10 Halloween marketing ideas for small businesses

With Halloween fast approaching, we thought we’d share some frightfully good marketing ideas for small businesses. 

We’ll be looking at some simple Halloween marketing ideas like:

• 1) Decorations
• 2) Costumes
• 3) Email marketing
• 4) Trick or treating
• 5) Customer engagement
• 6) Interactive posts
• 7) Online videos
• 8) Halloween promotions
• 9) Physical events
• 10) Community engagement

For some extra information about small business marketing, check out our article, “What is small business marketing?”

1. Decorations

Every good holiday celebration starts with themed decorations. It’s a surefire way to get your customers in the Halloween spirit. 

The extent of your decorating is up to you. It doesn’t have to be anything too crazy, but you’d be surprised how big an effect a few cobwebs and some plastic spiders can have.

2. Costumes

This one is fun for both customers and employees. Have any customer-facing staff dress up in their scariest costume. 

If you want to go the extra mile, you could assign the best-dressed employee to greet customers at the front door. 

3. Email marketing

On the approach to Halloween, get creative with your emails. 

Try using GIFs and images of famously scary horror movies and characters. Obviously, don’t do it for emails that are more serious in tone. But for everyday correspondence, why not get a little silly?

4. Trick Or Treating

Try running a “trick or treat” campaign. Give customers the chance to sign up for your mailing list. Then, on Halloween, you could send them a trick or a treat. 

For the treat, you could send vouchers or discount codes. For the trick, nothing too mean. Maybe just a cheesy joke or a GIF with a jump scare. 

5. Customer engagement

Get your customers involved to increase the hype around Halloween. 

You could ask them to submit pictures and videos of:

• Their best costumes.
• Their worst costumes.
• Worst Halloween jokes.
• Craziest decorations. 
• Best Halloween recipes.
• Most interesting pumpkin carvings. 

If you post all the results online, have the public vote for their favourites, and award a prize for the best submissions, it’ll definitely generate a buzz. And it might even get you trending on social media. 

6. Interactive posts

If you’re feeling a little more ambitious, you could try creating some interactive content for your social media pages. 

One of the simplest forms of interactive content is a quiz. For some reason, quizzes are a staple of social media so you could whip one up with a Halloween theme. 

Quizzes are generally split into two categories. 

There are trivia-based quizzes like:

• Can you name the monsters from all of these horror movies?
• Can you guess the movie based on the villain’s weapons?

And then there are the sillier, personality-based quizzes, like 

• Find out which famous monster you are.
• What Halloween sweets best describe you as a person?

Whenever you’re posting quizzes like these, make sure you include links back to your business website so it leads to some actual traffic. 

7. Online videos

Long-form videos on YouTube and social media are always great ways to engage users and improve your search engine rankings. And Halloween is the perfect time to make some creepy content. 

You can create jump scare videos, makeup tutorials, decoration ideas, Halloween recipes, or even short videos about the fun seasonal thing your office is getting up to. 

Make sure you post your videos with the appropriate hashtags to get them in circulation. Ask your friends, family, and employees to share them too, and always include links back to your original website.

8. Halloween promotions

Create some promotional material centred around Halloween. This could be a simple Halloween based deal along the lines of:

• “Slashing” prices.
• “Scarily” good deals.

Or you could vamp up your physical products by using:

• Halloween boxes and wrappers.
• Cobwebs and fake spiders in their packaging.
• Extra Halloween goodies with their purchase like sweets or costume accessories. 

It might sound a little silly, but that’s what Halloween is all about. And doing that little extra for your customers is sure to make them smile.  

9. Physical events

Creating some child-friendly activities in your local area can be a great marketing strategy. Organise a stall or booth in a public area and set up some fun games, face-painting, scary characters, and goody bags. 

Halloween is mainly for kids, after all. But the parents will love it and see your brand in a positive light, so kid-friendly events are a great way to promote your small business. 

10. Community engagement

Check if there are any local events in your area that you can get involved with like local competitions. You could even list your business as an attraction for trick or treaters to come and visit. 

Set up some decorations and give out sweets to visitors. You could even go all out and set up a haunted house for people to walk through. 

Alternatively, you could send out some employees dressed up in their best costumes to go trick or treating around town. Give them some gifts bags, sweets, and business cards, and have them hand them out to the public and other businesses. 

Community engagement like this is great for getting your name out there as a local business. And, of course, recording the whole thing and posting on social media will help increase your brand recognition even further. 

We all love a little scare during the Halloween season. But financial management shouldn’t be giving you nightmares. That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.