Halloween can be a good season for indie retailers.Success depends on active in-store and out of store engagement.
We do it in shops that we own and run and have evolved it from a low price point everyday halloween offer to a higher end specialty offer that is leveraged by fewer retailers.
Halloween is an excellent opportunity to ramp up traffic and sales leading up to Christmas. It is also an opportunity for the business to play outside its comfort zone. This is great news for any small business retailer.
Here is our advice from seeing Halloween in many retail businesses, advice on ways to promote Halloween to drive the opportunity further:
- Make your front window or front of story scary amazing, so shoppers have to step through it.
- Maybe host a night, after the shop closes, where people share local ghost stories. have some fun and get known as a place where local stories matter.
- Run a series of Facebook posts early in the season. Through these demonstrate your engagement as unique, different.
- Have a fancy dress competition on the weekend before.
- Mock yourselves in social media and elsewhere about being big kids, scary pants or more. Change how people look at your business.
- Run sales connected with people dressing up to access a sale price.
- A colouring competition for kids with a prize for the best.
- Have candy to give away.
- If you’re in a small town organise a Halloween trick or treat party for safe kid fun.
- Print a recipe sheet and give this away. Online you can find recipes for eyeball soup, eyeball appetisers, bloody desserts and the like.
Here at Tower systems we are all about small business retail. Anything we can do to help we will do, including providing practical business management advice for retailers on seasons such as Halloween.
Retail is all about entertainment. The more you embrace this the more fun people visiting your shop have. halloween is an ideal season for embracing retrial as entertainment.
Sometimes, the best way to get from A to B is to take a 90 degree turn.
