5 Fresh Marketing Ideas for Spring

Why is “spring cleaning” a thing? If you asked marketers or retailers that question, they may say, “Well, because spring is a slow season for sales so there’s not much else to do.”To that I say, “Oh, contraire!” Springtime is a great time to launch a marketing campaign for a few reasons:

• There’s less competition for email, ad views, and sales
• After Christmas, your business is still fresh in consumers’ minds
• Running a marketing campaign is more fun than cleaning things(!)

And in the midst of spring comes spring break - a week popular with families and kids who are looking to travel, shop, and blow off a little of their wintertime blues. Use this opportunity to reach out to your audience with a contest, giveaway or sale announcement.With that said, I’ve rounded up a few great examples of marketing campaigns that use Spring Break as their theme. All of these examples showcase a campaign strategy that almost any business could try:

Give Away Some Sunny Days

In the marketing world, giveaways are a beautiful thing - they’re very simple and inexpensive to execute. Collecting entries and choosing a winner is often seamless, and with a meaty, relevant (to your business) prize, you can collect lots of entries to beef up your email list with quality leads.The prize in this Spring Break Escape is both meaty and relevant to the contest’s host - Appleton Airport. Travel is a favorite activity for spring breakers desperate for a dose of vitamin D after a long winter. Appleton Airport is giving away a trip worth $1,500 and allows everyone who enters to pick “your favorite sunny destination” as the prize.This clever contest undoubtedly raked in the entries with a perfect spring-break related prize.

Ponying up a perfect prize has another benefit - you can leverage that prize to collect unique info about your audience. Typically, the rule of thumb for your giveaway’s entry form is: the fewer fields, the better. In other words, the more fields you have in your form, the more likely potential participants will think it’s too much work to fill out and abandon ship.In Jägermeister’s Spring Break Experience giveaway, participants were asked to answer a few questions in addition to sharing their name and email address in order to be entered into the drawing. Your business may not be dying to know “Which Creature of the Night are you?” as Jägermeister was, but perhaps knowing a birthdate, a geographical location, age or gender of people who enter will be useful for marketing at some point down the road.

Keep it Fun

Thoughts of spring break conjure more than just sunny travel escapes. High school and college kids get a week of freedom from their academic pursuits. The music group Dirty Heads took advantage of this “free” time and asked participants to post a photo or video to Instagram of themselves rockin’ out to a particular track on the Dirty Heads album. The winner would get a spot in the band’s music video.As much as a lengthy entry form can cause someone to abandon entering a contest, so can the number of steps, or effort it takes to enter. In form-optimization research, findings show that even reducing your number of form fields from 4 to 3 can increase entries by as much as 50 percent. By understanding how much one extra form field can impact your contest’s participation, you can also understand how asking participants to actually create a video can impact participation rates. However, Dirty Heads was strategic in the timing of their contest. Spring Break offered the perfect opportunity for their target audience to film a video and submit it.

Photo contests are perfect in the spring time - not only because students’ heads aren’t buried in textbooks, but also because people take the opportunity to get out and about, creating photo-perfect moments.Another way to run a photo or video contest - void of any barriers to entry - is to collect photos or videos with a hashtag. In this type of contest, entries are pulled in when they’re hashtagged with #springbreakfun. If you include a voting mechanism in your contest, participants will promote your campaign as a means to get more votes, helping you to raise awareness for your brand.

Spring Clean Your Inventory

Maybe a giveaway isn’t on your radar, but announcing a spring sale could be your best bet to boost sales and make way for fresh, new inventory. This Toyota dealership combined a sales announcement with a short form to generate a list of ripe leads. The spring cleaning theme hints that the discounts will be hefty, as the dealership cleans out old inventory to make way for the new stuff.

The rush of the holidays is behind us, but that doesn’t mean your marketing efforts can start collecting dust. Keep up the momentum and kick off a contest or giveaway, or announce a sale. Check out these templates that can help you build one all on your own.

Create your spring contest now

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