Whilst America has led the way in capitalising on Halloween, the UK is emerging from its crypt to make its own hair-raising impact. For near-enough a decade, Halloween in the UK has continued to grow with marketers across the country rising to the potential the season holds. Retail expenditure at Halloween more than doubled between 2013 and 2019, with close to £500 million being spent. Even during the subdued celebrations of 2020 due to the pandemic, there was an increase of 889% in searches for Halloween online. Clearly, there is more than enough for marketers to get their fangs into. So, let’s dust off the cobwebs and look at how you can make the most of Halloween marketing.
Whilst there is no witch’s potion for social media success, opportunity is abundant. In the build-up to Halloween, audiences flock to social media to discover or share all the Halloween tips and tricks they need from costumes, to decorations, to sweets and treats, and makeup tutorials. Every year our social feeds are overrun with everything Halloween, with a study by Mintel finding that 40% of purchasers turn to social media for some spooky inspiration. Needless to say, then, that offers your brand plenty of opportunity to dig in and make an impact. Even despite global restrictions in 2020, with many usual Halloween celebrations taking a year off, its impact could be seen on social media with over 963.7k posts featuring the hashtag, #Halloween2020, resulting in over 5.5 billion impressions across the globe. Even beyond being used as a sales tool, using the appropriate hashtags and creating nightmarishly brilliant content to jump on trends will do wonders to get your brand out there and be seen.
Although the Halloween content and copy you post needs to be relevant to the season, the opportunities are all fairly open-ended. Halloween can be a brilliant opportunity to pick the brains of your creative team and come up with some exciting stuff. You can post your own Halloween tips and tricks made for sharing. You could countdown your favourite horror movies perfect for a creepy night of binging on the couch – or hiding behind it. You could use more puns than you could shake a zombie’s arm at. And better yet, it’s the perfect chance to encourage user-generated content. Everybody loves to go that one step beyond with their costumes, their decorations, or their pumpkin carving. Use this to your advantage by offering your audience the opportunity to share their best (or worst) attempts using pre-selected and specific, appropriate hashtags to boo-st brand awareness and rake up your engagement in a user-generated competition or giveaway.
Like Frankenstein without his Bride, your social media content wouldn’t be complete without the appropriate graphics and visual elements to accompany it. With such a rich and varied aesthetic history, Halloween presents your graphics team with the thrilling opportunity to create some killer visuals. Design components including spooky fonts, creepy visuals, and a dark and gothic colour scheme are all there to be used as a source of inspiration for the macabre graphics you produce. It’s not just your social channels that could benefit from a little festive fright though, you can have even more fun with your website. No different to a store-front being beckoned by pumpkins, gravestones, and cobwebs, decorating your website with the appropriate elements could be a great, temporary opportunity to creep’ things real. Sprinkling in some Halloween imagery across your website through eye-catching pop-ups, banners, backgrounds, typefaces, or landing pages provides a great option for some suitably scary digital decorations. With so much to choose from film, tv, art, music, and history, you won’t be stuck for inspiration any time soon.
Not only has Halloween got plenty of opportunities to increase revenue directly, but it’s also incredibly effective at improving brand recognition rather than being used as a straight-up sales tool. Taking part in the festivities and getting creative to express your brand by producing some suitably spine-tingling content is a sure-fire way to earn you plenty of favour with an audience, providing them with plenty of reason for engagement. By letting your hair down and having a bit of fun with how you approach Halloween, you can bring out the best of seasonal marketing to create a positive and dynamic public image by tapping into the emotions of the holiday and your audience. There are plenty of ways you can shake up your marketing efforts regardless of the products you sell and the services you offer. Whether you’re creating a new product just for Halloween, or you’re adding a spooky twist to an existing one, Halloween promotions can raise existing products from the dead or bring new limited-edition products to life by promoting its exclusive and limited appeal.
