Take this Tweet from CNET writer Steven Shankland, for example. A simple post about a celebratory easter egg game from Google earned him over 800 Retweets and 2,500 likes.
This proves that you don’t need to be the one who spotted the easter egg to feel rewarded. Surfacing the hidden message to one’s own personal network is a reward in itself. That’s what makes easter egg marketing evergreen drivers of social media engagement.
4 Easter egg marketing examples you can learn from
Now that you know some digital easter egg basics, let’s look at how companies use them to drive engagement on social.
1. Harry Styles’s album release
Time to bring it back to Mr. Styles. As you may know, Harry Styles released his third studio album, Harry’s House, in May 2022.
The marketing campaign special database leading up to this release was chock full of easter eggs. From a mysterious website to cryptic Twitter and Instagram accounts, fans received a week’s worth of puzzles to solve.
The messages were clues hinting at the themes and song titles found in Harry’s House. For example, the lyrics in the Tweet above were shared ten days before the first single “As It Was” dropped on April 1st.
At the end of the day
the hype-building tactics worked. Just two hours after it became available to stream, Harry’s House earned the 574 leads for $1.5 in the online furniture store most first-day streams for a pop album released in 2022.
Marketing takeaway: Digital easter eggs are powerful excitement generators. Use them to tease long-awaited product or feature launches.
2. BMW’s Zeus movie
For all intents and purposes, this looks like a regular movie poster.
When actor Arnold Schwarzenegger shared the photo on January 27, 2022, fans assumed he was promoting his latest project. In a way, it hong kong phone number was true. The project just wasn’t a movie.