotion that ties into March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament.

Other options: If basketball’s not on brand, or if a relevant sporting event is happening at Easter that it makes business sense for you to get involved in, Drimify’s also got game engines you can customise for American football, football (or soccer), and rugby, with many more being developed for the platform.

12. Easter Tableau (Puzzle)

Whether to you Easter means frenzied egg hunting, ravenous chocolate consumption, or all that Easter involves for your religion, the universally agreed upon commonality for all factions, be they commercial or spiritual, is spending time with loved ones. With that in mind, why not customise a digital Puzzle for an Easter scene that’s relevant to your brand?

Make it something quick and easy that someone can scan off a QR code on your physical advertisements and play through as they take the train to their Easter dinner, or make it a more challenging, multi-level puzzle experience that people might take turns completing.

Flip the script: If families doing jigsaws by the fire isn’t dynamic enough for your brand, include a scoreboard and challenge players to recreate the images faster. A little tweak can make what some may think of as a sleepy passtime into a rapid-fire engagement experience.

Expert advice

By incorporating gamification into your Easter marketing strategy, you can provide your customers with unique, engaging, and memorable experiences on this varied but playful occasion. Whether it’s through contests, online challenges, or phygital experiences, gaming helps strengthen connections with your audience, builds customer loyalty, and creates excitement around your brand.

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