Fall is finally here. Pumpkins are everywhere (even in lattes)! That means Halloween is coming up fast and you need to prepare your business marketing plan to help you engage with your customers and clients. Social media marketing is fabulous for this but everyone will be more interested in what you have to say if you put some spookily awesome effort into spicing up your social media pages and even your website!
This isn’t as hard as it may seem. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can weave Halloween into your Quarter 4 social marketing plan to craft some super-effective and super-fun strategies.
Shortcuts to 7 Halloween Ideas:
One of the best, easiest, and cheapest marketing strategies is to use content generated by your customers and clients. You can encourage them to get involved by doing a fun Halloween giveaway. Customers love taking pictures of products they love and it is even better when they may be rewarded for doing so. They can snap a picture, upload it and then tag you and add hashtags to the post to be entered to win!
If you don’t have a physical product, you can still do this by encouraging a costume contest, best pumpkin carving, and so on. If you put a little thought into it, I bet you can tie it back into the product or service you provide as well.
If you have a product-based business, consider creating a product that can be promoted specifically during Halloween with a Creepy name, Green color, etc. People love taking pictures and sharing them so this is a fabulous way to get your customers engaged with your company, your product, and your social media pages.
M&M’s This is a fabulous example of user-generated content making a splash for a company!
2. Keywords are Creepily Awesome!
Don’t underestimate the power of keywords on social media. They can be the link that ties online content back to you and your business. Consider crafting a few well-thought-out hashtags for your Halloween social media marketing campaign.
Do a little research on keywords that your target audience uses to give yourself some ideas.
Use online keyword research tools to help you. (Like Keyword Tool, Google Trends, etc)
Take Halloween costumes, movies, recipes, and other popular searches this time of year into account
Once you have an idea about what people are searching for, you can begin crafting posts and hashtags that will help your users find what they are looking for and help your business be seen.
A great hashtag relevant to Halloween, Starbucks, & Drinks!
3. All Hallow’s Images on Social Media
If you owned a brick-and-mortar business there’s no doubt you’d be going all out to decorate your store for Halloween. You can do the same on your social media pages by choosing Halloween images or images with Halloween colors to post.
Be sure to choose images that align with your branding and follower expectations. For example, we wouldn’t suggest using gory or super scary images if you are a baby clothing store. Choose softer images if your brand is more feminine or “pretty”. Choose darker-themed images if your branding is normally edgy. There are so many ways you can utilize Halloween pictures, flat lays, and colors (even fonts!) in your social media marketing all of October!
Use pics like this on social media for Halloween:
4. Tips & Treats Can Be Shared!
Another thing you can do is to come up with some spooky-good tips and tricks to share with your customers.
How about some “how-to” posts or maybe a few DIY posts that your customers can use and share for you? The best tricks and tips are the ones people need and love to share!
For treats, consider Halloween-Inspired freebie downloadables for your customers. Maybe a short spooky story that introduces a new product? Maybe coloring pages, stickers, guides, checklists, ebooks, or anything that would be a free “treat” your customer would love.
You can combine this idea with the contest idea to encourage users to drive traffic to your pages to get the freebie. Capture email addresses this way as well and double down on your marketing efforts!
5. Halloween Promotional Codes!
Nothing can be more simple than creating a special code for your customer to use during Halloween. Run a promotion and use Halloween-specific codes for the discount. Examples would be: Take 10% off with code SPOOKYGOOD! Or, B1G1 by using code FANGTASTIC on our website!
A super simple yet super effective way to weave Halloween into your marketing efforts.
Take a look of Whistlefish’s email example below:
6. Everyone Loves a Spooktacular Contest!
Running a Halloween Contest goes hand in hand with promoting user-generated content in your social media marketing strategy. The goal really is just to get your customers to not only engage with your social media pages but to enter your giveaway and to share your contest/content as well so that more customers and people will see your campaign. This word-of-mouth marketing through contests and user-generated content is super effective, cheap, and brings people to your page who like to engage on social media.
Hint: the more engagement your page gets, the more it will be shown to others via social platform algorithms.
7. Decorate for the Holiday!
Consider changing up your website, your logo, your social avatars, or perhaps even your product packaging or shipping materials to add a little spookiness into your marketing. It only takes a bit of time, some graphic design, and ingenuity, but it can have a dramatic effect on your marketing efforts.
For Example:
Consider swapping out plain white bubble mailers for Halloween ones. If that is outside your budget, a simple, spooky “Thank You” sticker added to the package would do the job!
Do something as simple as swapping out title & header fonts for a creepy (yet legible) Halloween font for all of October.
If your website colors are normally black and white consider going dark mode with pops of purple or lime green for the “clicked links” or contrasting texts.
Website sliders are a wonderful way to display Halloween-specific promotions!
If your company is service-based or B2B, consider swapping out all your staff pics to pictures of your staff in Halloween Costumes or have their profile pics “zombified” for October! Fun!
These are nice decorative examples from , , and :
As you can see, there are so many ways you can incorporate Halloween into your social media marketing plan! From images, fonts, contests, user-generated content, to switching out your packaging, there are things you can do that cost little to no money or you can up your budget and go all out.
Bonus tip: plan ahead
Whatever you decide, be sure to get started early and plan the content, hashtags, sales, and images well in advance so you can get the most out of your marketing efforts.
As a busy small business owner, scheduling apps can be a great tool to help you streamline the social media management process. They can help you to post to several platforms at once, and many of them also allow you to manage posts and respond to comments all from one app. !
