If you’re looking for a holiday which can provide a big influx of interest and potential new customers then you should be considering running a Halloween social media campaign. The event is big business across the globe.
In the USA, it’s the third biggest spend of the year with the figure expected to reach a record $9.1 billion this year. In the UK, Halloween has been growing in popularity for the last decade with spending expected to reach £320m this year.
Last year Tesco, Airbnb and Burger King were just three of the UK’s big retailers to capitalise on the Halloween marketing event with more than 4,964 conversations on social media discussing Airbnb’s Halloween campaign.
As a social media activity, it’s one you can jump on for clients with relative ease and help generate traffic through a number of easy ideas for a Halloween social content strategy.

Here’s our top 5 awesomely spooky Social Media Campaign Ideas:

1 – Update Social Media Channels to Reflect the Season

Just as Google has its Doodle, you can update your client’s brand logos for Halloween with the addition of a few pumpkins, a skeleton or a ghost.
Image source: Google’s Doodles
Refreshing the banners on clients social media is an easy way to create a story in customer and follower news feeds, raising awareness and giving an opportunity to promote a link back to their website. Adobe Spark’s banner tool is a great place to start.

2 – Use Pop Culture to Tie into your Client Branding

Back in 2013, when the film remake of Stephen King’s classic Carrie came out, laundry brand Tide seized the chance to jump on the Halloween marketing possibilities by creating a series of Vine videos and the product-appropriate tagline – Stains better be scared!

Finding a cultural relevance is something all brands can aspire to, but be careful with tone and keep things light to ensure a positive response on social media.

3 – If your client has a product then offer a seasonal discount

Clients can offer a brand-wide sale, a small discount on the next order or a holiday-themed freebie with every order over a certain amount. Use a Halloween themed giveaway on Facebook or Twitter or use Polls to get customers engaged in conversation.
Ask questions about autumn or the holiday and reward all participants with content along the way. Once you establish the winners, make sure that they are sent their unique promotional codes and gifts.

4 – Host a Photo Contest

One of the easiest ways to promote a client’s brand which involves the least amount of work is getting their customers to join a photo contest. Have them send in images to a special email address or via Facebook Messenger and then create a page to display them all on their website.
Image source: American Apparel – Halloween Costume Contest
Other options include a themed food contest you can publish to Instagram using a campaign specific #hashtag or ask for decorated rooms or spooky places images or drawings you can post to a Pinterest Board.
Offer fun rewards throughout the competition with the main prize announced on the morning after Halloween. If you do host a contest, don’t forget to make sure your client joins in too with their own staff dressing up or posting their images on social media using the same #hashtag.

5 – If your Client Doesn’t Fit the “Fun” Vibe, Offer Advice Instead

The type of advice you share will depend on your client’s brand and their business. Give tips or talk about health and safety in relation to Halloween and the autumn season. If your client is in the food industry, offer recipes and share them on social media.
If they’re a travel agent or tourism-related business, offer a “5 best places to celebrate Halloween” blog. If they’re related to security or digital media, talk about safety advice both personal, home or online protection. The possibilities are endless.

Bonus Social Media Campaign Idea

If your clients have a physical space, make sure they decorate for Halloween and then post to their social media channels. Retail stores can create a window display featuring black and orange outfits or products, if they’re a hairdressers, use a cut out of a recognisable spooky character like the Addams Family or Dracula with a Happy Halloween message.
If your client has artistic staff, get them to carve a pumpkin with something relevant to their brand and put them on display in their premises. Run an in-house competition between shops or branches if your clients have more than one physical location and post the images on social media using a campaign specific #hashtag.
This goes a long way to making their brand not only seasonally relevant but lets their customers know they have a sense of whimsy.

Tracking Results

Then, once Halloween is over, you can use Veracity’s analytics tools to check how your social media campaign went and see which content worked best for engaging customer journeys.
Veracity measures website traffic from any digital channel. This enables you to track multi-channel website visitor journeys and attribute actions from anywhere on the web – social media posts, Google Ads, affiliate links, email campaigns and more.
Our unique metrics will track the visitor journeys from all Halloween social media campaign activity allowing you to drill down into the analytics and see what worked and what didn’t.
This can then be used for similar seasonal campaigns and, with Christmas looming, is a perfect time for some fine-tuning.