Halloween: the best contest ideas for the best holiday
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Christmas is obviously the MVP of the holidays from a commercial perspective, and Thanksgiving takes a lot of plaudits, but let’s just say it, Halloween is without a doubt, pound-for-pound, the most fun when it comes to the holidays. The movies are better, the parties are better, and the commercial prospects for businesses are frankly, wildly under-appreciated.
According to the National Retail Federation, last year in the US alone, 69% of people planned to celebrate Halloween, spending $100.45 each for a total planned spending of $10.6 billion. Even if you’re not in the costume, candy, decorations, greeting cards, or streaming media industries (or pumpkin farming), that’s a lot of people who’ll be susceptible to Halloween-themed media and content, be that by creating your own online contest or some kind of prize giveaway.
Why use online contests for halloween?
Quite simply, because the best holiday in the calendar is playful and adventurous, and online contests and competitions are playful and adventurous too. Just throwing out a pumpkin-spice flavoured version of your product, or some limited edition packaging with bats on and some orange point of sale signage (POS) is old hat, and even when it wasn’t old hat, it was lazy.
Different types of online contests and competitions can be a great opportunity to engage your audiences in more creative marketing campaigns to promote your products and your brand, reward your customers and promote loyalty, and as much as anything else, just have fun as a business and send playful energy out into your market.
Our top 6 spooky contest ideas
There are numerous types of online contests to engage audiences. They could be paid for competitions, free to enter luck-of-the-draw prize giveaways, or games that require some skills, knowledge, or creativity to have a chance at being crowned a winner. Exactly what type of contest you choose to create depends on your business, your brand, and the products or services you’re trying to promote.
Here are our top 6 online contest ideas to engage with prospective customers this Halloween. They could all be adapted for almost any kind of customer-facing business providing any kind of product or service.
Each game engine mentioned here can be fully customised to your exact specifications on the Drimify games creation platform – your graphic design, your images, your content, your messaging, as well as customising the specifics of the format to deliver the perfectly optimised experience inline with the aims of your business.
1. The scary costume Photo Contest
Do you remember the year every other person on Halloween dressed as Heath Ledger’s Joker? Do you remember the year every other person dressed as Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka? Every couple of years there’s always a costume idea that gets replicated all across the board. While it’s fair to say that not all attempts at these hot ticket costumes are created equal, the really good ones, in isolation, wouldn’t look out of place in the movies.
When creative people with a lot of attention to detail put their minds to dressing up at Halloween, they’re not taking any prisoners, and they’re understandably keen to show everyone what a good job they’ve done – that’s called social cache. There is almost a universal level of respect for anyone who makes their own costume and knocks it out of the park.
By customising the Photo Contest format around homemade Halloween costumes, you’ll be making an online marketing competition that’ll let you tap into that desire for social gratification, that creative energy, and competitiveness to have people not only create great costumes, but to take the best images they can to show off their creations. You can then approve the best (and brand-friendliest) entries to make a shortlist which you can use to tease your audience with on social media, until ultimately releasing your Voting Gallery to have people vote on a winner. Whatever prize or prizes you’re using to incentivise participants, you’ll essentially get 2 opportunities to engage with target customers to ask for contact details and encourage people to opt-in to your marketing newsletter.
2. The fright night Video Contest
Christmas specials and movies can be kind of a drag – there’s always some schmaltzy message at the core, and it’s inevitably goofy, but Halloween is basically a licence for fun and creativity, on the big screen and the small screen. In that spirit, you could use the Video Contest to really set your target customers a creative task.
Its appeal is much the same as with the Photo Contest, except with video, you’re going to get even more creative user-generated content, which will make for more visually compelling social media teasers.
For example, you could set your target audience the challenge of creating their own original micro-horror movie shot and edited on their smartphone like a reel, or encourage them to recreate a classic horror scene. Like with the Photo Contest, you can approve and shortlist the winning entries to be included in a Voting Gallery, and invite your audience to participate in voting for the winning video.
3. The horror movie trivia Quiz
Perhaps no genre of cinema is richer or more segmentented and parodied than horror. You have your classic horror, your slasher movie, the zombie flick, the found footage movie, your thinking “social thrillers,” and the list just goes on and on.
The Quiz format can be customised to any kind of online marketing competition you like, but for Halloween, a test of horror movie knowledge is a great way to capitalise on the Halloween season. Whether people “like” horror movies or not, they deliver an experience, and are so socially and culturally ingrained in our culture that they almost slot into the category of general knowledge rather than being a specialist subject.
4. An all the thrills game of Spin the Wheel
A simple but highly effective game of chance, a spin of the wheel to give anyone a shot at winning a prize, or, should you choose to customise it that way, everyone a prize. This game requires zero artistic talent, zero conscious effort, and zero knowledge of trivia or anything else for that matter to have a chance at winning. You customise a wheel with visual representations of prizes, and, as it’s Halloween, instead of just telling them they lose, some sections of the wheel could be spooky ghosts or monsters that are accompanied with a consolation message.
You can customise the allocation of prizes any way you like – there could be a single grand prize and everyone else gets a promotional code to incentivise sales, or you could even create a Spin the Wheel or other instant win game where every player wins.
Because this doesn’t require as much input on the player end, more people will probably participate, which means more chances to get opt-ins, and more exposure to your pop-ups and your calls to action (CTAs), whether you’re looking for social media shares, tags, or to encourage users to visit your strategic website pages.
5. A “Which horror movie big bad are you?” Personality Test
It’s quite common to read a book, watch a TV show, or watch a movie and identify with one of the characters, but why not flip it on its head for Halloween and assign your audience a villain or a monster? Afterall, it’s Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and Freddy Krueger who are the real stars when it hits October 31.
The Personality Test isn’t so much a contest in itself, but the experience will stand out on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook over more generic branded content like images and slogans, as it’s inviting your followers to participate. As a thank you for participating, you could say in your data capture screens that all newsletter opt-ins will be entered into a prize giveaway. You can also include intermediate screens throughout the Personality Test to promote your brand, service, or product with video pop-ups.
With this game’s format, you create your results first, or horror villains – for example, these results could be Lord Summeraisle, Leatherface, Hannibal Lector, Pamela Voorhees, “Red,” or Annie Wilkes. You then create multiple choice questions, the answers to which each correspond to a result. At the end of the experience, the participant can share their result on social media.
6. Make a Digital Calendar to make Halloween a season of online contests
Christmas gets advent calendars, so why not use the Dynamic Path™ format to create a multi-experience series of online contests for Halloween?
While it probably isn’t commercially sensible to make a full 31 days of online contests and competitions for any business, you could look to do 5 days to a week of online competitions as a way to keep your audience coming back for more. This gives you multiple chances to engage your audience and expose them to your copy, to ask them for contact details and to opt-in, and they’ll keep coming back because they know they’ll have another chance to win a prize. These could be variations of the previously mentioned online contests, or other game engines available in the Drimify catalogue which can be customised around your Halloween marketing promotion.
This sort of multi-step marketing experience will be an especially effective series of contests on social media, as people will keep coming back, keep sharing their results in response to calls to action, and gain you more exposure.
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