6 Social Media Marketing Tips to Boost your Sales during Halloween

By: Johana M. Caba, M.A. 

Halloween or Ol'Hallow's Eve, is that time of year right before the big rush of the Holiday Season. It's busy but it is still the calm before the storm of Black Friday and so on. It is one of the busiest times of year for so many big businesses and small businesses. This year, these Holidays will be different due to the current Pandemic, but small businesses and online based businesses can still expect to make good profits.  In this post, let us go over 6 social media marketing tips that you can use to boost your sales this Halloween and get you ready for the Holidays!

Optimizing your Website & Social Media Accounts
First thing is to ensure that your website and social media accounts are optimized. What do I mean by optimized? Well, when you optimize, you are ensuring that your website is accessible to search engines and that you are improving the overall chances that your website has to be indexed by these search engines. To do this, you need to make sure that you add the relevant keywords and phrases to your website's search engine optimization (SEO), edit your meta tags, edit your image tags, and make sure that you do not have any broken links. You will also need to optimize your social media accounts. Make sure that your accounts are easily found on your website, that you are posting consistently, that you respond to any customer concerns in a timely manner, and that you use hashtags to help you expand your reach. This is also a good time to audit your social media profiles to make sure that they are up-do-date, that your profile images are consistent and that your banners are consistent. Tip: Optimize your Instagram bio by separating important things into a bullet-style bio using emojis as your bullet points.

Prepare your Campaign 
You might be thinking, I'm not a huge business, why do I need to prepare a campaign? Well, a campaign will help you organize your goals, set up your key performance indicators (KPI), and it will help you create a content strategy to use. Here is a good time to look at the Content Marketing Funnel to help you decide how to attract your target audience and at which stages of the funnel to implement which tactics. This is also the point where you begin to create your Content Calendar in order to plan out when you will post new content and at what times. At this stage, you are planning your content, designing some graphics and ads, and figuring out when you will be posting for optimal engagement. You can do this by taking a look at your analytics. If you do not have a service that gives you all of your analytics from different platforms in one place, then you can go to each platform individually. For Twitter, go to their Analytics tab, same goes for Pinterest if you have a business account. For Instagram and Facebook, if your accounts are linked you can look at certain analytics in the same place, but otherwise you can look at Insights on your business pages. Your analytics will tell you at what times of day your audience is engaging the most, where they are from so you can determine the optimal posting times, their interests, gender distribution, age, and other demographics. Use this information to guide your campaign!

Promotions & Giveaways 
Halloween is a great time to run some flash promotions and plan some giveaways! If you are a convenience store, with a physical location, then this is a good time to decorate your store for Halloween and have some candy sales. Otherwise, keep reading! For online based businesses and other small businesses that are not convenience stores or large warehouses like Costco and BJ's, your strategy will be different. For example, a hair salon will use social media to run special promotions like doing Halloween makeup for a lower fee, doing new hair color changes for the fall for a special discount, etc. It really depends on your business. You will need to use social media to share your discounts with your audience and promote your giveaways. It's important to take quality photos of your products or examples of your work, or make engaging graphics using tools likeCanva to design. Talking about giveaways! I will be giving away a free physical version of my planner, The Blogger's Planner. If you would like to enter this giveaway, subscribe to my monthly newsletter, follow me on Twitter and share this blog post with your followers. I will be selecting the winner on October 31st! Good luck! 

Affiliates, Public Relations & Influencers
You are a small business, but you can still have affiliates, send PR packages and contact influencers. This is all a part of your overall social media/content marketing strategy! You can use affiliate marketing to get your products and services out to larger audiences by partnering with bloggers and other influencers in your industry. For example, if you are a small beauty/skin care brand, you can always contact beauty influencers and bloggers. Another example, if you are a small lifestyle brand or a small candle maker, you can always contact and partner with lifestyle bloggers and influencers. Make them affiliates and gift them your products. This way, they can try out your products and share their reviews with you and their followers. Remember, if a person sees another person that they follow give a good review of a new product or brand, then that person is more likely to become aware of the new product/brand, visit their website and purchase. This is called word-of-mouth marketing even if you hear about it on social media. And, it doesn't have to be expensive to send out PR packages. For example, with  my new planner, I've sent out email style PR packages with my planner and a nice thank you note. If you have a physical product, you will want to send out physical packages, just limit the number you send out if you do not have a large budget due to shipping fees being pricey.

Create Great Content
​This might sound harder than it is. Creating great content does require some skill, creativity and inspiration. With the right tools, you can create your own graphics, write your own content and plan when to share it. For a small business, you might wear many hats and might want to hire a social media manager to create the content and share it for you. They will also be able to create your strategy and help you increase your website traffic and boost your sales. If you want some information and tips on graphic design and creating your own content, visit my previous graphic design blog posts including 5 Graphic Design Tips for your Logo! To create great content, you need to know some of the basics of design, how to pair fonts, select color palettes and so on. You should also be aware of what type of content your target audience prefers. You can figure this out  by taking a look at your analytics on your social media pages. Another way to figure out what type of content your target audience prefers, is to do some market research including a competitor analysis to see what your competition is sharing/promoting to their audience. ​

Social Media Ads
The sixth tip is to use social media ads. I say this all the time because they work, especially if you have a good budget and a good strategy. My strategy is to promote/boost my social media posts that already have good organic engagement. I do this because I know that they will receive more engagement and impressions than boosting a post that does not have good organic engagement. When boosting posts or creating social media ads, you will need to select geo-targeting if you are trying to reach a local audience, you will also need to select the demographics, your call-to-action and your budget. When promoting something to a broader audience, you do not have to select geo-targeting locations. If you are an online retailer or online small business, it's better to select a broader audience. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, then geo-targeting is better because it will show your ads to local members of your target audience which can guide them to visiting your physical location. 

Conclusion
When you are creating your holiday campaign, you need to remember these tips. These social media marketing tips will help you boost your website traffic by increasing your reach on social media and guiding leads to your website. If you follow the Content Marketing Funnel, you can successfully guide them to your call-to-action which will be to subscribe, purchase or hire. If you want a more in-depth explanation on creating a social media marketing strategy to boost your website traffic, get Denelia Storm's new e-book Social Media Power (Affiliate) and her Free Social Media Roadmap guide today!