How to maximise Halloween marketing

Intro

With Halloween comes a multitude of dodgy puns, brands jumping on the holiday bandwagon and those pesky egg-throwing teenagers. Halloween provides a great marketing opportunity, but needs smart implementation to ensure you stand out from the crowd. We’ve listed the common pitfalls of Halloween marketing, and a checklist to make sure you’re optimising the holiday.

Crowded Space

So, our first concern is the biggest; crowded space. Everyone is trying to take advantage. It is a safe bet that if you’ve decided to leverage the holiday, your competitors are as well. This elevates the level of competition, not only operating within the same industry, but having concurrent marketing efforts following the same theme. Without doing something different, there’s every chance your campaigns will be too vanilla and just disappear in the noise.

The need to be innovative and unique is even greater, evaluate last years campaign, retain the elements that were effective and evolve. But most importantly, don’t be afraid to try something new! Put yourself out there, if you make enough noise, you’ll not only have successful marketing, you’ll also crush your competitors and sit top of the pile.

Consumer Spending

It’s not all doom and gloom though, holidays bring an increase in consumer spending! Now it’s just about getting them to spend with you, and how can we do this? Nurturing! Drip-feeding relevant and contextual content implants you into the consumers thought process. This is preferable to poorly targeted email blasts of promotional content and discounts that can wind people up to the point of unsubscription.

Start your campaign early and slow, start dropping yourself into the space, start creating themed content and reminding people that Halloween is just around the corner, and think about your products! It’s amazing how many companies email me on Halloween trying to get me to order a costume, on the actual day! Even if I hadn’t already sorted a costume, it wouldn't arrive until at least the day after! Make sure you understand your product portfolio, and when customers would be looking to purchase.

Checklist

• Start early
• Plan ahead
• Schedule content
• Adapt the holiday to suit your customers
• Run a nurturing campaign
• Innovate

Conclusion

Factor Halloween into your Q4 marketing activity, and plan well in advance what marketing collateral you’ll need, then load all your messaging into some good automation software and watch the results flow in!