Playing the fool in marketing

For April Fools Day this year, we decided to use the opportunity to promote some recently updated courses and have a bit of fun on our social media channels. We generally use a friendly, professional tone across all of our marketing communications but I’ve wanted to try a more relaxed approach on social media for a while and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a go to see if it had any effect on our reach and engagement.

We are currently updating three of our Short Courses – Expressive Arts, FoodWise and Leadership. Our Short Courses are widely used in formal and non-formal settings by 13–19 year olds and are our most popular product at ASDAN. We decided to create some fake Short Course titles, related to the three updated courses above, to post about on April Fools Day, including Brexit in relation to Leadership, Unicorn Food in relation to FoodWise and Dark Arts in relation to Expressive Arts. We used the hashtag #TheresAnASDANForThat, as our wide range of flexible courses is one of the things our customers regularly give positive feedback on in our annual customer survey.

 We focused on Facebook and Twitter, rather than LinkedIn, as I felt these were the most appropriate platforms for this type of campaign.

The data spoke for itself in terms of the success of the campaign. Our engagement on Facebook increased by over 1,000% for the week, with page followers up by 133%. On Twitter, our impressions rose by over 400% on the day and we had the highest amount of engagement we have seen in over a year.

I really enjoyed working with our team to create this campaign. Thank you to ASDAN’s Design and Creative Manager, Jemma Davies, for creating such brilliant and inspired book covers for the fake courses. I’m now feeling inspired to work on some more imaginative campaigns for our social media channels to ensure that we’re providing varied and engaging content for our followers.

Did you spot any particularly creative April Fools Day campaigns on social media?