Happy Halloween! Autumn is one of the best seasons: lovely weather, great activities, and plenty of holidays around the corner. The excitement of Halloween doesn’t end with scary movies and carving pumpkins. Halloween is exclusively about fun; there’s no need to buy presents, and there are no obligations!
These perks make Halloween a great opportunity for B2C businesses to offer deals, show off brand personality, and increase brand awareness. Halloween is second only to Christmas as the most successful holiday in the commercial sector, estimated to reach 8.4 billion dollars. By capitalizing on this opportunity, you’ll be able to increase your customer acquisition and retention!
Dig out your broomsticks and fetch the fake fangs: we’ve compiled some tips that can help you achieve these digital marketing benefits for businesses in every industry during Halloween!
Decorate Your Online Presence With Halloween Content
Ghosts, goblins, and ghouls, oh my! Traditional Halloween decorations are iconic symbols of the season, from pumpkins and fall colours to scary fonts and black cats. Brands can craft beautiful digital marketing content with these clear symbols. Revamp your content by adding creepy messages, spooky fonts, or changing your site’s colour palette to orange and black for the season.
Creating engaging content and layouts for websites and social media profiles can benefit a brand by providing more personality and generating more engagement. When it comes to the names of your products, a little creativity can be beneficial, such as naming red products in your online store to “blood red”. Kylie Cosmetics did this for their ‘Halloween Never Looked So Good’ campaign. As makeup and Halloween go hand-in-hand, they sold special edition cosmetics and changed product names and packaging for the season. Another example is Koala Furniture’s ‘A Ghoulish “Easter Egg” Hunt’ campaign: the company encouraged clients to look over their website for ‘Easter Eggs,’ such as an added skeleton and pumpkin on their about page. This strategy ensured engagement by incentivizing visitors to explore their site on purpose! Just like a witches’ broom, your engagement rate will soar high with this simple yet effective execution!
Offer Treats to Your Customers
Trick-or-treating isn’t just for kids! This year, make it no trick, all treat, for your clientele. Halloween is a fantastic opportunity to offer customers unique discounts and coupon codes. These discounts can be framed as “treats” for Halloween, and a business can distribute them online through their website, emails, and/or social media.
You can host a Virtual Trick-or-Treat Event as a Halloween marketing campaign, where you partner with other businesses to introduce different audiences to one another by giving away free products as part of a promotion. Otherwise, you can include small, themed gifts with purchases for the season so that your company is memorable.
You can even give away discount codes through your email marketing endeavours. Bouqs, a Californian company seen on “Shark Tank,” demonstrated this best. They used a Halloween-themed colour scheme, featured seasonal products, and included a discount code in their newsletters. By using Halloween-themed puns, you engage with clients in a memorable way (even if the puns are terrifyingly bad!).
Share Pictures of Your Team Celebrating Halloween
A major reason why Halloween is such a great holiday is that you can dress up as anything you want: you’re not limited to real or imaginary costumes. This is especially great from a business perspective, as it offers businesses the chance to share their personality with their audience.
Brands should encourage their team to dress up, both with their family and at work! This can help boost team morale, and if you take pictures, they can be used and shared as digital marketing content. Showing your team having fun helps humanize your brand, raises brand awareness, and cultivates a positive brand reputation.
Hold a Costume Contest on Social Media
Photos of your team celebrating Halloween can serve a dual purpose: not only do they promote morale among employees, but they can be used as informational material for a costume contest. Participants can share digital content (such as pictures or videos) of their costumes, and companies can offer prizes for the best or most creative costumes. Although contests for free stuff may seem like old-fashioned Halloween marketing tactics, companies can easily repurpose them to generate brand awareness using social media.
For example, Chipotle runs a yearly promotion offering discounts to customers who wear a costume in-store. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, an in-person contest revolving around Halloween costumes wasn’t the greatest of ideas. Chipotle refreshed their criteria for entering using TikTok. Users recorded videos of themselves morphing into their Halloween costumes and received coupons in return. The top five submissions with the most likes won free burritos for a year. This campaign worked with flying colours, as TikTok’s #Boorito tag currently has 4.2 billion views! In return, this Halloween campaign resulted in increased customer acquisition and retention and boosted the company’s overall sales.
Use These Tips To Boost Your Brand This Halloween
By following these tips in your Halloween digital marketing campaign, you can profit off building relationships with your business’ clientele. You can expect great results when you put your clients under your business’ spell by simply incorporating a Halloween-themed colour palette or holding a costume contest on social media!