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.
Booking.com “Stay if you dare” campaign for Halloween 2013
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
Pepsi’s irreverent Halloween ad
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.
Target’s “Halloween Hills” on Instagram fro Halloween 2014
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.
Pringles’ “Can-o-lantern” Facebook feature on the website
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/
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2377250/3-brands-3-social-media-strategies-for-halloween