Turn Your Brand Spooky With Holiday Marketing Strategies

Halloween is right around the corner, and brands across the country have already started to roll out spooky content. For any business, capitalizing on the holidays is great for your brand. If you tailor your holiday marketing strategies right, you can lead more consumers to you. This supports brand differentiation. See what your competitors are doing and think of how you can get the edge on them. If they aren’t tweaking their brand for the holiday, great news for you. If they are, then you need to step it up and look alive! Making small tweaks shows that you are a living brand, not just some stagnant, corporate business. Let the humanity show through. These tweaks can be simple or a little more complex depending on your budget. But there is something for every business!

Social Media Marketing

People love to visualize the fall aesthetic of pumpkins, hayrides, apple cider, haunted houses, decorations, and costumes. Utilize these themes in the next couple weeks across your social platforms. Doing this tells your consumer that you are adaptable, fun and human. If you don’t have the means to take photos, there are many stock websites that you can use royalty free images like Unslpash. For captions, be unique and add fall and Halloween emojis when appropriate. Hashtags can be your friend. Depending on the type of social campaign you have, create your own branded hashtag for others to use. This brings you more traffic.

Ulta Beauty highlighted multiple Halloween inspired makeup looks throughout October last year. They used looks created by their consumers, which is a major power move known as user generate content (UGC). Highlight your audience when you get the chance, so you can develop a personal connection. Ulta also directed others to share their looks with #ultabeaty.

Holiday Logo

Logos are like the face of a business, and any designer knows to keep it simple. But, this is a special occasion. You can change an “O” into a pumpkin or “T” into a scarecrow. This is a chance to really be unique. Google changes their wordmark almost everyday and it is still recognizable. If you can’t play directly with the letters, switch the colors up to orange, purple or black if appropriate. Nike and Pringles adapted their spooky logo in 2013.

Scary Videos

Video content is on the rise exponentially. If you want to engage your audience, this is the preferred way to go. According to Smart Insights:

In 2020, 92% of marketers say that video is an important part of their marketing strategy . . . According to 88% of marketers, video marketing provides them with positive ROI . . . It is estimated that the average person will spend 100 minutes every day watching online videos in 2021. This is a 19% increase compared to daily viewing minutes in 2019, which stood at 84.

Having good story telling is imperative for video and needs to be part of your holiday marketing strategies. During October, it is acceptable to scare people. Set the scene, have a main character, then BOOM – hit them with the CTA. Many brands manage to pull it off well. The videos hold your attention, you know the company, and you understand what the sell point was.

Burger King created their scary ad to poke fun at McDonald’s. Not only did they release this around Halloween, but this was when people were afraid of roaming clowns. They capitalized on three big buzz topics at that time. Killer commercial!

Contests

They are always great to bring more attention to your company. For a successful contest, define your outcome goals. Do you want more followers, email subscribers or people to purchase an item? Then come up with the strategy to attain those goals. Halloween allows for room to play. A few ideas include best brand inspired carved pumpkin, costume, face painting, or spookiest looking dish. A hashtag can be created specifically for the contest, which would bring more awareness as people use it. You’d be getting new followers at the very least out of this, and you can make them sign up for the newsletter.

This small company hosts an annual photo contest. This year they are focusing on child costumes!

Costumes

If your company is more corporate, this is an opportunity to relax and break down some walls. The possibilities are endless with costumes, so ask your staff to share their best outfit. Have a contest and allow consumers to vote for the best via social media. This creates a personal interaction with your audience and again humanizes the brand by putting faces behind it.

You could flip it and make this a contest for your audience. Dunkin’ did this in 2018 by asking coffee lovers to share their best Dunkin’ inspired costumes.

Limited Time Sale

Typically, consumers expect some kind of sale around a holiday, which means they are ready to by a lot of product. The sale doesn’t have to be a huge, it could be as low as 10%. This presents an opportunity for you to send out an extra email blast and potentially sell something. Design a graphic that fits with the fall or Halloween aesthetic that can also be used on your social media pages. ModCloth had this design a few years ago.

Not all businesses can afford to do a sale, especially if they are just getting their feet wet. That’s okay! There’s other options to chose from to develop holiday marketing strategies.

Seasonal Product or Services

Places like Starbucks or Bath & Body Works bring out limited edition items like pumpkin spice or apple cider drinks, lotions, candles or fragrances. Although, not everyone has a product or service that can be adaptable in that way. If you can’t, try switching up the packaging. Shoot for darker colors, include a spooky message or little item like a sticker. While unboxing, people would be pleasantly surprised by the tailored look. Hashtags come in great here again. American Apparel uses their own branded hashtag to pull all of their Halloween looks in one place. It also allows their audience to share the look they bought.

Recap

Quick recap on the holiday marketing strategies.

– Make your social media adapt to the current times by integrating a fall aesthetic. Hashtags are your friend.
– Separate yourself from other brands by developing a seasonal extension of your own. Play with your logo and see what works.
– Videos perform very well. Have strong storytelling to keep your audience on the edge of their seat.
– Host a contest to bring more awareness to your company.
– Don’t be afraid to have a little fun with costumes. Show that you’re human.
– Offer a limited time holiday sale as an opportunity to reach out and profit.
– Let your products or services represent the holiday in a unique way.

What’s something your brand is looking to incorporate this spooky season?

Featured Photo: Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash