Avoid Scary Results This Halloween | Our Top Marketing Tips For Spooky Season

Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Halloween For Your Marketing

Did you know that Halloween is one of the biggest shopping events of the year? According to Google, retail spend is predicted to hit £777 million during the spooky season. A main driver is the surge in content being created, with YouTube reporting a 31% increase in people watching Halloween-related content during the holiday.

But it’s not just social media that’s causing the influx in spending. Halloween also falls just before the biggest retail event of the year, Black Friday. This event is crucial for many ecommerce businesses, especially in this currency economic climate where shoppers are hunting for the best deals they can find.

So whether you’re participating in spooky-season or not, here are our tips to make sure you take advantage of peak season, without seeing numbers that are going to give you a fright.

Start Testing and Optimising Now To Avoid Scary Surprises

Before heading into the Halloween and Black Friday season, refine your marketing strategy and start testing now. You don’t want to enter peak season without understanding how your campaign types work and if they’re contributing towards your business goals. It’s like launching a new product on your online store without knowing what it is, how it works or even if your customers will like it. Launching a new campaign type that you have limited knowledge about can lead to underperforming ads, skewed data and losing out on key sales.

Google Ads has a suite of different campaign types that can help you achieve different goals, so it’s crucial that you understand the products that are going to work for you heading into peak season. As you’re testing these products, analyse the results, as they might be performing well, but these results might not align with what you set out to achieve. Or they might be generating the results you want, but are not hitting the KPIs that you set, so they need to be optimised before peak season hits.

You can find more tips on getting ready for Black Friday in our Ultimate Marketing Guide to Black Friday 2023.

Don’t Upload Content At The Last Minute

Although you might not be launching your campaigns until Black Friday, this shouldn’t be your deadline for getting your content finalised and uploaded to your platforms. We recommend finalising and uploading content 1-2 weeks before you want to launch your ads. During peak season, it can take twice as long for content to be reviewed because there is a significant increase in advertisers uploading new ads to the platform also for Halloween, Black Friday or the festive season.

The last thing you want is to spend time meticulously refining your beautiful, glossy image and video content only for it to be stuck in the approval stage when your deadline hits. So don’t want to be left begging at your computer to finally see the ‘enabled’ label.

Avoid Conflicting Cross-Channel Messaging

Choose your offering and messaging and stick to it. This means that each piece of content you create for each of your marketing channels (PPC, social, email etc.) should be communicating the same message. This might seem simple, but many businesses find themselves in pitfalls when their messaging becomes conflicting, muddled or unclear when they start adapting their content for their different funnels. Although you will be tailoring your content to suit your audiences on these channels, your core messaging and offering has to be the same.

We all know that our customers consume content across different types of channels, so they’ll most likely see your ads across multiple platforms. For instance, they might see your ad when they’re scrolling on their social media, and then again when they’re streaming videos on YouTube, and then again when they receive an email from you if they’re already in the funnel. Then if they click on your ad, they’re landing on your website, where your messaging also has to follow the same thread. If they find your offerings are unclear or your messaging is conflicting, you could be losing crucial customers.

Don’t Forget Your Website During Peak Season

You can create the best ads with campaign strategies that are fully optimised and a healthy budget, but if your website isn’t providing a smooth customer experience, you could be throwing money down the drain. So make sure your site is working and fully optimised before your campaigns are ready to launch. 

Again, this might seem obvious, but when was the last time you put yourself in your customer’s shoes and went through the whole customer journey? Think of all the different avenues that a user can take on your site before they convert – including all of the pages that your driving users to with your paid ads. Are there any hurdles along the way that stop users from converting? Are they able to browse products easily and find what they’re looking for? Does it work equally as well on mobile as well as desktop? Is the checkout process smooth or clunky? Identifying and resolving these issues before peak season is crucial.

Peak Season Doesn’t Have To Be Scary

It might seem daunting as you prepare for Halloween, Black Friday and the festive season. But, if you’re prepared and have a clear strategy, there’s no reason to expect any scary surprises!