Halloween, the 4th largest e-commerce sales holiday, is around the corner. This busy time of the year comes with full opportunities to grab attention of customers and to boost sales for your online stores through frighteningly cool Halloween advertising ideas.
There have been well crafted marketing campaigns over the last few year that you can take notes of in order to create long lasting campaigns for your brands, as the spooky day comes.
Read on, the following top 07 Halloween ideas do deserve your attention.
1) Forbidden Pizza Website – Woo customers with a spooky experience
This was a warning from a microsite of Forbidden Pizza during Halloween. What would you do if you see this message? Curious visitors who entered their physical address got immediately taken to their home through Google Map, with the house being haunted.
The only way to unhaunt the house is to pick up a Hot-N-Ready Pizza at the closest Little Caesar’s. Clicking to “UNHAUNT” showed customers the direction to the closest Little Caesars Pizza. Fun, wasn’t it?
What we love about this campaign is that it brought in the holiday spirits along with a tactful invitation to the store using very simple techniques. Just a site, google map, and a haunting sense.
For your store, you can customize this campaign to create your own Halloween treat to your customers: Set up a popup begging customers not to enter your email address.
Suggested tool: Better Coupon Box
If they do enter, they are haunted. The only way to unhaunt is to take the discount code from the popup and purchase something on your store. Easy, no?
2) Petco: “Make a scene” – Hold a photo contest
Hosting a photo contest is always an easy but effective marketing idea to raise awareness from your customers and potential audience. Keeping that in mind, Petco successfully launched its halloween campaign in the form of a photo contest.
The rules were simple: Follow on Instagram – Take a photo of your costumed pet(s) in a “scene” that matches your pet(s) costume(s) – Upload your photo to Instagram and tag it with #MakeASceneContest.
What makes this brilliant campaign so widely spread? First of all, people always love sharing their pet’s pictures. Second, Instagram is the right platform to create viral effect related to photos. The #HalloweenTogetherContest is definitely the right tag to engage a wealth of Petco’s targeted audience. Last, they offered a $10,000 grand prize, giving participants a great sense of competition.
So if possible, run a photo contest on your social media channels, you will not regret a second.
3) Burger King: Free Whoppers for clowns – People always love freebies
When it comes to Halloween, Burger King left their rival – McDonald’s far behind with an amazing campaign: “Come as a Clown. Eat like a King.” The campaign made fun of McDonald’s as it encouraged customers to disguise as the McDonald’s mascot Ronald and flood to Burger King’s store to receive a treat from Burger King. More specifically, on October 31st starting at 7pm, Burger King gave out free whoppers to any guests dressed in a clown costume (the McDonald’s mascot Ronald).
Offer freebies while having a poke at your rivals, do it if you dare.
Just as simple as this:
Suggested tool: Checkout Boost
4) The Oreo Laboratorium – Make use of User generated content (UCG) as great a Halloween advertising idea
A laboratory to produce “nomsters” from oreo cookies, wasn’t it a lovely idea? And this lovely idea generated $2.6 billions of sales for the candy brand. Fans of the cookie brand got a 1800s-style short video each day from the Oreo Laboratorium. The video showed the process of producing a nomster from Oreo cookies. Customers would then be asked to “Name the Nomster,” and get rewarded if their name was voted as the best.
This is a great example of a brand making good use of user generated content (UCG) for their marketing campaigns. Even if you cannot make a series of short stop-motion animation like Oreo, you can still take advantage of UCG by simply paying attention to your customers’ social shares to repost/ re-promote those posts on your channels. This way, you not only connect with your customers at a personal level but also give their peels quality social proof to take their actions.
5) Booking.com: Haunted hotels – Get creative with what you sell
Booking.com has gotten the Halloween game down. Taking advantage of their large variety of accommodations, the brand listed down the most haunted properties around the world to attract adventurous travelers to book their next ghostly getaway.
“With over 350,000 properties worldwide and over 25 unique accommodations, including haunted hotels, customers have nothing to be afraid of when trying to get their stay exactly right,” says Paul Hennessy, Booking.com’s Chief Marketing Officer.
Just like Booking.com, let give your products a role in your Halloween marketing tale. You could run a contest of purchasing “haunted” products on your store to get a post-purchase gift. You could also mark some special collections as haunted categories so if customers dare to purchase one product from those collection, you reward them a sweet treat. Just some suggestions for you to create your own store’s Halloween story.
Suggested tool: Boost Sales
6) HM – Offer a great seasonal discount
Offering seasonal discount is an all-time simple and straightforward marketing idea. During any holiday season, people always expect some gifts from our stores, whether it is an all store sale, a special discount, or the treat of getting freeship.
You can also go for some simple sales gamification to entice your in-mood-of-holiday customers to spend more. For example: asking them to reach $31 or $310 to get a discount of 20% or a freebie from your store.
Suggested tool: Checkout Boost
Do not forget to give your content a Halloween look like the above HM popup.
7) Cosmopolitan – Educate your customers
Holiday season is not just for sales. It is also a great time for you to educate your customers. As Cosmopolitan did, they taught their customers how to create unique Halloween look with the makeup you already have.
Knowledge sharing is a brilliantly simple marketing idea to show customers value of your products, increasing their awareness of your brand, thus making it easier to convert them into more sales for your store.
As you commit to educating your customers, you also show your goodwill of building a lasting win-win relationship with them, which definitely gives you brownie points sooner or later.
Conclusion
There you go with 07 Halloween advertising ideas from big brands to plan for your campaigns. The list goes on with many other brilliant marketing initiatives out there that you can refer to and create your own special treat to your customers. Apply those great ideas and make a twist. You may not know how surprising and memorable your Halloween experience stays on their mind.
Key Takeaways for you:
1- Woo customers with a spooky experience
2- Hold a photo contest
3- People always love freebies
4- Make use of User generated content (UCG)
5- Get creative with what you sell
6- Offer a great seasonal discount
7- Educate your customers
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