With spooky season just around the corner, it’s time we got our monster mash on. Amongst the tricks (and the treats), Halloween remains as one of the key dates in the marketing calendar. With more brands looking to shift their spend to social and influencer, we’ll be looking at how to develop the best Halloween influencer marketing strategies, unmasking the true secrets of spooky ‘SZN’ marketing on social media, and the brands nailing their strategies!
Contents
Halloween as a marketing opportunity
Understanding the Halloween audience
Ensure you identify the right influencers
Crafting Halloween campaigns with influencers
Spooktacular Halloween influencer marketing campaign examples
Halloween as a marketing opportunity
Halloween, or spooky season as many refer to it on social, is a significant date in the marketing calendar due to its widespread popularity and the mass consumer spending during the last week of October. Halloween has evolved from a traditional holiday into a cultural phenomenon, attracting people of all ages and backgrounds. Brands have been earmarking the 31st of October as a time for specializing their product offerings, promotions and events.
In recent years, we’ve been seeing brands shift more of their spending towards social and influencer in order to target audiences with seasonal offerings. There’s a particularly big opportunity given the organic social trends that always emerge throughout October, from Halloween outfit and makeup tutorials, to Halloween recipes, decor, or entertainment ideas.
The emergence of TikTok since 2020 has been a big driver of this. In fact, at the time of writing these are just some of the astounding stats on the platform in terms of hashtag views!
- #Halloween = 180.6bn views
- #HalloweenMakeup = 11.7bn views
- #HalloweenCostume = 10.6bn views
- #HalloweenDecor = 3.6bn views
- #HalloweenParty = 1.2bn views
- #HalloweenIdeas = 1.2bn views
Halloween acts as a natural promotional for brands, in that it enables them to engage with their target audience more creatively. Brands can host themed events, exclusive seasonal discounts, and contests to foster a greater sense of customer loyalty and attract new clientele. Coordinated Halloween marketing strategies that explore social media and influencer marketing can further boost brand visibility, customer engagement, and expand reach exponentially – that’s if they’re done right!
Understanding the Halloween audience
The Halloween target audience on social media comprises a diverse demographic, including individuals of all ages interested in festivities, costumes, decorations, parties, horror, creativity, and engaging with themed content. It’s a broad audience encompassing those seeking entertainment, inspiration, and opportunities to share their Halloween experiences.
Fortunately, brands have plenty of options available to them when it comes to understanding the Halloween consumer on social. Brands may benefit from employing the advanced analytics tools available on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, to gather data on social engagement and other specific metrics to identify user behavior.
Conducting polls and surveys specific to Halloween-related preferences is another great way to understand a target audience, and to personalize product or content offerings to align with consumer preferences. Features like Instagram Stories are great methods for collecting malleable data that comprises the thoughts and opinions of specific audiences.
Brands also have the option of tapping into social listening tools to better understand their audience. Real-time monitoring of conversations and sentiment across social during Halloween provides an accurate data source about audience opinions and emerging trends.
Where possible, brands should also consider strategic partnerships with influencers. Collaborating with creators specializing in seasonal content can offer valuable insights into their user base, unmasking its demographics and preferences to unlock a spooktacular Halloween influencer marketing strategy.
Ensure you identify the right influencers
Influencer marketing has helped transform the narrative in the digital marketing landscape. With influencer marketing brands are enabled to reach greater audiences online. Their endorsements and product placements have evolved into an opportunity in which brands are able to tap into new communities. An influencer’s audience is highly engaged, and has likely learned to trust the advice and recommendations from that influencer. This is a significant step for brands who no longer have to dedicate hours to cultivating audiences on their own. While influencer marketing is not a one-stop-shop, it certainly enhances brand awareness by having a trusted creator represent your values.
First and foremost, brands need to ensure that they’re making the right choices when selecting influencers to work with. It’s not always a case of bigger is better, different creators will have their own diverse user base, and will garner different results. Goat is the world’s leading global influencer marketing agency, here’s some quick tips for finding the right influencer partnerships on us:
- Define objectives
Brands should outline all campaign goals, target audiences, and core messaging as part of the first step. With clear set goals, and vision, brands can begin to search for influencers that align with their strategy. Even if it’s a Halloween campaign, there still needs to be a clear goal for what you want to achieve short and long term (is it awareness? Consideration? conversions?)
- Elevate audience alignment
As we’ve already determined, each influencer has their own unique audience with its own distinctive set of preferences. Brands should assess if the desired influencer’s audience aligns with the desired demographic in terms of age, interests, location, and preferences.
- Determine quality, authenticity, and engagement
In influencer marketing, authenticity is everything. Along with the quality of influencer content, brands must analyze the engagement rates to ensure they’re getting genuine reach and influence.
- Assess brand fit and values
Brands should be vetting every influencer before forming a partnership. Considerations should include their relevance to the brand, audience demographics, alignment with brand values and ethos.
- Foster long-term relationships
Consistency can play a major role in the success of influencer marketing campaigns. When brands foster a strong relationship with a creator, bringing them in for multiple creatives over longer periods of time, it helps keep the imaging constant. Brands should encourage long-term connections with influencers, which can offer sustained brand advocacy and loyalty.
Crafting Halloween campaigns with influencers
Key elements of a successful Halloween marketing strategy
A successful Halloween influencer marketing campaign is made up of a variety of key elements.
- Relevance and Alignment: Brands will want to ensure influencers resonate with Halloween themes as well as the brand’s image to establish relevance. This year, platforms like Instagram and TikTok are stacking up with Halloween themed content, and due to the visual nature of these platforms it is easy to cater content to spooky season. Brands are already activating influencers to promote their seasonal offerings with haunting makeup tutorials, spooky outfits, hashtag challenges and competitions, and more!
- Authenticity and Creativity: Authenticity and alignment are just as important, which should involve genuine, creative and engaging content that captivates the audience. There’s no better excuse to delve into storytelling than during Halloween. Brands shouldn’t be afraid to get creative, explore untapped content formats, and experiment outside of their traditional creative briefs. However, the core messaging should ensure that the brands ethos is reflected, and influencer partnership should be strategically selected and kept to those that align with brand beliefs.
- Metrics and Analysis: Additionally, brands should be measuring campaign performance to optimize strategies and drive better results in subsequent campaigns. Social platforms today are equipped with a luxury of data analysis tools, which is a huge benefit for brands who have dabbled in Halloween influencer marketing in previous years. Brands can meticulously analyze the performance of previous endeavors to find out what worked, what didn’t, and which areas of their campaign they can build upon.
Leveraging the right social media channels to spread the Halloween spirit
Brands should strategically leverage social media platforms for influencer marketing during Halloween to effectively reach their target audience.
Instagram stands out as a powerhouse for Halloween influencer marketing due to its visually driven nature. Influencers can showcase costumes, makeup tutorials, themed decorations, and DIY projects through posts, stories, and reels. The platform’s broad reach, especially among millennials and Gen Z, makes it an essential channel for engaging Halloween content.
YouTube offers an excellent space for more elaborate Halloween-related content. Influencers can create comprehensive tutorials, DIY projects, haunted house tours, and product reviews. With a significant user base seeking in-depth information and entertainment, YouTube provides an opportunity to showcase brands in a comprehensive and engaging manner.
TikTok, known for its short and digestible content, is a goldmine for Halloween influencer marketing. Creators can share quick and engaging clips featuring costume transformations, spooky challenges, or captivating decorations. The platform’s popularity among a younger demographic makes it ideal for reaching millennials and Gen Z during the Halloween season.
Pinterest is another valuable platform for Halloween campaigns, offering a space for influencers to share and promote creative and inspirational Halloween-themed pins. Brands can collaborate with influencers to curate boards showcasing their products in the context of Halloween, providing inspiration to users seeking costume and decoration ideas.
Lastly, brands may want to activate on X, a versatile platform for sharing Halloween promotions, announcements, and engaging with a broader audience. Brands can share timely updates, and participate in trending conversations related to Halloween.
Collaborative Halloween content ideas
Across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and more, brands have a range of creative options to creative collaborative content.
We often see brands approach this through strategic hashtag challenges and trends, especially on TikTok. Using a specific branded hashtag that relates back to a Halloween-related product or theme, brands can partner with influencers to get the ball rolling on such challenges. Ultimately, consumer participation is the key, capitalizing on user-generated content and boosting brand visibility.
Channel takeovers are another popular method for brands to collaborate with influencers. Influencer takeovers allow brands to leverage a creator’s personality but entirely within the brand’s channel. These pieces of content are frequently used to give behind-the-scenes glimpse, or day-in-the-life style perspectives. It’s often a fresh and engaging narrative that enables brands to engage an influencer’s audience. Implementing this creative strategy around Halloween could involve sending an influencer to a branded Halloween event, and giving them the social media access to offer a behind-the-scenes perspective for their followers.
Live influencer sessions are most popular across Instagram, TikTok and Twitch, and provide brands with a real-time opportunity to engage their target audience. Brands can collaborate with influencers to host Halloween themed live sessions where they can discuss the brand, hold a Q&A session, or showcase live product demonstrations.
Leveraging Halloween Hashtags and Trends
TikTok and Instagram are the hotspots for Halloween content due to their nature for trends and challenges to circulate. On these platforms, brands can research popular and relevant Halloween-related hashtags, and align them with tailored brand messaging. One the right hashtags have been underlined, brands can create engaging content using them to inures visibility and reach within the Halloween conversation.
To maximize hashtag usage, brands can infuse them into campaigns to capture the interest of the audience, and encourage them to submit their own content using the same hashtags. Encouraging user participation enables a greater sense of community, and a wider scope for potential consumers to find affinity for brands during Halloween.
Measuring success and ROI for next years insights
Analyzing the performance of Halloween influencer marketing campaigns is crucial for building future strategies. By assessing metrics like reach, engagement, conversion rates, and ROI, brands gain insights into what worked and what didn’t.
Understanding audience behavior and preferences during Halloween helps tailor content and targeting for subsequent campaigns. It allows for identifying successful influencer partnerships, content formats, and optimal posting times. What’s more, analyzing the competition and market trends during Halloween provides a comparative view, enabling brands to refine strategies, allocate budgets efficiently, and create more impactful campaigns for future seasonal events.
Spooktacular Halloween influencer marketing campaign examples
Now it’s time to look at some of the brands that are nailing their Halloween influencer marketing efforts across social, and how they’re implementing key strategic elements.
Paramount Plus
Paramount Plus is a subscription-based streaming service that offers a wide range of TV shows, movies, and exclusive original content from Paramount Pictures and CBS.
What they did
Get ready to scream… was the tagline for the brand’s Halloween influencer marketing campaign last year. Paramount Plus partnered with a mix of creators on TikTok, which included makeup artists, parents, cosplay, and (of course) horror enthusiasts.
The campaign sought to promote the brand’s streaming service, highlighting the range of seasonal themed movies that had been added for people to enjoy during the spooky season. In the content, influencers tailored their content to suit their audience preferences. Holly Murray, a makeup artist, showed off some incredible Halloween makeup styles themed around the movies available on Paramount Plus. The brand also partnered with horror enthusiast, and storyteller, thedisturbingdissector to bring to life the stories behind selected movies on the streaming service. Additionally, creators from the parenting vertical were also activated to target family audiences who planned to settle in with Halloween movies come the 31st of October. Their content delved into the movies available on Paramount Plus, looking for Halloween costume inspiration, and watching scary movies from the safety of their beds.
Why it worked
Paramount Plus clearly defined the goals of the campaign, identified their target audience, and sought to select creators that aligned with their vision and brand ethos. Having these definitions helped the brand to nail the Halloween creative, and appeal to audiences across multiple verticals.
Each creator tailored their content to match their audience’s preferences. The makeup artists and cosplayers brought the brand messaging to life through extravagant halloween themed makeup, whereas the parents content felt more cozy and family oriented to align with how that audience spends its time during Halloween.
Superdrug
Superdrug is a British health and beauty retailer offering a variety of personal care products, cosmetics, toiletries, and pharmacy services through its stores and online platform.
What they did
There’s something eerie about porcelain dolls. Superdrug is bringing that ghastliness to life for its 2023 Halloween influencer marketing strategy. The brand is challenging beauty creators on TikTok to unleash their inner doll this Halloween, with makeup that’s hauntingly beautiful, inspired by 6 dolls that come to life after dark.
Superdrug have partnered with Shavonte_dill, itsgurlaisha_, and makeupbysamanthaharvey among other popular beauty influencers. In the content, each creator is challenged to bring their Halloween doll to life using a range of beauty products available at Superdrug. The influencers gave their followers a tutorial on how to create these styles for themselves, whilst promoting products from RImmel London, Studio London, Elf Cosmetics, and more.
Why it worked
Superdrug is demonstrating the true power of collaborating with influencers. As well as activating influencers on their own channels, Superdrug are also featuring the creators on the brand channel, which has enabled behind-the-scenes content, and higher quality visuals. The influencer content explores things like tutorials and behind-the-scenes footage of the Superdrug campaign shoot, whilst the messaging is tailored towards beauty elements, products and most importantly where to purchase the highlighted products from.
The use of the branded hashtag, #superdrugdollsafterdark, also enables user-generated content from those who have been inspired by the creator content, purchased the products, and are ready to show off their own inner doll.
Ensure your brand maximises the potential of influencer marketing at Halloween
Halloween represents a paramount (pun intended) marketing opportunity in the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing. Plus, as spooky season approaches, brands are increasingly recognizing its significance, prompting a shift in marketing spend towards social media and influencer collaborations. Halloween, now a cultural phenomenon, captivates people of all ages and backgrounds, making it a key date in the marketing calendar for brand campaigns.
Understanding the Halloween audience is key to a successful marketing strategy. Leveraging advanced analytics tools, surveys, and social listening, brands can decode audience behavior and preferences during this season. Strategic partnerships with influencers specializing in Halloween content can provide valuable insights into their user base, enhancing the creation of a compelling Halloween influencer marketing strategy.
To maximize the potential of influencer marketing during Halloween, brands must focus on relevance, authenticity, and creativity. Collaborative content ideas such as challenges, channel takeovers, live sessions, and strategic use of Halloween hashtags can captivate audiences and encourage participation.
Analyzing campaign performance, assessing metrics, and understanding ROI are vital for shaping future strategies. Learning from successful campaigns like those by Paramount Plus and Superdrug, brands can adopt a proactive approach, aligning influencer partnerships with campaign goals and audience interests.
It’s time for brands to unmask the secrets of marketing on social media and learn how to get the most out of influencer marketing at Halloween. There are many way to achieve this, including partnering with an influencer marketing agency.
Goat is the leading global influencer marketing agency. Over the past eight years we’ve scaled some of the most exciting brands in the world. Find out more about our expertise, and how we can help your brand ahead of spooky season!
