8 Tips for Planning Your April Fool’s Day Marketing

The day everybody gets a free pass to joke around with friends, colleagues, or even companies and big brands: April Fool’s Day! You might have already come across several business websites featuring funny redesigns, hilarious in-app features, and other innovative strategies that make you giggle. Why not jump on the bandwagon? 

Staying afloat amidst the competition requires an active online presence that gets people talking about your brand. Capitalize on occasions such as this one to ensure that people think of your brand as one that not only offers great products, but also carries a memorable personality.

Offer Hilariously Fake Products

Fake products are an amazing way to generate hype around your brand and attract attention. Advertise products with hilarious unrealistic features or services that sound too good to be true (because they are!). Such offers often get viral on social media platforms. Use visually appealing social media campaigns, posters, and banners for advertising such product lineups. 

For example, McDonald’s came up with a hilarious idea of selling sauce pots, which were essentially mini milkshakes to dip fries in. It immediately attracted attention and got people talking about the brand more, purely because of how ridiculous the product sounded. Marketing fake products, if done with the right tone-of-voice, can do wonders for your brand.

Be Creative with Customer Data

If your business gathers customer data to enhance the experience of your products and services, get creative and use it humorously. One such company that pulled this off was Spotify. It created ads that used its users’ playlists data hilariously. 

It featured I love gingers that had about 50 songs by Ed Sheeran and a collection of tracks that included Sorry on Valentine’s day. Spotify proved that customer data didn’t only have to sit in databases for basic and general campaigns. You can use said data to make your customers smile on April 1st.

Offer One-Day Special Edition Products

This April Fool’s Day, reinvent some of your existing products and sell special editions only on the 1st of April. One such instance is Burger King, which once sold single fries as a marketing prank.

Alternatively, if you deal with the latest and greatest tech, dial back a decade or two. Sell archaic products, but market them like they are at the top of their game. This approach will spread laughter and generate interest in buying exclusive-edition products for their conspicuous-consumption appeal. 

Offer Comical Features

Show off your sense of humor by implementing an advanced set of tech features that are hilarious yet catchy. This strategy is effective for businesses that deal in electronics. You can release an update for your products that bring hilarious features to all active devices.

Honda Canada is a company that implemented this idea. The car corporation introduced a feature called the Polite Horn. What it did was let drivers act passive-aggressive without being rude by creating the sound “Ahem Ahem” each time someone pressed the horn. 

Offer Unrealistic Discounts and Offers

Discounts and promotional offers are remarkably effective ways to capture attention. However, too-good-to-be-true discounts can immediately grab attention and leave customers wanting to learn more. This way, people will take note of your brand and start looking you up online. 

For instance, if you run a clothing store, you could offer a shirt at an 80% discount or include bundle offers. The important thing is to make this scheme hilariously exclusive by making the offer applicable only for everyone named William. Ask them for valid ID proof before taking the discount. 

Engage your Customers

Do not jump into the April Fool’s Day prank alone; get your customers to join in on the fun too. For instance, you can organize a competition for the funniest prank online in relation to the products or services offered by your brand. 

Other examples include a clothing retailer that rewards customers who create the most hilarious outfit with clothes bought from their store. Yet another could be a pub organizing a competition for the funniest or ugliest cocktail created. Get creative and think about a way to engage with your target audience that relates to the business.

Spread your Prank Effectively

Once you have formulated an April Fool’s Day marketing campaign, decide on a budget and spread the word. Use social media to post news on your hilarious offers and pranks. Use email marketing, online advertisements, or set up a spoof landing page or website. Create fake but hilarious customer testimonials and product descriptions alongside catchy graphics.

When announcing fake products, you could go about it two ways. One is to take the typical approach you would implement when launching a new product or a service. This maintains an air of authenticity and makes your prank funnier in retrospect. The second option is to make it so extremely obvious that anyone looking at it would laugh at the ridiculousness of it.

Stay Committed to Your Prank

Do not spill the beans just after announcing a prank. To ensure that you capture the most attention on this day, fool people for as long as you can. If people know that it is a prank early on, it won’t go far before disappearing into the barrage of April Fool’s Day posts. 

Oreo’s Double Crunch is one such unfortunate example. It could have been a great gag had the brand not immediately revealed that it was a prank for April Fools’ Day. Don’t worry about holding off on the big reveal for too long; pull back the curtains only once you have amassed considerable engagement.