13 Halloween Marketing Ideas That Are So Good, They're Scary

Every year, before the leaves have even started to fall, shoppers and businesses are already gearing up for the spookiest season of the year. Halloween is America's second-largest commercial holiday and a $12 billion opportunity (opens in a new window)to drive sales, build community connections, and boost brand awareness. Halloween isn’t just for kids and costume parties; it’s a frighteningly good opportunity for businesses to interact with their communities, reach their target audiences, and boost their brand awareness. 

When should I start marketing for Halloween? To maximize your marketing efforts during the Halloween season, it’s best to start teasing your Autumn sales and Halloween promotions in September. In our 20+ years of experience at 4AllPromos, we see a shift from summer to fall promotions in late August, right after kids go back to school. When the pumpkin spice lattes hit the coffee shops, it's time for fall, and these days they’re scheduled to return the last week of August.

Planning your Halloween Marketing Campaigns

Americans love Halloween, and there’s data to prove it. The National Retail Foundation (opens in a new window) has seen record spending for Halloween since 2020, outperforming even pre-pandemic numbers. From small businesses in town to large corporations, organizations have a chance to increase sales as consumers start buying candy, costumes, and spooky decor to get into the Halloween spirit.

How can companies use Halloween to their advantage? With a well-planned Halloween marketing campaign, you can use spooky themes and products related to the ghoulish holiday to playfully resonate and connect with your audience.  Our 4AllPromos marketing experts sat down to create this wickedly clever Halloween marketing ideas list to help you create a killer campaign.  

1. Participate in Neighborhood or Chamber of Commerce Trick-or-Treating

Businesses with a brick-and-mortar location are able to take advantage of community events during the Halloween holiday season. Many towns have a trick-or-treat walk for children to walk from business to business, collecting candy and fun promotional giveaways. Join your local chamber of commerce’s trick-or-treat event to connect with the community. Hand out business cards or Halloween promotional items like small toys and glow sticks. This is a great way to spread brand awareness and meet the people who live close enough to shop in-store.

2. Host a Halloween Event like a Pumpkin Carving Contest or Giveaway

Nothing says we’re in the middle of the fall season like pumpkins! Invite the family members of staff and the kids in the community to a pumpkin giveaway or pumpkin carving contest. Run an in-person carve-off with corporate gifts as prizes. If you don’t have the space for a contest, add your logo to pumpkin carving knives and pumpkin scoopers to encourage people to carve pumpkins at home and post on social media platforms. 

Have people vote by liking jack-o-lanterns that feature a custom hashtag and tagging your business. This will grow your reach organically to their audiences, and maybe a prospective client will see the post.

3. Hand Out Branded Halloween Bags

The days of using a pillowcase to run around town collecting candy are over. Get custom trick-or-treat bags to hand out at events leading up to Halloween. Nearly every organization benefits from the brand awareness promotional Halloween bags have to offer. 

We have Halloween-inspired designs that kids will take all around town to collect their candy and Halloween treats. Each house they stop at will see your logo, giving you repeated brand exposure all night long. 

Another Halloween bag campaign idea is to fill the bags with candy and Halloween goodies to spread goodwill. When parents inspect the Halloween treats, they’ll see your brand and learn about your business. 

4. Make Limited Edition Halloween-themed Products & Branded Merchandise

From 6-foot-tall Halloween decorations to limited-time pumpkin-spiced lattes, Halloween-themed products fly off the shelves. Create a buzz by stocking special edition branded merchandise and spooky season products with limited-time offers. You create a sense of urgency and FOMO that drives your customer base to act fast for the Halloween specials. 

What are some creative ways to engage customers with Halloween giveaways? Give your customers something they’ll use that fits the theme of All Hallows’ Eve. This could be anything from Halloween-inspired apparel, light-up products for Halloween parties, or spooky stress relievers to keep on their desks at work.

5. Create Halloween Discount Landing Pages for E-commerce

Make sure customers can find your Halloween deals with a web page dedicated to your offer discounts. A Halloween-specific landing page that features special discounts and promo codes will make the experience better for returning and new customers. Use Halloween colors and graphics of ghouls, goblins, skeletons, and zombies.

Remember to have a banner or link to your landing page from the home page to direct traffic to your Halloween sale. Add a countdown clock to let shoppers know when the sale starts and ends. It’s also a good idea to use UTM links if you want to see how you have acquired your audience for your Halloween sale. 

6. Boost Social Media Campaigns with Spooky User-Generated Content

From costume contests to Halloween recipes, use October to boost engagement on your social media channels. Halloween provides the perfect time to gather user-generated content. Run online costume contests or polls for costume ideas, or encourage your customers to share their Halloween experiences using your products.

User-generated content is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and increasing your social proof. A fun promotional idea during the witching hour is to have followers try a scavenger hunt, tagging your business in stories when they find items. This lets people from all over find similar items on the list and play from any location, all while spreading your handle to their audiences. Send winners a gift card or branded company swag as a prize.

What should I post on social media for Halloween? On the day of Halloween, make social media posts that include photos of your employees, pets, or (with permission) kids in their Halloween costumes. If you’re having a sale, be sure to remind your customers one more time, too.

7. Give Branded Candy to Trick-or-Treaters

If the community your business is in has a trick-or-treat event or a Halloween parade, stand out and spread awareness with promotional fun-sized candy. For online stores, add a branded bag of candy with a little message telling the customer it was a “treat” to pack their orders. Any leftover candy after Halloween can be given to guests and visitors when they come to your office. 

8. Host a Trunk-or-Treat Halloween Event

Take the initiative to invite the city to come to you when you host a trunk-or-treat event in your parking lot. Trunk-or-treats are drive-through trick-or-treating events that gained popularity during the pandemic. Decorate your car trunks with spooky Halloween decorations and hand out Halloween treats and promotional products. This is a great way to engage with families and create a memorable experience.

9. Send Halloween Email Campaigns

Don’t underestimate the power of email marketing during Halloween. Craft Halloween email campaigns with catchy subject lines, festive templates, and exclusive Halloween deals. Highlight any of your limited-time Halloween products and encourage recipients to act fast before the deals vanish. Change up your abandoned cart sequence to spooky-themed messaging like “Your cart is haunted by abandoned items”. 

When should I start Halloween marketing campaigns? Start teasing customers with peeks at any Halloween merch or swag coming for the season as early as late August. If you plan to have a sale closer to Halloween, start your campaign later in September. Emails with coupon codes can be sent the week of Halloween to give customers one last shot to take advantage of discounts. Remember, if you’re buying custom logo Halloween giveaways, your orders should be placed 4-6 weeks ahead of when you need the items! 

10. Use Interactive Pop-Ups for Trick-or-Treat Promotions

When users land on your homepage during October, fire a pop-up with an interactive trick-or-treat game. Ask a user if they want a trick or a treat, and have a result for each selection. Promo codes or free shipping are great offers to entice them to make a purchase, and your pop-up can direct them straight to the Halloween sales landing page. Have your dev team implement gamification through "trick-or-treat" pop-ups, too, where visitors click on Halloween items scattered across your site to reveal discount codes.

11. Run Halloween Quizzes and Polls to Build Email Lists

Use Halloween to build your email list or social media following with quizzes and polls. People love Halloween, and put as much effort into decorating houses and having parties as they would during Christmas. This means they also have strong opinions about which movies are best for the season, what recipes are a must, and which types of Halloween costumes are trending. Use this to your advantage by having your audience engage in polls or quizzes, giving them the results in exchange for their email addresses.  

Go a step further with the information you collect about your audience to segment and send more personalized offers based on their preferences. 

12. Distribute Halloween Safety Tips & Brochures

Halloween is a fun holiday for children and adults, but it does come with safety concerns. From the dark nights to people trying to play tricks instead of getting treats, it’s always good to be cautious. Hand out Halloween bags that feature safety tips, light-up or reflective candy bags, or even brochures with helpful information. This shows your community you care.

13. Hand Out Halloween Promotional Products

Halloween is a holiday that all ages and backgrounds enjoy. Your business has the opportunity to connect with people you may not have otherwise reached with Halloween promotional items. Staples like Halloween candy bags and branded treats are popular items for the season, but also consider handing out items like glow sticks, coloring books, and stress relievers. We carry options in the shape of pumpkins, eyeballs, or skulls. Giving out promotional Halloween items at the end of a haunted house or during a harvest fest parade makes people remember your name. Add your logo to balloons, light up candles, and drinkware for easy DIY decorations to keep your brand shining during the Halloween party. 

Measuring the Success of Your Halloween Campaign

It’s easy to get caught up in the creative excitement of Halloween when you’re running your campaigns, but like any marketing campaign, it’s important to set goals and metrics for success. This way, you see if your investment into Halloween marketing generated real ROI and know where to improve next year. 

When you track the data from your marketing efforts, you’ll see what channels and content resonated best with your target audience. Your data may reveal new audiences that found you based on these campaigns. Some metrics to consider tracking include your engagement rates, conversion data, social media likes and follows for brand awareness, referrals from influencers and affiliates, and attendance for in-person events. 

After your campaign, take a look at the data to adjust and plan the budget for the following year. 

4AllPromos Staff Picks for Halloween Promotional Products

At 4AllPromos we have over a hundred different Halloween promotional items to choose from. What do people buy for Halloween events and celebrations? For parties, we see people buy Halloween balloons and candy most often. For events leading up to Halloween, we see our other branded Halloween items getting more attention. We asked our staff what their favorite items have been that they have seen ordered around Halloween time, and here’s what they say:

• Shelby says, “The Halloween Cotton Coloring Tote Bag is such a cool idea. It gives kids an opportunity to be creative and let their inner artists shine. You can have a color event, and then they get to use the bag for trick-or-treating. Parents get a little keepsake, too.”

• Julie picked the LED Pumpkin Bag and the Pumpkin Spinner Wand. “The products that light up give parents like me an easy way to see our kids on Halloween night. It’s the safety aspect for me, but the kids love the glow of the LEDs and the fun spinning pumpkin on the wand. It’s something they’ll keep around, and the LED bag can be used over and over again. Any company would be smart to put a logo on one of these products.”

• Sam’s favorite branded Halloween item is the Monster Hand Phone Holder Stress Reliever. “How cool is this product? I don’t know about anyone else, but when I’m working at my desk, I’m constantly misplacing my phone or accidentally covering it with papers. This gives me a place to put it, plus it’s spooky-themed and doubles as a stress squeezie after a tough meeting. For me, this item might be Halloween-themed, but it’s on my desk year-round.”

Start Planning for Halloween promotions and Get Spooktacular Sales

Halloween is an excellent opportunity to get creative with your marketing strategy. Leverage the love for the spooky season with Halloween-themed products, interactive campaigns, and timely promotions to increase your brand's visibility and drive sales. 

Whether you're handing out branded candy, hosting a Halloween event, or launching an email campaign, our strategies can help your business stand out and make the most of this frighteningly fun time of year. Start planning your Halloween marketing efforts today to ensure a fang-tastically successful holiday! Browse our staff's favorite products or any of our other Halloween promotional items to start your brand awareness campaign this year. 

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Sources

1. Watts, Lottie. “Halloween Spending to Reach Record $12.2 Billion as Participation Exceeds Pre-Pandemic Levels.” Nrf, 20 Sept. 2023, nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/halloween-spending-reach-record-122-billion-participation-exceeds-pre.