Once again, the spookiest season is upon marketers everywhere. Whether it is personally viewed as a beloved, or just-for-the-kids holiday is irrelevant, as Halloween now represents a momentous opportunity for businesses to creatively engage audiences and drive heightened levels of awareness and traffic to their websites.
Every year, the occasion increasingly becomes more and more popular with adults and children alike, and has steadily become the third largest retail occasion after Christmas and Easter. Now, Halloween is expected to generate a total of £687 million in consumer spending this year alone.
Brands of all sizes and industries can participate and get creative with their activity around Halloween, and use the opportunity to have some fun with their audiences. To mark the occasion, Lauren Gray, Digital PR Executive at Digital Ethos, is sharing her expertise on her favourite spooktastic brand campaigns, and how these can easily be adapted to suit businesses from across different industries, and on a smaller scale.
Frightfully Immersive Online Events
In 2021, Mexican food giant Chipotle took its annual Halloween extravaganza ‘Boorito’ to a whole new, purely digital, level, hosting an immersive experience on the platform Roblox. From the 28th-31st of October, 30,000 Roblox users could dress up their avatars in exclusive Chipotle-themed costumes, and visit the restaurant’s virtual location and maze game to win special promo codes that were then redeemable on Chipotle’s app and website.
Tying in its Halloween efforts with the excitement around metaverse activity, Chipotle became a digital innovator, and its Halloween efforts generated massive levels of engagement and media attention.
Hosting an online, spine-chilling event can be a creative way to incorporate several marketing tactics and generate immense levels of user engagement. Using elements of the metaverse can be a fantastic opportunity to use the hype and interest still circulating, allowing for the activity to become a fantastic talking point for audiences that sets the brand apart from its competitors.
This can extend to decorating the website homepage, from full-out Halloween attire complete with sinister text, colours and ghoulish animations, or even a smaller adjustment such as giving the business logo a suitably frightening costume, or switching to a darker website layout.
For a more immersive interface, consider running an online event complete with interactive and personalised mini-games. For a clothing brand, this could be challenging users to locate the exclusive pumpkin discount, or for an events brand, this could be jumping in with the metaverse hype to create a spooky virtual world complete with scary characters and seasonal mini-games.
Trick or Treat with PR Stunts
PR stunts are an incredibly effective way to generate attention and get people buzzing about a brand, usually from an unconventional and eccentric idea. What better timing than to use Halloween to entertain audiences with a thrillingly spooky stunt?
In 2018, Marmite got stuck into the fun by playing to its brand awareness as ‘love it or hate it’. The business did a product stunt and released two limited edition jars exclusively online – a ‘potion’ jar for the lovers of its spread, and a ‘poison’ jar for the haters. As a result, it sparked huge excitement on social media, creating a surge online as fans rushed to the website to get their own jars.
The stunt was a success because Marmite understood the popularity of Halloween and its own brand image, and used it to create viral marketing with a simple change to its product packaging, resulting in exponential reach as more and more people heard about it, and then shared it with their social circles.
Businesses can similarly use the thrills of Halloween to play trick or treat with their audiences, even on a smaller scale. This could be giving the packaging a suitably scary makeover like Marmite did or making the product names suitably Halloween-inspired. If businesses have the extra investment, they could create a Halloween-themed limited edition gift, or samples of upcoming products, which could be included as a ‘treat’ with every Halloween purchase made.
Businesses can really stand out by entertaining audiences with a fake product launch. For instance, a food manufacturer could challenge customers to try a ghastly Halloween-inspired food dish, much like the Weetabix and Heinz baked beans stunt that garnered enormous social media attention. This campaign could incorporate social media polls to interact directly with the audience or have a downloadable fake recipe card and pumpkin-carving pattern on the website, accessible through email signups.
Scarily-Easy Social Media Tricks
Scarily straightforward, an interactive social media campaign can be one of the easiest ways a brand can retain engagement with its audience, and expand its reach to new audiences. With Halloween, there is a thriller amount of campaign styles that businesses from all different industries could create, from interactive social media competitions and Halloween filters, to spookily-themed social media content posts. Don’t be afraid to make the most of Halloween hashtags and some frightfully spectacular puns!
A great tip to use this season is to run a frightfully-fun giveaway competition, encouraging people to like and share the business’s post on social media to count as an ‘entry’ into the competition. Not only can this help attract new customers, but it also works to retain current customers and re-engage them with the brand. This can also be a great way to launch a new product or giveaway a sample of upcoming products as the exclusive prize, generating some extra excitement and interest.
With the rise of TikTok, brands don’t have to be household names to generate high levels of engagement. Instead, brands can do spooky twists to viral trends and repurpose popular memes to build engagement and interest. For example, a makeup brand could demonstrate how to effectively remove Halloween makeup, using a viral audio clip over the top of the video, or a sustainable brand could demonstrate how viewers can repurpose their pumpkins after October.
Boo! The Main Takeaways
Halloween is a fantastic opportunity for brands, not only to have fun with audiences and drive engagement but also to test suitable marketing strategies ahead of larger retail occasions such as Christmas.
Adopting one, or more, of these frightfully fun tips into current strategies will be a sure way to entertain and delight audiences, old and new, on relatively small budgets. Yet, while Halloween is a night of fright and thrills, it is important that brands first understand what is most suitable for their audiences and ensure the activity they are going for is scarily-good fun, to avoid a PR nightmare of their own!
