Halloween Marketing Ideas

What gets lost within the Halloween holiday is the fact that Halloween can offer you one of the best marketing opportunities of the year. Halloween could be argued as one of the most fun holidays of the year and it’s time for you to capitalize on the marketing opportunity to target your core audience. Here are some marketing tips to spark your creativity, so you can generate that ROI, visibility, and impression during the holiday season.  Read some tips on how you can develop a direct mail campaign focused around postcards, brochures and flyers for a monster return on your investment.

Offer a Give Away With Your Campaign

Halloween Printing

Play trick or treat without going door to door. Give away a free sample or offering is a great way to engage your audience to take advantage of your product. For example, if you are a APP company looking to generate more sales, you might want to send out a postcard that includes a special URL for a free game download or trial.  Another good way to use direct mail to market during the Halloween season, a mortgage broker might send out a postcard with a piece of candy attached to it that says, “No Trick, Just Treats.”  It is a good way to show your clients that you are thinking about them and are more likely to get a direct response.

Direct Mail can also be used to drive traffic directly to your website and generate inbound leads. A good example of this is if you are automotive company, you can offer a giveaway to get a % off your next visit. Here is a good example of a direct marketing campaign done above.

Do a Halloween Challenge

Halloween Challenge

You can promote a Halloween carve off through social media and integrate it with print marketing collateral. If you are bigger companies with a legitimate following put together a pumpkin carving contest and send out postcards with variable data that has each person’s name on it. By asking them to participate and submit their carved pumpkin content to their Facebook or Instagram page is great for customer engagement.  Have your postcard have links to both social platforms and offer a giveaway to the person who carves the most creative pumpkin. You can have the contest include pumpkins with your brand include in the carving or you can make it a generic competition.

Haunted Houses Are Always Great Corporate Events

Print Marketing on Halloween.

Capitalize on the staple of Halloween horror by hosting a haunted house.  You can also partner with local haunted houses for community give away. This will earn you valuable PR points and all proceeds can be donated to your charity of choice.  This will also give you the possibility of getting free press from local newspapers, radio, and television news programs.  If you choose to go this route, you will get a ton of brand awareness, because you can print off a large banner with your company name as the sponsor of the haunted house.

The best way to market this type of event is through half-folded brochure mailers that resemble funeral cards, or if you are marketing towards a younger crowd, you could create die cut Halloween shapes such as: tombstones, bats, ghosts, or your favorite monster. These will be a huge hit at home. If you do it correctly you can also gather data to determine on how to improve upon the event next year.

Store Front Halloween Specials

Halloween Print Specials

Strategize different ideas to keep consumers away from trick or treating by enticing them to shop at your local store front. Have mid night specials and offerings by naming the event something creative. Employees and guest can dress up in Halloween customers and outfits to make it fun and exciting. You can play thriller and other Halloween music, offer refreshments, or offer baked goods. If you go this route the key to success is making sure people are aware of the event, and the specials are worth the trip. Print flyers for your store front, create a direct mail campaign for the clients that you have shipped items to, and make sure you personalize it as much as possible.

Website Promotions for eCommerce Websites

If you don’t have a store front but you are trying to capitalize the holiday season by getting more traffic then there are also viabHalloweenle solutions to increase your awareness.  With SEO becoming harder and harder to rank, and the investment it would take months in advance to get a top ranking for a 2 day period, the value of online marketing  isn’t always a viable solution. If you lose rankings, or invest money and never generate the 1st page ranking you are out of luck. eCommerce websites are starting to put together holiday catalogs to make sure that they generate product awareness and direct response that Google can no longer provide (unless you are paying for their advertisements). Paying Google for those ads can be very expensive and most companies don’t have keywords that people are going to search for their give always.  Printing flyers, catalogs, and invitations assure you that your ads have been reached by your consumer. Don’t let your message get lost in cyber space hoping that they stumble upon your event or marketing message.