Whether you like to go trick or treating or you prefer to hide behind the curtains, now is the time to plan ahead and prepare your marketing campaign for the spooky Halloween season.
Halloween always falls on the 31st of October with celebrations getting bigger and better every year. UK consumer spending for this celebration has also been increasing every year, rising from £230m in 2013 to £474m in 2019.
We’ve put together some guidance to help you create a spooktacular marketing strategy to maximise your sales in the lead-up to this special day.
Do you struggle to create engaging content on your social media platforms?
Are you unsure how to use awareness days to boost your profile?
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Halloween Marketing
Get planning! Before you even launch your Halloween marketing campaign ideas, you need to plan them out. We recommend your first task is to put together a content and activity calendar. This will enable you to keep track of all activity and ensures you will deliver a targeted marketing campaign.
Ad-hoc marketing, without any forward planning, is more challenging to manage and can have a negative impact on your results. You also risk confusing your messaging and therefore also confusing your target audience. Having a marketing calendar of activities helps when drafting social posts, emails and any off-line activity you have planned.
Halloween Marketing Campaign Ideas
So, what makes a Halloween campaign deliver results? Well for us it is all about consistency in the messaging and linking your marketing to the products or services you are selling.
Campaigns that work well are ones that encourage engagement and give you the opportunity to reach existing and new customers as well as an opportunity to gather customer data to build into your contacts database.
Competitions are probably the most obvious way of creating engagement. Our biggest piece of advice would be to remember to KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Your audience has a short attention span, and they are unlikely to go to lots of effort to win prizes. Think about data collection and linking this to your competition and any follow-up marketing you may send to them.
Competitions are one thing, but there are plenty of other ideas that could make a successful campaign.
Consider your in-store displays and advertising. Think about any special offers or promotions you want to put on in the weeks leading up to Halloween.
As part of the in-store or online displays, think about specific themed products and bundles you might want to offer. These can be promoted in-store or through your marketing channels, including social media by way of a Halloween ‘must have’ list.
Halloween Email Marketing Ideas
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers and market your Halloween campaign. But first off – ask for permission from your email list. Halloween isn’t something that everyone celebrates, whether it is by personal choice, religious beliefs or otherwise, so before you embark on your email campaigns ask the contacts on your database if they want to receive emails around Halloween promotions. If they don’t, they can tell you and it really does show that you are thinking of your customers and what they are wanting to hear about.
When you are producing an email marketing campaign, our tips for things to look out for and be aware of include:
Your subject line. The most important part of your email. The key to whether a reader opens your email or ignores it. Try some of the following:
- Drive Fear of Missing Out
- Invoke Curiosity
- Be Funny
- Use a Pain Point
Visual impact. Once you’ve got your reader to open your email, you need to make it visually appealing, on-brand and in line with your campaign to make it recognisable. Before we even look at the content of an email, we are drawn in by images. The more eye-catching they are the better and keep it on theme!
Offer up ideas and tips for a spooktacular Halloween. By doing this you are giving something back to your contacts, which will mean they will be engaged for longer.
Never forget the call to action – what do you want your reader to do next? Consider what you want them to do once they have read your email – order a product, call to book, download a guide. Whatever it is, make sure the call to action is visible, eye-catching, and easy to follow.
Halloween Social Media Content
Social media channels are the most direct and effective ways of communicating with your customers, as well as a way of attracting potential customers through raising the number of followers on your accounts.
You can use your social media accounts to reinforce your Halloween marketing campaign and ensure your posts are promoting and mirroring your wider campaign activity. For example, if you are running a competition, make sure you are creating social media posts that promote the competition and remind followers to enter. If it’s something that is more interactive, you can use social media as a source to share other people’s posts, pictures, and videos. You can also create bespoke hashtags and encourage your followers to share content using the hashtags you have created.
Top tip! We recommend that you create a social media content calendar that sits alongside the campaign calendar and mirrors the activity with the social posts. This gives your campaign that consistent feel which is important.
Make sure you are brand aware and share things that are on-brand and sit within the campaign so it’s easily recognisable as your own content.
Whatever social media channels you use to promote your business, make sure that the content that you create is the type of content that works best on those channels and don’t be afraid to try something new. We all know that images work well on Instagram, but how about trying out Reels and Live Stories? X (formerly known as Twitter) is great for short, sharp messaging, but why not try a poll?
Here at Piece of Cake Marketing, we specialise in social media management and content. If you need support on how to manage your social media accounts in the most effective way, check out our Social Media Essentials Club.
Creating Halloween Social Media Content Calendar
You have the social media channels, you have the Halloween marketing campaign plan, and now it’s time to create the posts. We recommend you produce a content calendar that sets out the posts you want to make for the duration of the campaign. This does take time and thought and sometimes working out what you want to post can be a challenge. But the preparation beforehand is worth it in the long run.
Not only do we recommend that your social post should be made in line with your campaign activity, but it’s also a good opportunity to get creative and it doesn’t always have to be an obvious hard sell. A blend of targeted campaign social posts and more creative general messaging works well.
Post a meme, share a joke, interact with other channels and always keep it relevant to your business. Countdowns work well and are great as a reminder to get organised and ready for the special day.
Our top tips to remember when creating social media content:
Try to create an image or video to accompany the messages that you are wanting to put out on social media.
If you use more than one social media account, make sure you post on them all. It broadens your messaging to more followers.
Where possible use relevant hashtags and encourage your followers to post using the hashtags, so you can link this back to your campaign, the obvious ones will be super busy. Depending on your goals some of these might help… #halloweenfood #halloweenlover #halloweenlife #spookyseason
There is also a small amount of people who love the idea ‘halloween is all year round’, so it’s also a great time to keep these types of people interested #halloweeneveryday.
If you need some inspiration or support with your content creation and planning for your social media accounts, Piece of Cake marketing can help. Ask us about our social media content creation service. We will look to prepare your social media content calendar for the month, based on your marketing objectives. To find out more, check out our website here: Social Media Content Creation Service.
