Treat Your Customers With These Halloween Marketing Ideas

Embrace the mystery, magic, and superstition of this spooky holiday. As the nights draw in and the days get colder,  marketers have a great opportunity to catch shoppers’ attention.

Last year alone, American consumers spent $10.6 billion to get in the holiday spirit. 69% planned to celebrate in 2022, and 45% started shopping for Halloween in September or earlier. The average Brit spent £100 on Halloween in 2022, interest in Halloween has increased by 40% year-on-year in Saudi Arabia, and Halloween spending in Italy is picking up from a fall during the pandemic. What was once primarily celebrated in America is now growing in popularity worldwide.

And it’s not just candy, costume, and decoration brands that can benefit from great Halloween marketing. From charities to cat food and sneakers to streaming services, every brand has an opportunity to put a spooky twist on their Halloween marketing to increase sales during the holiday season.

6 Fun and Fiendish Halloween Marketing Ideas

Here are just some ideas to delight (not fright!) your customers this Halloween.

Get Scary Good at Social

Create themed content, contests, and promotions to build excitement around Halloween. For example, costume inspiration, spooky stories, décor tips, and party recipe ideas. Use influencers and incentivize sharing to boost engagement.

Get your customers involved by asking them for user-generated content that encourages self-expression. For example, sharing photos of costumes or scary ways they use your products.

Slay Online

Build anticipation and demand with online-only offers and rewards. Try digital sweepstakes where taking part gives entrants a chance to win a prize or gift card. Reward consumers by giving them a gift with purchases of specific products, e.g., if they buy a set of vampire fangs they get a free spooky makeup kit. You could also offer cash back if customers buy from two brands at the same time.

Get Spooky In-store

Make Halloween shopping memorable by creating a fabulously spooky atmosphere in-store. From decorating with accessories like fake spider webs and playing scary music to designing themed product displays, there’s loads you can do to join in with the fun and encourage spending.

Treat Your Customers

Make customers feel good by giving them a great deal. Reward them with relevant gifts when they make a purchase, e.g., a branded ‘spooky’ swag bag with qualifying products. Give them something that shows you’re a thoughtful brand. For example, if they buy a certain food product, you give a percentage of the profits to charity.

Receipt marketing is another great way to engage customers. Reward them by providing offers at the point of sale. You can provide blanket offers to everyone or personalize them based on factors like basket size and repeat or new purchases.

Co-brand Initiatives

Team up with other brands to extend your customer base and offer rewards. For example, if they buy from your beer brand, you could give them a Lyft or Uber voucher to get home safely from a Halloween party. Or, if they buy a coffee product, you could team up with a local coffee shop to give them a free pumpkin spice latte.

Create Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

Introduce urgency with time-bound offers. For example, if a customer makes four purchases in a month, give them a gift. Or go one step further with daily or even hourly special offers to build interest.

You can try basket size promotions, too. For example, if a customer buys three flavors of your products, give them a fourth flavor for free.

Inject fun by hosting events or introducing gamification. For example, host a spooky webinar where you share scary stories or run contests with rewards for taking part in games like horror movie trivia.

Get in the Spooky Groove With These Halloween Marketing Examples

Here are some Halloween marketing ideas made reality to inspire your next campaign.

A Sneaky Gift From Reese’s

Reese’s created a trick-or-treat bag with a secret stash compartment for kids to hide candy in. With selected products, customers got this bag for free to protect their haul of Reese’s delights.¹

A Frightful Night With Coca-Cola

Universal Studios in Orlando hosts a coveted Halloween Horror Night. With a little help from Coca-Cola, Orlando residents can get heavily discounted tickets with coupon codes on drinks cans.²

Protection from Trickery

Snickers partnered with insurance brand, Lemonade, to provide home-insurance policy holders with full-size Snickers bars and Lemonade-branded Halloween decorations to help deter criminals during Halloween.³

A Whopping Great Ghost Hunt

Burger King created a ghost-hunting game that users could play on their app. Players were encouraged to play the game where they like to hang out and if they found a ghost, they’d get a BOGO voucher for a Whopper. ⁴

 A Shockingly Clever Eco Halloween

Rubicon made recyclable trick-or-treat bags that consumers could order online and easily return for recycling with pre-paid postage stamps.⁵

Ready For a Wicked Halloween Marketing Campaign?

Start planning your gruesomely good Halloween Marketing campaign early to get ahead. If you’re looking for intelligent software, try Snipp’s customer acquisition, engagement, and retention platform for easy contests, shopper promotions, sweepstakes, rewards, and more.

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