15 Aug How to Dress Up Your Content For Halloween
Halloween is right around the corner, which means it’s that time of year when social media managers begin planning their costumes, scouring Pinterest for inspiration and loading up their carts with accessories and bags of fun-size candy. While your Halloween costume may already be hanging in your closet (that Best Costume Award is yours this year!) planning for your Halloween social content might be another story.
Thankfully, planning Halloween content for social isn’t as hard as you might think. With a few tricks up their sleeve, anyone can dress up their content for this haunted holiday. Read on for our favorite ways to get in on the spooky spirit and treat your fans to click worthy content.
Get Crafty with DIY Projects and Decor
Halloween is the ultimate DIY holiday. From creative costumes and décor to painted pumpkins and spooky snacks, it’s the one time of year that almost everyone gets their craft on. Capitalize on your fans newfound DIY inspiration by filling their feeds with all kinds of DIY projects, recipes, and costumes that use your product or service.
When creating content, think of your fans interests and what sort of DIY project your brand could help them with. If your brand specializes in hardware (like our friend Lowes), a DIY pumpkin carving kit or homemade spider web décor might be right up their alley. Working with a fashion retailer? Create a Carousel ad of how certain garments can come together to create cute and creative costumes without breaking the bank.
Curate a Pinterest Board
Pinterest is a place to discover ideas based on your projects and interests. With over 150 million monthly users, the digital corkboard has become a center for DIY inspiration for everything from home décor to wedding planning, and is expected to garner even more traffic during the holiday season. Given that 27 million Pinterest users pinned Halloween content last year, creating a Halloween Pinterest board is one of the easiest ways to help fans find and curate your content.
Utilize the channel’s visual-first medium by creating eye catching, relevant pins that your fans can re-pin and share to their hearts content. Costume ideas, recipes, pumpkin carving ideas and more are all great ways to inspire and excite your fans.
Need more Pin-spiration? Check out these brand boards for creative marketing ideas.
Offer Scary Good Deals
Between candy, decorations, and finding the perfect costume, it’s no surprise that consumers are spending a lot on Halloween—about $8.4 billion, to be exact. With those kinds of numbers, it’s no wonder that some retailers view Halloween as the beginning of the holiday season. If your brand specializes in retail or other consumer goods, flash sales, special deals, promotions and exclusive discounts are all great ways to connect with your community and inspire them to click.
Retailer H & M advertised a spooktacular sale on their website with an eye-catching themed GIF that fit both their brand and the holiday.
Utilize UGC
Scroll through any social network and you’re bound to see your feed flooded with heavily branded content, advertising everything from cars to carpet cleaning. No matter where you go marketing messages follow: they appear on your way to work, in the media you consume, at home and in your own newsfeeds.
Given the prevalence of branded content, it’s no wonder that fans are craving a bit of authenticity. According to Salesforce, 92% of consumers trust online content from friends and family above all other forms of brand messages, making UGC the must-have marketing strategy for social.
The best part? Besides appearing more trustworthy to consumers, UGC is also extremely cost effective for marketers. By simply asking permission to use a fans photo, utilizing it on your channels (with credit, of course!) and utilizing a CTA to inspire more fans to submit, you’re creating an interactive and effective content bank that your fans will love. Halloween is the perfect excuse to tap into your fans enthusiasm and generate excitement around your brand.
Who knows—their ideas might even inspire you to create new content!
Host A Contest
Contests are a great way to boost engagement and get people talking on social. By offering a prize, brands instantly increase engagement, shares, and mentions from their community, making them a no-brainer for a high traffic holiday like Halloween.
To start, think about who your audience is and what sort of contest they’d be most likely to engage with. Are they family oriented or more the hands-on, DIY type? Your answer to these questions will determine what sort of contest you host. Draft your contest rules and get ready to judge those submissions!
New to sweepstakes and contests? Check out our Social Promotions 101 guide here.
