Spooky Marketing Tips for Halloween

 

In 2011, nearly $7 billion dollars was spent on Halloween festivities all over the country! This makes Halloween the second most important holiday for retailers, right behind Christmas. Now is the perfect time to ‘spookify’ your marketing strategy. Take advantage of the opportunity to be playful and have a little fun! Here are some tips that won’t scare your customers away:

1. Host a contest: Holiday contests are the perfect way to get people not only excited about the holiday, but also about your company. The best way to host these would be on your social media pages, such as Facebook. Encourage customers to post a photo on your company’s wall of themselves, (or even their children or pets!) in their scariest, cutest, or most creative costume. Come up with a creative prize for the winner, such as a free consultation and a bucket of Halloween candy. This is fun for your customers and you!

2. Send out promotional items: Whether it’s direct mail or e-mail, create a Halloween themed flyer that has coupons or other incentives. Include images of ghosts or candy corn with orange and other Fall colored fonts. Maybe your company is more playful and wants the background to look like dripping blood. Get creative! Other things that could be included are: safety tips for trick-or-treating, festive recipes, or pumpkin carving tips. By including those things, people are more likely to save the flyer and be reminded of your company every time they look at it, which will increase your brand recognition. 

 

 

3. Create a video: Videos are an awesome way to attract and keep your customer’s attention.Take this video, for example. It was made by Westlake Ace Hardware and got over 30,000 views, plus national media attention from a news channel. Not to mention the fact that it’s just plain awesome! Creating entertaining and shareable videos, will draw lots of attention to your business, which is the whole point of marketing. The best part is that all you need is a video camera, creative idea, and killer costumes.

What are some things that your company is doing to utilize Halloween in your promotions?hYperstrand Marketing has a bunch of great ideas and tools to help you along. And don’t worry, we won’t suck your blood  Happy Halloween!

Marketing vs Sales

Many companies often blur the connection between marketing and sales; some even combine the function and actually create the position Vice President of Sales & Marketing.

That would be the same as appointing someone as Vice President of Finance and Operations. Unless the company is exceptionally small, no one person can maximize their effectiveness at either position. Simply put, both functional areas are completely separate and require separate management as well as separate skill sets.

Marketing vs Sales

Basically speaking the sales function is to bring in business. Marketing’s function is to give sales the tools it needs to be able to bring in that business. Marketing’s job is to understand the company, the competition, and the market. 

Many companies operate under the misconception that the only job of marketing is to saturate the opening of the sales funnel. They accomplish this saturation utilizing advertising, brochures, branding techniques, trade shows hoping that they can generate numerous leads for the sales department to follow-up on.

In reality, the marketing process is two-fold requiring a vast amount of research and analysis and then the creation of sales tools. Most often sales resources are limited and cannot afford to chase unqualified leads. The combination of market research and targeted sales tools should lead to demand creation activity. However, that is not always the case and true measurement of success in this arena is generally very limited. 

If you take any marketing course in business school, the Five P’s of Marketing are ingrained into you from day one. Collectively these 5 P’s make up what we as marketers call the Marketing Mix. While there are some variations to the P’s, they generally consist of:

 

• Product – the product or service offered to the customer
• Price – pricing strategies with the goal of meeting a desired profit margin or costing structure
• Place (Distribution) – distribution of the product/service to your target market
• Promotion – communication and endorsement of your product/service to a customer
• People – service marketing and the level of customer service you provide to your customer

Marketing is Also about Customer Retention 

Unfortunately, some marketing “professionals” wouldn’t know a customer even if the customer were a rattle snake and bit them in the behind. They rely on surveys, research and sales person feedback alone. Furthermore they often lack the sales experience to understand where the opportunities really lie. Make no mistake; it is the customer that drives the entire marketing mix. The entire process starts and stops with the customer – this is the only true measure of success.

Some Key Marketing functions should include the following:

Market research
Competitive analysis
Development of marketing plans
Advertising & Promotions
Brand management
Business Communications

Marketing is how you define your product, promote your product, distribute your product, and to maintain a relationship with your customers. Marketing can also play a role in helping sales to become more effective (thereby increasing the close rates) by providing competitive data, solution-building tools, and so forth.

Effective marketing should lead to effective sales.

Marketing may be viewed as “doing their job” if they put out enough brochures, advertising, etc. But, the sales team is considered a failure if all this great marketing effort is not turned into increased sales. Let me repeat — Marketing and Sales must work together but are separate roles. Marketing is a support function to sales but should be held accountable for supporting growth with effective, measurable marketing plans. 

Together, as a team…

Social Media Marketing: The basics every business needs to know

The arrival of social media on the internet was originally designed to connect people around the world, share information and create a communication tool that was better than sending letters through the post office. Big business saw the potential and launched social media into an entirely new direction. Large and small companies were finding creative ways to promote their business online – after all this is a billion dollar industry that offered a level playing field for anyone who could figure out how to use social media.

Google has 620 million visitors daily and 46% of internet users will interact on social media on a daily basis. Considering that 63% of users will recommend online brands the internet creates a unique selling situation. Your business is now open 24/7/365 and your goal is to figure out  how to take advantage of the most powerful sites online.

Social Media Buzz

LinkedIN is your personal and business profile. This social media site is the center where 121 million business professionals go to connect and share their industry insight. There are senior executives looking to stay connected and newbies looking to find jobs.  With 1.5 million users joining new groups every week this is your opportunity to network and build relationships.

 

Four key steps that will make your LinkedIN profile successful:

1. A clean and complete profile that gives you credibility.
2. Have quality connections will increase your reach and visibility.
3. Add video, blogs and links to your profile keeps people engaged.
4. Join groups and be active in the conversations, this will open a variety of new business opportunities.

 

Twitter provides the opportunity to interact and inform. Tweeting is your opportunity to reach more than 100 million worldwide users and with 55% of active users accessing via mobile devices, you can now reach a targeted audience when and where you need. There are an average of 350 million Tweets every week so you need to find the balance between too many Tweets and too few in order to be seen.

 

The four keys to making Twitter successful for business and simple but effective:

1. Invest in a personalized background and upload your picture to fill your space with important information.
2. Put each connection into a group for more targeted marketing.
3. Share content via ReTweets. This is the strongest way to build good connections and start conversations.
4. The content you Tweet should be information your target audience needs and include links. More than 400 tweets/minute contain a YouTube video!

 

YouTube allows you to visually showcase your business. When search engines like Google show results for your criteria, they will pull videos, pictures and blog pages before they list your website. This means visual content is critical to being found online. Consider that there are 490 million users and more videos uploaded in 60 days than the three major TV networks created in 60 years.

 

Making YouTube effective requires four simple steps.

1. Create a personalized channel keeping your brand image in mind as well as the needs of your target audience.
2. Recognize that how-to videos are the most popular and create your videos in an engaging way.
3. Share your videos on all your social media sites and on your web/blog.
4. Comment on and subscribe to other videos that are in your industry to gain recognition and enhance the value of your channel.

 

What makes a social media post go viral? The simple fact that the information is relevant to a target group, it’s engaging and worth sharing, and it informs rather than sells. Still not convinced of the power of social media? Google Kahn Academy and discover how a simple family tutoring session is now a million dollar non-profit supported by The Bill Gates foundation.

 

Sheryl Theisen is the Owner of hYperstrand Marketing. You can find more marketing ideas at www.hYperstrandmktg.com or 630.940.7920.