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Easter is a key gifting season for Thorntons. With growing competition in the Easter egg market from retailers and confectionary brands alike, they needed to gain an edge in order to drive traffic, and increase overall brand visibility and equity online. Our challenge was to own the conversation around Easter eggs.

We created 'The Ultimate Guide to Easter Egg', with the aim of driving search visibility and cementing the brand's synonymy with Easter - while providing a great overall digital experience. Following detailed analysis of search trends around the topic of Easter eggs, we crafted a piece of long-form content themed around those trends, packed with keywords to be picked up by search engines.

This content was then turned into a colourful landing page featuring behing the scenes imagery, call-out facts, profiles of long serving members of staff; all with mega-nav and scroll-to functionality for easy navigation. The launch was supported by blogger outreach (including an exclusive blogger event), PR, agile email content and eCRM; and was supported by Thorntons' Social team for maximum exposure.

But the jewel in the campaign's crown was to open the doors to the Thorntons Easter egg making process - via a fully interactive, CGI animated chocolate factory overlaid on the long-form content page. We also introduced a layer of gamification, by hiding wrapped Easter eggs around the factory to be found and collected in return for entry into a prize draw to win a tour of the real Thorntons factory and a year's supply of chocolate.

15,000 users interacted with the content a total of almost 30,000 times. 80% of these users had not previously interacted with Thorntons' content. Search visibility for both branded and non-branded terms increased by 2% and Thorntons held the #1 search position for 'Easter eggs' in 2016 (vs #4 in 2015).