We all know that seasonality is a fundamental feature in a digital marketing campaign and holidays represent incredible opportunities for brands to interact with their existing customers, reach new ones, increase their engagement and create an enduring awareness. Halloween is around the corner and it’s time for marketers to unleash their creativity to take advantage of this chance in the best way.

For some kinds of business, as for example the food or the apparel ones, the connection with Halloween is pretty obvious and digital marketing campaigns show a direct relation with sales. However, for many other fields it is not the same: what can possibly link the night of witches, monsters and dead with detergents, cars or furniture? A well-planned digital marketing campaign does. Smartly harnessing the power of the Halloween atmosphere can bring valuable results for every business, regardless of the size and the product category. In order to achieve this goal, it is fundamental to understand which are the main tricks that a good marketer has to perform to treat the target customers.

1)      Use a memorable tagline and hashtag

A funny, creative and impressive catchphrase is essential. Try to make a non-trivial joke connecting your product or brand to Halloween and it will be the best way to be stuck in the minds of your customers for a long time after the end of October. It must be something short, smart and of course easy to remember. Create a related hashtag, use it in all your social media and encourage your followers to do the same. This step is very useful for marketers not specifically aiming at increasing the sales, but generally working on awareness.

2) Create buzz

Try to create an innovative campaign, able to surprise your customers, maybe adding some ironic and/or irreverent elements: this will make people talk about the campaign. A buzz surrounding your brand is a powerful tool to achieve a long term awareness.

3)      Be careful not to look as desperate to be seasonally relevant

Don’t try to create connections where they cannot exist, since they would seem implausible. If your campaign looks as strained and unnatural, customers won’t like it, they won’t feel any engagement with it. The final result will be just bad for your brand.

4)      Be interactive

Interacting with your customers and make them be an active part of the campaign is essential to achieve the wished success, and thanks to all the online features, it is really not that hard. Take advantage of a wise combination of social media and website to get people involved and to give them a complete digital experience. An outstanding example in this regard is given by Target’s digital campaign for this Halloween: they used their Instagram page to provide their followers with an original interactive game. They’ve been posting pictures that, when put all together, create a frightening digital neighborhood. Navigating in this online space, users are encouraged to click on “trick” or “treat” links, leading them to different kinds of content.

  5)      Get in the Halloween spirit

Try to make changes in your website and social media sites in order to get in the Halloween mood. Even just colors, fonts and a little bit of graphic tricks can be enough to be nicely connected to the seasonality. Introducing some Halloween-related features is also an option. A good website design team can make the difference in this context and the impact on customers can be great.

6)      Deliver a content

Don’t forget that all the previous efforts are completely useless if you don’t provide your customers with a valuable, thrilling content. Decide in advance what do you want to communicate and make sure that every tweet, post or picture will lead the users to some interesting information.

7)      Be consistent

The last, but not the least: make sure that all the advertising campaign parts are consistent with each other, with your brand image and with your general marketing positioning. Otherwise the customers will just be confused and the Halloween-themed advertising will play you a bad trick.

Sources:

http://www.jasonpaulmarketing.com/scary-good-marketing-opportunities-halloween/

Five Social Media Marketing Tricks for Halloween

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2377250/3-brands-3-social-media-strategies-for-halloween

One of the major challenges for people working in marketing areas is the one of collecting consistent and reliable information about customers and, in particular, about their decision-making and purchasing processes. A typical marketing research takes place in a room, where a bunch of experts asks some predetermined questions to a group of people. Clearly, the risk of obtaining answers with a bias given by the particular way in which the interview has been structured is very high: stilted questions and presence of researchers end up with strongly influencing the customers’ answers. People are lead to think about solutions that maybe they would have never spontaneously considered in the everyday life. Therefore, the result is never completely trustable and satisfying, since we have seen that the emerging data cannot reflect the real purchasing pattern of a free and normal individual.

A very original solution to this concerning problem comes from a new app for smartphones: Journey HQ. Why is it so innovative? Simple: it allows to get rid of both the abovementioned intrusive features that affect the reliability of a classic marketing research, questions and question-setters. The app, which is notably developed by experts instead of techies, gives the opportunity to the customer to track his purchasing pattern as he prefers: writing, taking pictures, recording audios or videos. The participants are also encouraged to express their emotions and feelings at every stage in order to give a more detailed insight, but basically they are not forced to do anything, since the core value of the app is to preserve the spontaneity.

When people log in and record their purchasing steps, data are immediately sent to a website enabling marketing researchers to follow their customers’ pattern step by step and to analyze it through a range of analytics tools. The potential of Journey HQ is now pretty evident. The quality of the gathered data will be incredibly improved with respect to the “old-fashioned methods”: marketers will be able to access to a wide range of information and to capture the real-time thinking of people, something which is just impossible to achieve by an ex-post question-based research.

Certainly the application is still at its first stage and the new methodology needs to be tested and adjusted. However, if experts keep working in this way, attempting to free marketing research from bias and external intrusions through a smart use of technology and social media, the benefits could be dramatic, not only for marketing and
ethnographic studies, but also for consumers.

Sources:
http://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/journey-hq-customer-journey-app
http://www.marketingtechnews.net/news/2014/oct/02/want-fully-understand-customer-journey-get-customer-do-it/

At the beginning of September Samsung announced that its new Galaxy Note 4, that will be released before the end of the year, will entail new powerful virtual reality features. This will be possible thanks to the revolutionary “Gear VR”: a headset powered by Oculus (acquired by Facebook for $2 billion last July) featuring an immersive three dimensional technology. It will provide the customers with the possibility of living a 360 degree adventure in a virtual world, being able to simulate a motion experience by reacting to eyes’ movements. The VR technology will be mainly used by Samsung for gaming purposes and it will surely turn the entire videogame world upside-down.

However, marketers can’t and won’t let this new incredible opportunity slip. To a watchful eye, the VR technology is a perfect mean to considerably improve the digital marketing efforts. Exploiting it, companies will be able to provide their target audience with virtual reality experiences of what they are advertising. Moreover, ads could become something exciting, enjoyable and desirable, rather than interruptive and annoying as it is now in most of the cases. The dream of marketing people of creating an advertising campaign perceived by the audience as something that truly meets their desires and needs could be finally fulfilled.

The marketing possibilities are infinite and the technology could be helpfully used in all the business sectors. By simply wearing a pair of virtual glasses, people could visit places far away to decide where to go on holiday, walk around a virtual store for some online shopping, take a look at hotel rooms before booking, try how it is to drive a new car and so on. Customers will be able to directly interact with products and services offered by a company, and this will stimulate their engagement and interaction in a way that traditional techniques could never do. Someone has already started to exploit this new technology, as it is the case of the Marriot Hotels chain, that has tried to supply even a 4D virtual travel experience to its customers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWxSOjfqMvI

In a close future, the way in which customers interact with brands will dramatically change, so be prepared to be part of this new thrilling (virtual) reality.

Sources:
http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/samsung-s-vr-technology-big-step-ad-revolution/295118/

http://blog.appnova.com/oculus-vr-future-digital-marketing/
http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/gearvr/