Seven Ways to Leverage Your Online Marketing Tools this Halloween to Increase Sales and Leads
There Are No Tricks—Just Treats—on this List of Ways You Can Take Advantage of Halloween to Boost Your Brand Power
As a focal point of fall festivities, Halloween provides a sweet reason to celebrate in the middle of a cooler season. For some, Halloween is the first big reminder the holiday rush will soon begin, and whether or not you want to take part in the costumed revelry, it’s a great time to leverage your online marketing tools to gain new followers, emails, and customers ahead of Q4. It’s also the perfect time to test out new marketing strategies—both online and offline—before the major holidays arrive. Just think of Halloween as your test-run holiday!
Check out some of our favorite strategies below.
Put Your Brand to Work
As you may be able to tell, we like orange around here. This comes in handy around Halloween, when we can pair our brand orange with black and purple to create assets that are uniquely ours but also in line with the festive spirit.
Write a Spooktacular Blog Post
Do you sell products that would make a great Halloween gift? Or have a list of favorite “haunted” spots to visit this time of year? Share these in a blog post.
Be sure to work frequently searched keywords that you’d like to rank for into your headings and body copy (as long as they make sense with the rest of the content). Now is an excellent time to try and rank higher in organic search listings and to be discovered by people who are not your customers...yet.
Decorate Your Storefront or Office
Show off your spirit and sense of fun by decorating your business’s physical space. This will add a sense of personality to your environment which visiting customers and clients will likely appreciate.
You can even use physical decorations as a tool for social media. Take some photos of your decorated space to post on each of your channels. You can also encourage visitors to take shots of your space to then share to their own accounts; just make sure they tag you so that you can find and re-share their posts. They get a shout out on your channels, you get easy social content—everyone wins.
Host an Event for the Community
Whether it’s a cider tasting, pumpkin carving, or costume contest, hosting a free event open to the community is a great way to get people to come to your place of business during non-traditional times. This can help you build hype and brand awareness as the holidays roll in.
If you run a restaurant, you can feature themed food and drink specials (like Pumpkin-flavored treats or “Hallowine”) during your event. If you have a brick-and-mortar consumer goods store, consider offering free tote bags filled with branded merch and coupons to inspire attendees to come back for more over the next couple of months.
Regardless of your industry, if you advertise online, try and get people to RSVP—this not only will give you a sense of event numbers, it’ll also offer you a chance to engage with potential customers who have expressed interest in attending.
Show Off Some City Love by Attending Local Events with Your Team
Support local by bringing your team to events held by neighboring businesses. If you’re in the Seattle area like us, you may consider Oktoberfest up in Leavenworth or the Halloween Pub Crawl in downtown Seattle. There are also tons of orchards where you can go apple picking and corn mazes where you can get lost together.
Not only do events like these offer the perfect team building opportunity, they also give you a chance to network and connect with other local-loving businesses in your area—you may even find new leads or customers who were previously unfamiliar with your business.
And be sure to take photos of your team to share on your social channels; this is the perfect occasion to show off your support for other local companies and your status as a business devoted to its community.
Offer a Halloween-Themed Discount Code
An easy way to show your spirit is by offering a discount code on a banner and/or pop-up window on your website. You may want to encourage users to sign up for your newsletter in order to receive the discount—you’ll want to collect as many email addresses as possible before the holiday season when you can offer even more ongoing email campaigns for your clients.
Create Themed Product Bundles and Add-Ons
Whether you sell actual Halloween-themed merch or black and orange clothing items or cider-and-spice candles, it’s a great idea to offer deals on bundles of products—not only will it get your customers in the Halloween spirit, it’ll help you move more product.
Another great option is to offer a product you’re looking to get rid of as a free add-on to every order over a certain amount. People love free stuff, even if they end up spending more in the long run.
Halloween may not be the “Big Kahuna” of end-of-year holidays, but it can provide a great opportunity to boost pre-holiday sales, prep for the post-Thanksgiving rush, and test marketing strategies you’ve been considering for some time. If a discount code makes your site explode with sales, tweak it and try it again around Christmas. If decorating your storefront didn’t seem worth the energy, expend more effort on other forms of marketing in the future. This is a prime time to learn and adapt, and from those lessons you can conquer the upcoming holidays.
We Can Help You Make Your Brand Shine Online
At efelle creative, we’ve been running online marketing campaigns since 2005. We are passionate about providing our clients with results-based strategies that help them outshine the competition. From website design and development to SEO and adwords management to conversion rate optimization and more, you can rely on our processes and expertise to help elevate your professional services firm or eCommerce business. Call us today at 206.384.4909 or reach out via our online contact form.