Effective Halloween-Themed Social Media Campaigns

Get inspired by these effective social media campaigns for Halloween!" Halloween is not far off, and there are many marketers searching for ways to promote their brand for this particular holiday. While any holiday gives a marketer a great opportunity to use promotions on social media to boost their results, Halloween is special in that it appeals to a much wider base than religious or culture-specific holidays. Throughout the text below, we will have a look at a few Halloween social campaigns that are considered widely successful, and various takeaways from these promotions will be examined in the context of employing the strategies for your upcoming campaign.

Campaigns that Made the Grade 1: Zombifier - From Mike's Hard Lemonade

This particular promotion played directly to the season in a fun, interactive, engaging way. Zombies are huge in the movies and in television series, and a few years ago Mike's decided that creating an app dealing with zombies was a fantastic way to bring attention to their brand while crossing a few demographics. Not only does this play well to the Halloween theme, but it taps into the zombie-loving audience.

This was a great way to use Facebook for business. An app was created that transformed normal photos of people into "zombified" pictures through a series of easy options the user could control. To use the Zombifier, people had to "Like" the element.

2: Get Gourdeous - Target

Target is a huge brand, but they went very social and directly to the people with their Get Gourdeous promotion. Similar to the Zombifier, this promotion allowed users to upload their photos. They could then stick their photos inside of pumpkins, tweak the image and add different features, and create custom Jack O'Lanterns to send to their friends. It was the epitome of social and played directly to the Halloween season in an encompassing way.

3: Halloween Hunt - Kraft Foods

Instead of just a promotional app, Kraft Foods created an entire game that was set up on a separate landing page. When users clicked through, they were taken to the proverbial haunted house scene, complete with graveyard and other Halloween-themed images. This was marketing at its finest. The game itself allowed users to scroll over images, their mouse pointer becoming a skeleton's hand while clicking on images. After certain items were found, a quiz was given at the end. Get it right and win a recipe.

What You Can Learn From These Campaigns

So, what are the different takeaways from these successful campaigns? Let's have a quick look at how you can extrapolate data from these contests, create some efficient, succinct tips, and apply them to your Halloween promotion.

• Use a popular element of Halloween for your promotion that also crosses holiday boundaries. For instance, using vampires is very "Halloween," but there's also a huge audience for that topic specifically.
• Make sure that your promotion is interactive in some way. Requiring users to take an action to participate is a given, but the destination cannot be static. Make it entertaining and engaging; make a game of it.
• Allow users to put themselves into the promotion; i.e. with images, friend interactions, personal controls, etc.
• Make sure that the destination page or element is functional before you decide to launch. A promotion can easily fail if people go to interact with it and it freezes, doesn't do what it was designed to, or has other issues.
• Add some incentive! "Share this to play a game" sounds good, but "Play a game to win a prize" sounds much better.
• No matter what the promotion is, require an action from users in order to access it. It's a trade-off.
• Although Halloween themes are very cliché at this point, you can still use a common element in a very creative way. Zombie dance parties, creating your own Frankenstein monster, hunting Dracula, a tweet hashtag contest for best Halloween tips - your options are limitless when it comes to creative design.
• When advertising your promotion, don't neglect to use a management app like Qwaya to test your targeting ads, to focus your marketing, and to carefully monitor the results.

Halloween promotions give you a great opportunity to draw a lot of attention to your brand during the holidays. However, don't neglect to take this same approach to promotions for any time of the year.

Written by guest blogger Craig Robinson, a social media enthusiast and professional writer for Qwaya-a technology company specializing in Facebook marketing.