Offer Treats, Not Tricks, With These Halloween Marketing Ideas

Halloween might not be the first holiday you associate with shopping, but the $9.1 billion spent on the occasion might give you pause. Forbes reports that consumers only spend about $2.7 billion on candy. Want to get in on the fun and profits? Even if your business doesn’t seem geared towards the spooky fun of Halloween, you can use these marketing hacks to engage with your customers.

Create Themed Holiday Products or Services

Get creative and put some items together that may work for Halloween or fall. If your product or service doesn’t lend itself well to the season, use cultural references to Halloween in putting together some ideas. For example, offer branded treats, candy or another goody with your logo and information. Come up with some marketing ideas that go with the holiday. You can rename products to fit the theme, such as “blood-red nail polish.”

Add Halloween to Your Branding

Have fun decorating with Halloween symbols in your physical store. Show off your holiday spirit by adding spider webs to your cash register and corn stalks in your windows. Look for ways to add decorations to your signage. Go upscale with a masquerade ball theme. However, don’t stop with your storefront. Update your website with a spooky theme. Encourage customers to come in and see your fall offerings.

Create Interactive Promotions Around the Halloween Theme

You can throw a party at your physical location to draw people in. Offer a Halloween coupon for anyone who joins in the festivities. To boost SEO, get your customers engaged in an online Halloween promotion, such as a scavenger hunt that invites them to search your website for clues. Anyone who finds all the items should win something sweet. The bonus is that they’ll learn more about your company as they go through your pages.

Use social media to engage with your customers. Offer holiday tips and ideas on your social media platform. Hold a costume party for your followers and let them vote on the best ones. Get your customers to interact with your social media accounts and website. Even if they don’t purchase something this month, you should see an SEO boost from the added traffic.

Create Halloween-Themed Content

Content marketing is an effective marketing tool that generates a lot of leads when it’s done well. Educate readers about your products, services, and business through Halloween-themed content. Create posts, infographics, and videos that include Halloween marketing ideas:

• Invent ghost stories and myths about your industry or business.
• Make pumpkin carving stencils that include your brand.
• Offer Halloween guides for safe decorating.
• Film a scary story video that shows off your Halloween spirit and includes ideas from your business.
• Update content that is older, because Google loves new content.
• Promote local events, because such sponsorship offers more advertising opportunities.

Collaborate With Your Business Neighbors

Hold a party with the businesses on your street. Make it a festive afternoon or evening to get customers in your door. Connect with local attractions and offer promotions for customers who shop with you. Do a giveaway with your logo at an attraction or complementary business. You may come up with some cross-promotions that lead to new business for each of you. Also look for opportunities in your community to sponsor local events that gets your name out there and ask for online links back to your business.

Check Your Website

Halloween is a great holiday to go through your website and make sure your customers have a great user experience, with treats instead of tricks. By checking broken links and improving content before the busiest shopping time of the year, you have more opportunities to give customers the information they’re looking for. Don’t forget to optimize for mobile search, because more users rely on their smartphone when they’re out and about. Keep your bounce rate low by making a good first impression when visitors come to your website. Grab their attention and present good information to make your customers keep reading and shopping.

Don’t Trick Your Customers

SEO tactics break down into two categories: white hat and black hat. Black-hat techniques are those methods that bring initial quick results by tricking your customer and the search engines. Once Google catches you, however, it penalizes your website. You lose those results. White-hat tactics follow SEO best practices and focus on the customer experience. Make sure to give your customers treats instead of tricks. Here are some tricks to avoid:

• Keyword Stuffing | When SEO was new, you could put keywords throughout the content and see your ranking increase. Today, keyword density should only be 5-10% of the page. More than that is keyword stuffing, which will get you bounced out of the search results.
• Content Spinning | This tactic works by creating one article, then changing the wording by using synonyms so that the content seems different. This method used to work. Today, you need high-quality, original content that offers value to your customer.
• Comment Spam | When you visit blogs and industry boards where you can leave comments, one way to increase visits was to leave a link back to your website. With today’s SEO strategies, this is not a good practice. It can get you reported to Google, decreasing your site’s authority. If you do comment on blogs or social media, make a good comment that demonstrates your authority. Don’t link unless asked for more information.
• Doorway Pages | These pages are content that only the search engines see. If a customer clicks on a link to the doorway page, it redirects them to another page. Google will penalize your site if you do this. Create high-quality landing pages that work into your long-term strategy.

Give customers a reason to shop with you this Halloween. For more marketing ideas, contact the Boostability team.