6 Ways to Create New Halloween Marketing Ideas Every Year

And here's a few things we noticed:

• Halloween content generates 148 shares, and 2 links on average per article
• Engagement peaks in October (can you believe it 😱)
• BUT engagement can pick up as early as July!
• 2020 saw a good amount of engagement in the lead up to Halloween – due to speculation around whether we'd be able to celebrate
• October 2020, on the other hand, saw the lowest engagement in the last 5 years (which is understandable, since we were already living through a horror show 💀)
• 2021 saw lower engagement in the build up months – but by September engagement with Halloween content reached the highest it's been in the last 5 years. 
• We're nearing the end of September, and engagement isn't looking too pronounced. But, as we've seen in past years, come October anything can happen

So, now we've established there's big interest, how can you make sure you’re creating the best, most engaging content for Halloween every year?

1. Discover Halloween marketing ideas with search data

Both search and social are goldmines when it comes to finding out what people think and want.

So, what better way to assess the Halloween situation and build out ideas for your content strategy, than to look at search volume data?

You can do this pretty easily with the BuzzSumo Keyword Tool, which instantly gives you "Seed" keywords alongside their volume and "Cost Per Click" value, and a bunch of other ideas to get your brains whirring.

For more Halloween marketing ideas, Google releases yearly trend content, including a "Freightgeist" digest, which shows the costume ideas we’re searching for most that year.

2. Find the most engaging Halloween content on social

We entered the phrase "Halloween costume ideas" into the BuzzSumo Content Analyzer, set the date to the "Past 6 months" and found that:

• The most popular piece of content is centered around couples costume ideas.

Can you use trending duos to drive content engagement? Or explore ideas that could be used to inspire couples’ costumes?

• Timeless Halloween trends, like clowns, will always be a favorite for users looking for Halloween content. This seasonal content drives engagement year after year and can be great for inspiring content that can be updated and repurposed with minimal effort.

If you're looking to re-engage audiences year over year, consider timeless themes.

• Pop culture and celebrity references drive Halloween ideas – in this instance it's Olivia Rodrigo

Everyone has become a *little* obsessed with her, and rightly so. With her audios dominating TikTok trends and the charts over the last year. Using trending names of popular celebrities can be a great way to drive more traffic and engagement with your content.

Pro tip:

If you're looking to create trending content to inspire audiences for Halloween, look to the most engaging pop culture topics – from the best TV series, through to the top entertainment news of the year.

Tabbing to the "Analysis" view in the Content Analyzer, we can see that "Spider-Man: No Way Home" has the highest average engagement (ie. shares per article), whereas "Pete Davidson Kim Kardashian" and "Inventing Anna" drive the highest average links...

You can then compare how these topics trend over time...

Then you can decide whether to lead your Halloween marketing ideas with:

• The topic that drives the highest average shares
• The topics that drives the highest average links (ie. great for PR!)
• The topic that has trended most recently
• The topic that trends repeatedly throughout the year

Having this data to hand can help you justify your Halloween content marketing ideas!

In that same report, you can also get an idea of how to create and distribute your content.

When it comes to "Halloween costume ideas", Facebook and Pinterest are the best channels to share for top engagement, while comprehensive listicles are the most engaging.

Social engagement data like this is great for giving you more granular content ideas and insights into what people want when it comes to Halloween.

Jump into the Content Analyzer and assess engagement around trending shows or characters, to inform your Halloween plan.

This is the kind of formula that you can repeat year-on-year to build engaging Halloween marketing and brand awareness.

3. Know when to action your Halloween strategy

We all know when Halloween falls, but social trend data can sometimes offer up surprises, where expectations don’t always match reality…

As we saw earlier – engagement for Halloween can pick up as far back as July!

Social isn't just a doorway to your brand – it's a window to your customers' mind.

It not only shows you what topics your audience care about.

It shows you when to publish your content to meet that demand.

This kind of insight is especially useful to know for those of you that are looking to create evergreen Halloween content.

When it comes to search, it’s been proven that content published in-advance of peak demand has a much greater chance of ranking.

After all, authority has been built, a few links earnt and maybe you’ve even had time to do your own internal linking to make this content your "Pillar" page for all things Halloween.

As well as helping you to plan your content strategy, knowing YoY trends is also super important for creating strategies across the business.

Using social YoY trend insight, you can:

• Get ahead of your competition.
• Share content to your social channels to dominate the conversation early on.
• Use "Build up" months on social as a testbed for bigger content pieces further down the line.
• Assess social and content engagement in July for early signs of novel trends that may inspire Halloween ideas, and feed this into your content.
• Feed insight back to other teams (ie. Merchandising) to inform decisions.
• Serve ads at less competitive times.

And so on…

You can find this "Engagement & content over time" trends in the "Analysis" tab of the Content Analyzer in BuzzSumo.

Historical trend data is available to Large and Enterprise users in BuzzSumo. Check out our plans here.

4. Pick the brains of the public

There are many ways you could go about creating unique Halloween marketing ideas – upcycle competitor strategies, analyze the most engaging social headlines, look for the most searched keywords, or examine social content at scale to define "Success" formats.

But "Hearing it from the horse’s mouth" is still arguably one of the best ways to validate your content efforts.

With BuzzSumo you can do just that, by scouring forums and comment sections on blogs across the web, to discover what people really want.

Using BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer, you can see exactly what people are asking in relation to Halloween that year.

Set the date range, and ask yourself “Are there any questions repeated YoY that I can answer?”

5. Cast a wide net

If you want to make sure your content research is bulletproof, just head to the content Topic Explorer, where you’ll be presented with a word cloud of the most engaging topics related to your search.

In this part of the platform, it’s better to start with a broad topic. This will give you more in the way of content ideas. This time we’re simply searching "Halloween".

Topic ideas here are ranked by "Co-location" – meaning how often they appear in the same article with the main topic – which can give you some pretty interesting, niche content ideas.

In the Topic Explorer, you can also see related keywords and content ideas.

In fact, if you click on the "Insights and Content Ideas" report (see above) you can quickly tab through "Insights", "Content", "Questions" and "Keywords" all in one place. So good, it’s scary!

6. Find out what’s trending

Remember when everyone used to dress up as Harry Potter or one of the blue Na’Vi from Avatar?

Some Halloween costumes, themes, and activities are popular every October, but many are time-limited or culturally specific.

Knowing the kind of new content that trends in your niche every year is key to informing your Halloween strategy.

Is there a particular product that’s caught people’s eye this year?

Are they more intrigued by decorations than Halloween makeup?

What piques your audience’s interest?

The BuzzSumo Trending Tool lets you highlight the content in any country that’s gaining the most traction on social, based on a "Trending score" i.e. the speed of content engagement.

You can build a custom feed based around Halloween and check in regularly to discover the latest stories attracting attention.

Looking at this insight, when prepping your content every year, can give you pointers on the types of stories to cover and themes to focus on.

In the example above, that seems to be celebrity Halloween news,  TV inspired costumes, and coverage of series-focused experiential Halloween events.