October 3, 2013

7 Ideas for Halloween-Themed Social Media Campaigns

Tips & How To’s Posted by 2 Comments

Social Media Campaigns For HalloweenWhen we think back to what Halloween meant to us as kids, one common theme resonates: absolute darkness. It turns out, aligning eye-holes with plastic masks or even homemade sheet-ghost costumes is kind of tricky.

Even through poorly aligned eye-holes, though, we can see that Halloween isn’t just for kids anymore. It’s actually the second biggest holiday celebrated in the U.S. Halloween – and all that comes with it – is a big deal to teens and adults too. Not convinced?

Check out these stats:

• Last year, approximately $8 billion was spent on Halloween-related items.
• The average American spent nearly $80 on candy, pumpkins, decorations, and costumes for themselves and their pets (Spider-dog to the rescue!).

That means this is a great time to market your products and services (even if you aren’t selling candy and costumes). If you’re not sure how to create a unique, Halloween social media campaigns, read on.

This list of 7 Halloween campaign ideas will help build your brand while having some spooky fun:

1Halloween Campaign Idea #1: Adjust your Product Offerings

No, you don’t have to suddenly start making candy or costumes or plastic skeletons. Don’t change what you’re selling; just present it with a Halloween spin. For example, a bakery can feature their new “spooktacular cupcake,” while a book store can highlight scary stories and other Halloween-themed book series. With the right thematic marketing, you can ‘scare up’ some business in no time.

Yep, we went there.

2Halloween Campaign Idea #2: Offer Free Safety Tips

Now for some straight talk: Halloween is fun, but can be dangerous. Use your company blog, an email blast, or your social media pages to share common Halloween safety tips with your readers. Even better? Tie your product or service into the safety tip to garner potential sales (this works best if your product actually has some safety applications (think flashlights or batteries) – you may struggle to smoothly integrate all-natural laundry detergent into a safety tip, no matter how good for the environment it is), so be sure not to force it.

3Halloween Campaign Idea #3: Encourage Participation

How many people do you know dress up for Halloween and then stay home and hide their costume from the world? No one, right? People LOVE to share their costumes, so ask your fans to snap a photo or shoot a video of themselves using your product while in costume. To really boost participation, turn it into a hashtag photo/video sharing contest – with an appropriately Halloween-themed incentive, of course.

 

4Halloween Campaign Idea #4: Offer a “Treat” of your Own

While your customers are unlikely to show up at your door looking for candy, that doesn’t mean you can’t use Halloween as a chance to give your followers and fans a special offering. For example, offer 10% off a purchase when they share your post. Then, make it special by offering an additional 1% to the discount (up to, say, 25%) for every ten shares. The key here is to give “treats” only for actions that have the potential to increase shares or likes on your page. An added benefit? You won’t be scraping eggs off your front door on November 1 if your treat isn’t to someone’s liking.

5Halloween Campaign Idea #5: Involve your Employees

Wanna know something scary? Your employees – they’re people too! (Actually, we suppose that the alternative would be much scarier, but it wouldn’t have made nearly as good of a point.) Being people, they probably like Halloween. Show your customers the fun and relatable side of your business by creating an online album of your team. Feature photos of your employees showing their holiday spirit by dressing in costume or decorating their work areas. You’ll create a good feeling about your product and humanize your brand at the same time. You can even go a step further by creating a contest that asks the social community to vote on the best costume or decorated desk, then award a prize to both the winning employee and one of the winning voters. Fans will love it!

6Halloween Campaign Idea #6: Invite Sign-Ups to your Mailing Lists

Halloween is about so many things, but at the core, it’s about getting free stuff. (Has any kid, ever, offered to pay for their candy?) Sadly, though, getting free stuff for Halloween tends to wane when you get older. Bring back those memories and offer a Halloween freebie to anyone who signs up for your newsletter. Items like printable stencils, recipe ideas, and pumpkin-carving templates are useful, free and easy to create.

7Halloween Campaign Idea #7: Put your Sites in Costume

Who says that it’s only children, teens, adults, babies, dogs, cats, trees, bushes, cars and storefronts that can be dressed up for Halloween? It’s the perfect time to put your website in costume as well. Adding a ghost or pumpkin image to your site masthead, placing a cobweb watermark behind your content, or changing your color palette to orange and black will add a fun seasonal flair. Once you’ve started dressing up your sites, why not give your Facebook and Twitter pages some Halloween flair too? And, don’t forget about your mailings and e-newsletters around the holiday – they want to dress up too!

Rignite Insight: Don’t forget to remove the festive flair in a timely fashion. It’s great to “decorate” a few weeks before the actual holiday, but be sure to take it down within a few days of Halloween’s end.

It may seem scary to take your marketing down this path (see what we did there?), but it’s never scary to capitalize on public sentiment. Halloween isn’t just a holiday for kids anymore, it’s a holiday for people with money to spend. This year, dress up as a creative marketer!

Next up: Start planning your Thanksgiving social media campaigns and while you’re at it, here are a few Black Friday ideas too.

 

Easily Run Halloween Social Media Campaigns Using Rignite

Rignite is a software solution that makes it easy to run social media campaigns to promote your business during the Halloween season. With Rignite you can:

  • Boost engagement by requiring social actions for entry–post likes or comments, tweets with a photo and hashtag
  • Reward more than one winner to attract more participation
  • Cross promote across both Facebook and Twitter with a series of posts
  • Get campaign level reports showing which posts were most effective

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About the Author
Kim Cooper

Kim Cooper is Sr. Marketing Manager at Rignite. She helps businesses get better results from their social media activity. She blogs about tips, best practices, and social media success stories.


  • tspofalejandra

    Is it too much to attach business cards to the candy we hand out?

    • Kim

      I think that’s a fair exchange. You are providing value (in the form of candy) and you aren’t asking for anything from them, so a simple drop of a business card should be acceptable.