PosterMyWall free class: 4 Halloween ideas for your small business
October means the arrival of the spooky season. As a small business, you want to capitalize with ghoulishly-clever marketing. After all, Halloween is one of the biggest holidays of the year.
To help you stand out this spooky season, we invited PosterMyWall senior marketers, Zohair Abbas Khan and Rimsha Imran to share their favorite Halloween marketing ideas.
You can watch the class replay above or, if you prefer, read on for a summary.
4 Halloween promotion ideas to give ’em pumpkin to talk about
Here are four promotional Halloween ideas for the upcoming spooky season that you can adapt for your small business.
1. Halloweenify your brand
Zohair kicked us off with nifty tips to “Halloweenify” your brand. This means adding Halloween elements to your branding. This will let customers know that your business is fully engaged in celebrating the season.
Add a fang-tastic touch to your logo
One way to Halloweenify your brand is to “add a fang-tastic touch to your logo.” This can be easily accomplished by adding a small image or icon to your marketing. For example, at PosterMyWall we dress up our logo in a tiny witch hat.
Despite its small size, our witch hat is eye-catching, impactful, and gets the point across.
Scaling it even bigger, you can follow Disney’s lead. This year they Halloween-ified their iconic Mickey Mouse silhouette by constructing a Mickey head out of supersized pumpkins.
Work with what you have!
There are many ways to adapt this strategy to your specific small business. If you have a catering business, you can arrange your grazing boards into jack-o-lantern faces. If you run a coffee shop, you can create “batty” latte art. The possibilities are endless.
Limited edition products or services
A popular strategy when it comes to Halloweenifying your brand is to launch a limited edition product. Zohair’s examples included Kitkat’s pumpkin pie chocolate and Skittles’ zombie candy.
Creep it fun!
You don’t have to go big, though. A little Halloween-themed humor can go a long way. Like Coca-Cola and Pepsi’s joint promotion where they both ran the same ad with very different captions.
2. Spookify your store and staff with Halloween ideas
Next, Rimsha shared Halloween ideas related to spookifying your store and staff using easy DIY hacks, decorations, and costume parties.
Add an eerie touch to your space
Rimsha said the first step to get your store ready for Halloween is to give it an “eerie touch.” Spooky decorations, like spider webs and bats, are both simple and inexpensive to create.
Don’t forget to reuse Halloween decor left over from last year. In addition to keeping your costs low, it’s healthier for the environment.
Creating Halloween displays is another way to add that signature creepy touch to your store. This can be implemented in infinite variations to fit all kinds of small businesses: sweet shops, eyewear stores, and even animal hospitals.
Get your team to dress up in Halloween costumes
This one is pretty self-explanatory. Costume parties at work not only get your team and customers into a festive mood, but they also serve as a valuable team-building activity. Especially if there are prizes for best costume, wink.
3. Don’t ghost social media!
After covering visual merchandising and team participation, Zohair moved on to social media.
Targeted Halloween Ads
One of the best ways to leverage Halloween is through targeted posts or ads. Facebook and Instagram in particular have very specific and user-friendly ad features. And with a very small budget, you can target your ads to reach a specific demographic based on age, location, interests, or whatever criteria applies to your audience.
For more on this, you can check out the recent class we did with Morgan Meyers on how to use Facebook ads for your business.
Create Special Halloween Ads
Zohair emphasized that online ads have to be eye-catching in order to grab the viewers’ attention and convert them into customers.
“Head over to PosterMyWall for bone chilling, fully customizable Halloween templates. We offer menus, sale ads, videos, party flyers, costume contest invitations, and posters. The list is endless.”
Our ultimate Halloween guide for 2023 is here! Get Halloween marketing tips and graphic design resources for your next Halloween campaign, all in one place.
4. Get your customers to create fa-boo-lous Halloween posts
For the final Halloween idea, Rimsha showed us how to involve your customers in your marketing in a fun, budget-friendly way.
Do a ghoulish online giveaway
An online Halloween-themed giveaway can be a brilliant way to involve customers.
For instance, host a Halloween costume contest by asking your customers to dress up in their quirkiest, most imaginative costumes, then post pictures of themselves. The winner can be the person with the most likes online. Or print the photos and invite customers to come into your store to vote for their favorite. Recognize the winner with a gift or a free meal.
Don’t forget to attach a unique hashtag to the contest to help the posts gain traction.
More Halloween ideas for giveaways include:
- Pumpkin carving contest: people share their best attempts at carving a pumpkin; the winner gets a free product or coupon.
- Pet costume contest: people share cute pictures of their pets dressed up for halloween; winner gets a free product or coupon.
- Halloween sweepstakes – finish the horror story: write the first line of the story and ask followers to keep adding on to it in the comments.
Start a terrifying TikTok challenge for Halloween
Another approach is to start a Halloween-themed TikTok challenge. Rimsha said TikTok is a great way to reach a younger audience, because 60% of the people on TikTok fall between the ages of 16 and 24.
Ideas that you can implement for TikTok include trends like the spooky dance challenge and the scary makeup challenge.
Rimsha’s examples included the Chipotle burrito challenge, and the Fruit by the Foot candy costume challenge. See our class presented by Monica Farber to learn more about how to use user generated content to promote your business.
Grab your witch’s broom and sweep away the competition!
We hope Zohair and Rimsha have awakened your inner spook and that you’re inspired to run some fang-tastic Halloween promotions using the Halloween ideas these two shared.
If you’re ready to start on your Halloween promotion planning right away, try our Halloween templates. If you attempt one of these halloween ideas, let us know if you scare up any business.
