Halloween is just around the corner, possibly waiting to jump out and shout ‘boo’, and doubtless you’re reading this while carving a pumpkin or preparing bags of sweets (or maybe you’re just reading it at work). Regardless, you may look around and see retail businesses getting out the Halloween decorations and putting fake cobwebs over their doors. It’s a well-known fact, as well as being common sense, that tapping into the collective love of Halloween is a great way to steer custom to your business. Most people think this only applies to retail or certain product-based businesses, but the truth is that if you know what to do, you can make any business spook-tacular for Halloween! With that in mind, here are some tips from us on how to do it.
Hold frightening photo contests
People love dressing up for Halloween. That’s just fact. They also love showing off these excellent costumes. Combine that with your social media marketing and you’ll find yourself with an excellent, consumer driven campaign that will quickly spread. Hold a costume contest, or one to see who can send the spookiest photo, and then offer prizes to the winner. Your fans will be clamouring to show off their hard work and photography skills, bringing attention and goodwill to your company. Instagram is of course an excellent platform for photo contests, but Facebook and Twitter can work just as well.
Make sure you’re in the mood
Even though it’s not as common nowadays as ten years ago, plenty of shops and small businesses still bring out the orange and blacks, skeletons and fake cobwebs. It all revolves around tapping into the Halloween spirit, partially because it’ll make people more likely to pop in and have a look, but also because it’s just good fun. Have you ever considered doing the same for your online business? It’s very easy, some orange and blacks, an image of a spider crawling over your banners, and both your website and social media pages can be looking superbly spooky. It may seem like a small thing, but your fans and consumers will genuinely appreciate it.
Use your own eerie images
Halloween is a time when you can loosen the conventional wisdom of social media for a few days. It’s not normally a great idea to post lots and lots of images, but this is the perfect time to do so. Some can simply be fun, quirky pictures to give your fans a chuckle, but some should absolutely be related to your product. The best ones will be memorable, intelligent and fun, like this one from Maynards, advertising their Sour Patch Kids:
It can help to get your employees involved, too. Host a company costume contest, upload the pictures to social media and have the public vote on the best one, with prizes for the winner and one of the voters. As well as drawing attention to your company it will humanise you, which is always helpful for bringing in customers.
Use delightfully devilish discounts
As well as getting into the Halloween spirit (see what we did there?), another way to bring in some more business is to offer discounts for your product or services. Of course, discounts are a good way to get customer at any time of year, but Halloween is especially good because people expect discounts and special deals during holidays, so why disappoint them? A great way to integrate discounts into your social media strategy is to offer discounts to customers for liking or following your pages. You could even make it so that the more times a customer shares your content, the higher the discount goes (within limits, of course).
Finally, remember to be safe
Halloween is a great, fun time for most people, but there are still things that can put a damper on anyone’s evening. Make sure that amongst your promotion and fun you make sure to remind your fans to be safe. Offer safety tips for trick-or-treating, start a relevant hashtag and so forth. Make sure you don’t promote your service or product here. The result will be that you look like a company who genuinely cares, and your advice may well be useful to some of your fans.
