To some, it may seem a little early to start planning for Halloween event marketing. However, the beginning of September is the ideal time to start ramping up your efforts toward marketing Halloween events and other seasonal parties.

To help you make sure your Halloween event gets the attention it deserves, we’ve put together this quick guide to help you create a real buzz around this milestone holiday.

Background: The Challenge of Effective Halloween Event Marketing 

Each and every day, your customers get bombarded with thousands of promotional emails, Tweets, images, Facebook ads and much more, telling them to hit up another “hottest party in town.” And things just get worse around October 31st, as the market gets flooded with Halloween and other seasonal events, making it increasingly difficult to get the word out about your event.

To make sure you cut through the clutter, you’re going to need a strong, well-executed event marketing strategy, so scroll down and let us show you some of our favourite approaches to marketing a Halloween event that’ll help you get noticed.

Drop Boulders, Not Rocks:

We like to use a certain analogy when we talk to our clients about their event marketing strategy: Think of your customers as a river of opportunity, and your marketing efforts as rocks. Imagine that you are standing on the edge of a dike, watching the opportunity rush past you and wondering how to make the most of it.

You can attempt to throw lots of small rocks in the water, but they will just wash downstream with little impact. Or, you could grab the biggest boulders you find, line them up, and drop them into the river at the same time. This creates a dam that captures and contains the opportunity and ultimately wields the biggest impact.

Here’s What NOT To Do:

Consider this example: You just found out that your Halloween event, which is going to be taking place at a brand new nightclub, will have a Top 100 artist headlining. Super stoked about the news, you anxiously wait until the contract is approved, and then immediately take to Facebook to inform all of your followers. The next day, you update your website as well and decide to approach some media partners to see if they can help spread the news. As the date approaches, you add a small advertising budget here and there to push the event to sell out.

To be honest with you, this Halloween event marketing strategy is not very effective. Remember, each one of your customers is faced with thousands of tidbits on social media each day. Spread across the web, this messy social media approach is likely to get buried within minutes. Hence, we recommend something we like to call a Coordinated Media Launch Approach.

Marketing Halloween Events: The Coordinated Media Launch Approach

Let’s consider the same Halloween event announcement we mentioned above, but instead, apply this strategy:

• Create a media release: Create one document that contains all of the important information about your Halloween event to help coordinate the announcement across all of your social media platforms and media partner press releases.
• Select an on-sale date: Keep people hungry by selecting an on-sale date that they have to wait for. However, make it far enough away from the event date that customers who like to plan their Halloween early will be able to get tickets.
• Plan early-bird incentives: Give people a reason to buy their tickets early by offering a strong financial incentive, like a set of 500 early-bird tickets that cost 25% less than the rest, for example.
• Pick a media release date: Pick an exact date for your event announcement to be released on social media.
• Coordinate with your media partners: Make sure your media partners know exactly when you want to announcement to go live, and that they synchronize their marketing efforts so that the news is breaking everywhere at exactly the same time.
• Schedule your social media updates: Get all of your social media posts ready ahead of time and use an app like Hootsuite to make sure they all go live at the right time. It’s also a good idea to apply a large advertising budget upfront to make sure you hit your full audience ASAP. Also, make sure:
  • Your team is fully involved: Get all of your employees, contractors, sub-promoters and partners involved by asking them to like, comment & share your key posts as soon as they go live to give them an extra boost.
  • You’re Remarketing: Amplify your message with targeted Facebook remarketing and paid boosts. Target them to people who like the artist/s who will be at the event.
  • You’re hosting contests: Launch a viral contest along with your media release to give customers an extra incentive and bring more traffic to your Halloween event.
• Schedule your email newsletter: There should be a prepared email blast that goes out along with the media releases on your media release date.

Time and time again we’ve watched this event marketing strategy succeed. Like in our previous analogy, it combines all of your marketing efforts and releases them at the same time to create a REAL impact. Being well-prepared will give you peace of mind, and it will be exciting to wait until the media release date and watch your Halloween event get the traction it deserves. Kind of like Christmas, but better.

Need More Halloween Event Marketing Help?

Of course, the whole myZone team is always here to help any of our clients update their event marketing strategy, so feel free to contact us to help you develop the best possible marketing strategy for your Halloween event this year.