Spooktacular Halloween Advertising Campaigns to Captivate In-Store Shoppers
The spooky season is one of the biggest retail spending occasions of the year – so the last thing you want is for your Halloween advertising campaigns to vanish into thin air.
Out of Home (OOH) advertising is perfectly placed to reach shoppers in key retail environments and engage consumers in the run-up to October 31st. In this guide, we’ll be looking at Halloween marketing campaign ideas and covering how to craft a seasonal OOH strategy that offers more treats than tricks.
Creating a Spooky Shopping Experience
The shopping experience encompasses far more than just browsing the store and potentially making a purchase. Every touchpoint leading up to the point of transaction matters and during the spookiest time of year, it all starts with setting the right mood to attract shoppers with Halloween advertising campaigns.
Interactive Digital Billboards
Interactive advertising naturally invites audiences in, capturing their curiosity and demanding their attention. By encouraging viewers to stop and interact, an interactive billboard can have a dramatic effect on both the scale and depth of engagement.
Halloween marketing offers the perfect opportunity to get creative with interactive billboards. Consider how you can use the immersive nature to draw shoppers to your store – for example, by implementing a virtual costume try-on experience.
A spooky Halloween-themed game can also get customers in the mood and drive footfall to store by revealing special offers or offering discount codes as prizes.
Themed Countdown Timers
Incorporating a countdown timer into your Halloween billboard can be an incredibly effective way to improve activation. Seeing a clock ticking down both builds anticipation and creates a sense of urgency that springs shoppers into action.
If your store sells confectionary, you could include a countdown to the 31st of October, reminding audiences to stock up on trick-or-treat goodies before it’s too late. Timers can also be used to highlight special offers ending soon, or to promote local Halloween-themed events.
Engaging Visuals and Animations
Digital billboards build on the attention-grabbing nature of traditional billboards because they can display dynamic elements that catch the eye. Video, moving images and rotating creatives can enhance your Halloween ad’s storytelling and draw audiences in for a closer look.
Dancing skeletons, flying witches and hovering ghosts can all quickly convey your Halloween theme, creating a spooky atmosphere that entices shoppers. You can even use animation to build in a jump scare for a truly unforgettable experience!
Crafting Compelling Halloween Messages
Halloween advertising generally kicks into gear as soon as the back-to-school season is over, which is normally around early-mid September. As one of the biggest retail occasions, competition is rife and getting consumers to choose your brand over a competitor often comes down to one simple thing – having a compelling message.
Understanding Your Audience
When brainstorming Halloween marketing ideas, it can be easy to get caught up in fun creative fantasies. And while creative ingenuity is never a bad thing, it’s important to remember that consistent results come from campaigns that are built around the audience.
Understanding your target audience’s needs, interests and preferences makes it so much easier to craft tailored messaging that truly resonates. Whether it’s parents searching for bargains on children’s costumes or students looking out for edgy Halloween events, everything should start with the audience.
Spooky Storytelling
Storytelling in marketing is based on human connection, which is why it goes hand in hand with OOH. Billboard advertising reaches audiences as they go about their daily lives, allowing brands to connect on a more personal level.
When it comes to Halloween marketing campaigns, storytelling can be used to evoke emotions of excitement and anticipation. Narratives that tap into the thrill of the season will have a greater impact and leave a more memorable impression on audiences.
Clear and Catchy Slogans
Slogans are designed to be memorable, summing up your brand message in a single short statement. When writing your Halloween ad slogan, remember that the holiday is all about having fun with a spooky twist, so your slogan should reflect this.
A good guide for brainstorming slogans is to think about the three Cs:
Clear – quickly convey your Halloween theme and deliver your message with clarity.
Concise – you’ll lose your audience’s attention if your slogan is too long. Keep it concise to nurture higher engagement.
Catchy – consider how you can use alliteration, rhythm and Halloween-related wordplay to create a catchy phrase that will stick in your audiences’ minds.
Designing Eye-Catching Halloween Digital Billboards
Halloween is a very visual holiday; it wouldn’t be anything without the costumes, decorations and spooky symbols. Designing a billboard that’s instantly identifiable as Halloween-themed can therefore be quite simple – but ensuring that your billboard also stands out in its advertising environment while clearly getting your message across requires a bit more consideration.
Use of Colours and Imagery
Halloween colour palettes are traditionally comprised of the following colours:
Orange
Black
Green
Purple
Red
White
Orange, purple and neon greens are popular colours in Halloween marketing because they grab attention while evoking images of pumpkins, witches and slime. Alternatively, you can stand out by using colours that aren’t on this list – moody blues can make a spooktacular eerie backdrop, for example.
Staying on-brand is equally important – and entirely possible. You can give your brand colours a temporary Halloween spin or incorporate Halloween imagery to create a creepy, captivating billboard.
Incorporating Halloween Symbols
Halloween has many recognisable symbols: pumpkins, ghosts, vampires, witches, zombies, spiders – the list goes on. Incorporating these into your design will help form a seasonal connection with shoppers.
It’s generally best not to include every Halloween motif you can think of, as this can make for a visually overwhelming advert. Instead, pick a couple of symbols that make sense thematically and are suitable for your target audience – for example, zombies might work for teenagers, but it might not be such a great idea to include them in an ad targeted at children.
Balancing Creativity and Clarity
Creativity is at the core of effective Halloween marketing but to get results, clarity is also required. At its most basic, this means using colour, contrast and positioning to highlight important information so that your message doesn’t get lost.
Your ad also needs to be legible – ‘dripping blood’ fonts look great, but can your audience read the text? When incorporating creative design elements such as this, make sure that they work to enhance your message rather than obscure it.
Examples of Successful Halloween Advertising Campaigns
We’ve pulled together some of the best Halloween advertising campaigns to get your pumpkin juices flowing.
Co-op
Co-op’s Halloween OOH campaign focused on two big motivations for shoppers – ease and price. Although the very first thing you notice about this ad might be the pumpkin, your eye is then quickly drawn to the ‘£1’ which has been highlighted using contrasting colours.
The text below then tells you where you can buy a pumpkin nearby. Wordplay is used to inject some fun into the ad and forge an emotional connection with the audience.
Superdrug
Superdrug let the image do the talking with their Halloween campaign. The model is wearing skeleton-style makeup, showcasing how Rimmel’s products can be used over Halloween and inspiring passing viewers. Aside from the prominent brand names, the only text is a simple CTA compelling audiences to visit the store.
Pleasurewood Hills
Pleasurewood Hills, a family-friendly theme park, used OOH advertising to reach relevant audiences and promote their Halloween-week attractions. The brand received an on-season makeover by changing the name to ‘Pleasurewood Chills’ and using spooky but entirely legible lettering.
This is also an excellent example of how to keep your audience in mind. The advert is clearly Halloween-themed but maintains the brand’s family-friendly essence.[1]
Measuring the Success of Your Halloween Advertising Campaign
Measuring and evaluating the success of your campaign is crucial to improving Halloween advertising efforts going forward. Here’s how you do it.
Key Metrics to Track
By tracking key metrics throughout your campaign, you can find valuable insights into performance. Depending on the goals of your campaign and whether you’re using digital billboards, traditional ones or a mixture of both, your key metrics might include:
Reach
Impact
Dwell time
Frequency
Foot traffic
Conversions
Sales
Unique URL visits
Cost-per-mille (CPM)
Tools and Techniques
OOH media owners use various tools and techniques to gather performance data. These often include geolocation data from mobile devices, eye movement tracking from built-in sensors, historical traffic data and seasonal audience behavioural patterns.
This level of analytics helps you understand how many people have seen your ad, but there are also techniques you can use to discover what happens post-exposure. Analysing footfall to stores near advertising sites, Halloween sales figures during the campaign’s duration and number of website visitors can tell you how effective your campaign is at driving action.
Continuous Improvement
By monitoring the success of your DOOH Halloween advertising campaign, you can make real-time changes to optimise performance. A/B testing different creatives, CTAs and ad schedules can further refine your ads to achieve the highest ROI.
Even if you’re using traditional static billboards, post-campaign performance analysis can help you understand what can be improved on for next year’s spooky season. You can identify highest-performing locations, messaging angles and Halloween products by looking at how different billboards performed across your campaign.
Ready to create a frighteningly effective Halloween marketing campaign? Get in touch to find out how to haunt the streets with spooktacular OOH advertising.