Pumpkins are orange, 🎃

Sotrender is too.

Spirits are rising,

And boo! 👻 We’re brewing something for you!

In this blog post, we’ve stirred the most charming Halloween content marketing ideas with the most hair-raising mistakes to beware of. So, keep reading… if you dare to find out something that will definitely haunt your thoughts (in a positive way) this season of frights and on.

Why Brands Go Batty for Halloween Marketing Campaigns

Don’t ghost your audience on Halloween. Never. Under no circumstances. Otherwise, you’ll lose potential followers and customers (and, naturally, profits).

People get easily spellbound to buy during the spookiest season of the year. In fact, Halloween spending is projected to reach a record high in 2025: $13.1 billion. As 73% of consumers plan to celebrate Halloween, here’s what they are more likely to spend on:

• 96% → Candies
• 78% → Decorations
• 71% → Costumes
• 38% → Greeting cards

But even if you don’t sell any of those, it’s a top-tier holiday on every marketer’s list. A successful Halloween marketing campaign can help you raise your brand’s visibility and stand out by showing that you’re more than just a business; you’re also a little boo-siness. Creative halloween marketing ideas and a great halloween marketing idea—like limited-edition products, themed bundles, or exclusive offers—can help your brand attract more customers and boost engagement. Not to mention that people are already in the buying mood. So, it will be easier to attract leads and then engage and convert them into customers.

The Do’s: The Best Ideas for Halloween Engagement

Animate Your Online Presence

Is your website as lifeless as if it has fallen into lethargic sleep on Halloween? And what about your social posts, huh?

To maximize your reach during Halloween, it’s crucial to utilize various social media accounts and social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. This allows you to engage different audiences and boost your brand’s visibility throughout the season.

Let’s revive them from the dead, all while taking a “byte” from the following examples, sweeter than Halloween candies. For engaging content, consider halloween themed videos, such as team costume showcases or spooky office tours, to capture attention and encourage interaction.

For example, a TikTok video of your team carving pumpkins can be a hit. Remember, you can create multiple posts from a single event or idea—turn that pumpkin carving into a halloween social media post series using reels, stories, and photos to maximize engagement.

Sharing a variety of halloween posts across different platforms helps maintain audience interest and keeps your brand top-of-mind during the festive season.

Website

If you had visited BARK’s website last year, you would have seen the following animation. The dog is sitting in front of a graveyard… The fog is thickening… And dazzling lights (or was it lightning?) start flashing in the background. What a vibrant and lively Halloween spirit!

But you can likewise breathe life into your website with Halloween-inspired sounds like these:

• Evil giggles or laughter
• Howling wind
• Creaking door (or maybe coffin?)
• Hissing cat
• Growling wolf
• Hooting owl

Social Platforms

How about adding eerie-sistible dynamism to your Halloween social media posts and make your audience stop mid-scroll?

Consider these reviving elements to boost Halloween engagement across your socials:

• GIFs
• Short animations
• Dynamic effects (e.g., floating Jack-o’-lanterns or burning candles)
• Abrupt video transitions
• Stitches

For example:

Imagine a “wow” effect transformation in a TikTok video from the healthcare niche: from a medical gown to a Halloween costume. Actually, there’s no need to use your imagination. That’s what @ladyspinedoc did for online doctor marketing on Halloween.

Sidenote: You can perform the same Halloween marketing tricks with your emails, too!

Craft CTA Spells That Work for Social Media

Let’s do other enchantment rituals on social media.

If you’ve brainstormed enough Halloween content ideas, it might be high time to create engaging CTAs, one of the social media best practices you’re most probably overlooking.

Grab these bewitching ~spell~ CTA examples to enchant and engage your social media audience on Halloween:

• Double-tap to bless this Jack-o’-lantern
• Hit**if you like this Halloween [decoration/costume/etc.]
• Comment with a spider web if Halloween is your favorite holiday.
• Send this to your boo or your ghoulfriend to warn them: the scariest season has begun!
• Tag a friend who also loves this spine-chilling time of the year, the way you and we do.
• Trick or treat! Comment your answer to unlock a surprise Halloween treat.

To boost participation, try adding fun facts or interactive polls, such as asking your audience to vote for their favorite Halloween candy. Offering virtual Halloween treats or small rewards can also incentivize more audience interaction.

For example:

That’s actually one of the proven Halloween marketing strategies RushOrderTees applies every spooky season, each time with a new custom T-shirt twist, though. This year, the brand entered the ghostly October days with a similar trick for Facebook engagement. They crafted a screen-printed tee with a phrase, “Normal People Scare Me,” and a CTA, “Tag your BFF who can relate to this one.”

Brew the Right Hashtag Potion

What if your engaging post simply vanishes into the social media abyss?

Every decent Halloween brew for social media marketing needs a wise blend of ingredients—hashtags. Drop too little relevance and—poof!—your posts disappear in the digital mist.

For that not to happen, you need to tap into strategic hashtagging and combine hashtags from two major categories. For example, use content-themed hashtags like #halloweenplaylist or #famoushauntedlocations to promote immersive experiences and storytelling. Hashtags can also be used to highlight free downloads, such as Halloween guides or checklists, as part of your campaign. Additionally, event-based hashtags, like those for scavenger hunts, can drive participation and boost engagement.

Halloween-driven Hashtags

• #HappyHalloween
• #TrickOrTreat
• #OctoberVibes
• #PumpkinSeason
• #TooCuteToSpook
• #HalloweenCostume

Also, if you aim to drive TikTok engagement on Halloween, remember to target relevant sub-toks, such as #HorrorTok or #WitchTok.

Niche-driven Hashtags

For example:

See how Freedom Debt Relief combined holiday-themed (such as #spookyseason and #halloweenvibes) with niche hashtags (like #creditcarddebt and #moneytips) for Halloween marketing on Instagram.

Celebrate with Amazingly Sweet Giveaways and a Halloween Costume Contest (Prioritize Instagram)

Haven’t closed your Instagram tab just yet?

Great. We’ll need to stay there for a bit longer to savor the sweetness of Halloween-inspired giveaways.

When it comes to Instagram: Did you know that you can gather 3.5x more likes and 64x more comments with contests or giveaways, compared to average posts? Well, now you know, and you can benefit from them in your Instagram marketing strategy for the spooky season.

For example:

Take a look at this Halloween giveaway by Pretty Pilates, a fitness brand that garnered over 400 comments in just one day!

To make your Halloween promotion even more attractive, consider offering halloween discounts, flash sales, or special discounts as part of your giveaway mechanics. Including halloween themed products as prizes can also boost excitement and engagement.

Are you ready to skyrocket Instagram engagement with yours? And by the way, did you catch those tiny details used for social media branding? The pink pumpkin and the pink bow with a skull create a holiday vibe while still preserving brand consistency.

Plot Fang-tastic Stories with Real “Spellbinders”—Influencers

If there’s one thing scarier than a content drought, it’s ghosting influencers and their nearly magical power to engage social media users on Halloween.

The following influencer campaign ideas will surely make your Halloween content marketing come alive (without any extra resurrection spells):

• Transformation challenges
• Frighteningly generous giveaways or contests
• Summon-your-inner series (e.g., “Summon your inner vampire: nighttime productivity hacks”)
• Spookified tutorials or how-tos
• Weird secrets or behind-the-scenes confessions

Partnering with a small business for your Halloween influencer campaign can help increase your reach and credibility, while also supporting local brands during the seasonal rush.

For example:

Revolution Beauty teamed up with a makeup artist to promote the UGC competition, #Revoween25, inviting others to demonstrate the most terrifyingly good Halloween makeups.

But before your influencer collab turns into an absolute nightmare, make sure your agreement is set in stone (not the tombstone kind). Use contract management software to agree on the clear-cut terms with your spellbinding content creators so that everyone knows exactly the story’s plot, format (e.g., reel or carousel), and so on.

Sprinkle Some Gamification Magic

Who says Halloween fun should stop at “sweets” like animations or giveaways? Why not give your audience a snack-sized game for higher interactivity?

Gamify your Halloween marketing campaigns with interactive mini-games like these:

• Tap to catch the flying bat
• Swipe to escape the haunted house
• Spin the spider’s web of luck
• Match the Jack-o’-lanterns
• Defeat all zombies and win a prize!
• Host virtual costume contests for your audience to show off their best Halloween looks

(Of course, prizes are optional but very much beneficial to attract your audience.)

Note: You can create it not only for Halloween engagement on social media but also for your website, app, email, or any other channel.

For example:

Let’s learn from the master of gamification. Whenever the spooky season approaches, Google releases a themed doodle game. In 2022, the search engine users celebrated Halloween while playing the Great Ghoul Duel. In 2024, they were to “help Momo the cat battle ghostly opponents across the atmosphere.”

Let Halloween SEO Worm Its Way Into Your Blog (the Earlier, the Better)

Now, over to your blog.

If you haven’t yet added any Halloween-themed blog posts to engage your audience into reading (and then into buying from you), here’s how you can do that. And do that as early as possible next year to give Google (or Bing) enough time to index your articles and make them discoverable by your target audience. Planning early promotions and sending Halloween emails alongside your blog content can help you reach early-bird shoppers, generate buzz, and maximize your campaign’s reach. Integrating your blog content with email campaigns, such as Halloween emails with themed designs and special offers, can further boost engagement and sales.

You may target keywords for both generic and local SEO.

Generic keyword examples for blog SEO on Halloween:

• Halloween costumes
• Halloween recipes
• Halloween party ideas
• Halloween DIY decorations

Local keyword examples for blog SEO on Halloween:

• Halloween activities near me
• Family-friendly Halloween events [City]
• Where to buy pumpkins [City]
• Best Halloween photo spots in [City]

But which should you target?

Here’s a trick. Turn to an advanced SEO checker to see what your competitors are up to on their blogs, analyze the keywords they’ve picked, and use competitive keyword benchmarking to decide which exactly you need.

For example:

Let’s talk specifically about B2B. Check out this article by Outback, a corporate team-building and training provider. It contains niche-relevant keywords, such as “Halloween team-building activities” or “virtual Halloween team-building games.”

Again, have you noticed? They also embedded YouTube videos to engage online visitors in watching, not only reading.

The Don’ts: How to Avoid Horrifying or Disengaging Your Audience on Halloween

Sinister Warning #1. Too Dreadful Animation

If your website or social media landing page has grown dynamic cobwebs as if swaying in the wind to engage your audience on Halloween—that’s one thing. But in case you design an animated monster jumping out of nowhere and scaring your audience to death, it might be too much. After all, you do want to end your Halloween marketing campaign with kudos (and sales), not curses.

For example:

These can be small spiders hanging from the web instead of heart-stopping jumps.

But also mind: Some people have arachnophobia (that’s true about 2.7–6.1% of the global population). So, if you do plan to add a spider image or animation, make it more cartoonish and cute-looking to infuse just a bit of spookiness, but not to overindulge.

Sinister Warning #2. Drained, Skeleton-Like Ideas

Are you making this terrible Halloween mistake again: the same “spooktacular sales” or last year’s Jack-o’-lanterns scattered all over the digital place?

Just as expected.

That’s why we’ve prepared several unconventional, non-cliché ideas as follows:

• Guerrilla marketing: It can be a discount scavenger hunt with potion bottles and promo codes hidden around the city.
• Summoning séance: “Tonight, we’re summoning your favorite best seller from 2019—reborn for one night only!”
• The Fear Detox Challenge: Any campaign around conquering fears.
• Invisible discounts: Type sneaky coupon codes in faint text in your Halloween blog post.
• Create a halloween playlist: Curate a themed playlist to boost seasonal branding and social media engagement.
• Share your favorite halloween themed books: Collaborate with local bookstores or authors to recommend top titles for the season.
• Run a poll on favorite halloween candy: Engage your audience with interactive polls or quizzes about nostalgic Halloween treats.

For example:

Flip the script and run “13 days of Halloween deals” instead of “12 or 24 days of Christmas” with dedicated Instagram content for each day, just like here. To boost engagement, include fun facts in your Halloween-themed quizzes or games.

Sinister Warning #3. Deadly Late Campaigns

Living by the “better late than never” rule is okay. However, “better earlier than late” is a must to avoid the worst Halloween marketing mistakes, like this one.

As of 2025, Halloween shopping began between April and June for a whopping 61% of people, while 38% planned to wait until October.

Launching early promotions and running flash sales can attract early-bird shoppers, generate buzz, and boost sales performance well before the main holiday event.

So, you may wish “Happy 1st day of Halloween” on the first day of October or start the sale haunting season months in advance.

For example:

Surprise your audience with a “Happy Summerween” in summer with a Jack-o’-melon (or even Jack-o’-pineapple) instead of a Jack-o’-lantern.

Final Warning: Don’t Enter the Foggy Forest of Social Media Unarmed

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This way, you’ll never have to guess whether that skeleton meme is a success or a disaster.

We’re witching you an enchantingly effective Halloween marketing campaign! And happy haunting!