Tricks and a Lot of Treats: Restaurant Marketing Ideas for Halloween

Ghosts and Monsters and Vampires, the Spooky season has commenced! This fun and mysterious holiday brings in a lot of opportunities for the restaurant owners in the USA to up their sales. According to a report by the National Retail Federation, the total spending for Halloween is expected to reach $9 billion this year; therefore it is a great time to promote your restaurant or bar. This article will give you restaurant marketing ideas for Halloween that would help you in organizing events, decorating your restaurant, and other things you can do to lure in more guests and make this day scary for them in a good way!

Try These Restaurant Marketing Ideas to Attract More Customers This Halloween

The  Halloween season is a great time to launch some out-of-the-ordinary promotion campaigns. You can achieve great marketing benefits by hosting Halloween parties, best costume contests and more. 

Here are some restaurant marketing ideas for Halloween that will come handy in making your restaurant stand out from every other restaurant in the city!

1. Spooky Decorations

People are obsessed with Halloween; therefore it is essential to create a right Halloween aura at your restaurant. It does not matter whether you are a quick service restaurant, fine dining or a restro-pub. Get creative and scare a guest or two!

Use deep dark colors for decorating the interiors to make your restaurant look like a vampire’s crypt. Cobwebs, dry leaves, candles, etc. are also some good props to make your restaurant look scary. You can also use fog machines and dim the lights to create a mysterious atmosphere, and the customers would love it! You can search through various sites to get the best deals on the decorations. For example, Oriental Trading is a great website which offers up to sixty percent discount on Halloween decorations.

You can also invite a professional decorator to transform your entire restaurant space, and this would allow you to focus on other aspects like marketing strategies, designing a new Halloween special menu, etc.

2. Halloween Special Menu

Channel your inner ghoul or goblin and come up with an exclusive menu for Halloween. People are always up for experimenting. You can incorporate favorite autumn flavors like pumpkin, cinnamon, maple, etc.

A perfect example is of Starbucks pumpkin spiced latte, which they release every year during Halloween and have sold more than two hundred million pumpkin spiced lattes since it’s launch!

Curating a special Halloween menu is not a difficult task, all you need to do is use the color red as much as possible. For example, if you serve tomato soup in a goblet with fake eyeballs and give it a spooky name like “Vampire’s Soup.” Let your chef’s imagination run wild!

If you are a restro-bar, you can consider changing the name of the cocktails to match their looks like “Bloody Mary” for a red colored drink, “Witch’s Brew” for a green colored drink, and so on.

3. Hosting Costume Parties and Competitions

Everybody likes to dress up during Halloween even adults who cannot trick or treat like kids; therefore costume parties or competitions is a great excuse for them!

Hosting such events is a great marketing strategy as many people would like to be a part of it especially if there are incentives involved.

You can start the celebrations one week prior or a day or two prior Halloween and have a different theme for each night and hand out discounts or prizes for different categories like the scariest looking, best couple costume, etc. You can let other guests vote for the best costumes.

Take pictures of the event and post them online on your website or social media profiles. This is an excellent way of engaging people and having them visit your restaurant.

For example, The Tuck Room restaurant in New York hosted one of the spookiest costume party last Halloween in collaboration with iPic theaters. They had decorated the restaurant exquisitely and made it scary looking for their guests. The $65 Tickets gave the customers an all-access pass to Ghoulishly Delicious Food and an open bar of Creepy Crafted Cocktails.

The winner was awarded free dinner and four movie tickets to a nearby iPic theater. Giving out prizes is an excellent way of ensuring active participation from people.

You can take inspiration from this restaurant and build a mysterious aura in your restaurant this Halloween!

4. Promote it Well

Once you have planned out the entire schedule for Halloween, you need to let people know about it, and a great way of doing so is through online and offline promotions. Start posting about the events on your social media pages or your site. Entice your followers, let them know what you have in store.

You can share pictures of the exclusive Halloween menu, seasonal drinks, etc. You can also create a unique hashtag for your restaurant which people can use while posting their photos online. 

The Tuck Room started promoting this event three weeks before Halloween to ensure maximum participation. They even uploaded a video on YouTube which looked like a snippet out of a horror movie.

Be creative, and your posts are sure to get extra likes and shares which will increase your restaurant’s visibility!

5. Sponsor an Event or Participate in One

Get involved in a local Halloween-related event as it would be an excellent opportunity for you to promote your restaurant’s Halloween event. You can host a pop-up stall at an event and serve some autumn specials you wish to serve during Halloween; it would also let you know if people like the new food item or not and whether you should include it in the Halloween exclusive menu.

Pumpkin picking, Jack-O-Lanterns walks, etc. are some of the events that you can participate in and let people know about your restaurant. You can also sell tickets for the event at our restaurant; this will give you an idea of the footfall you can expect at the event.

Similar to many other holidays, Halloween is a perfect opportunity for you to increase the restaurant sales and come up with innovative restaurant marketing ideas. People are already in a mood to splurge and celebrate, and you can use this time to attract more customers. Use the tips mentioned above to make this Halloween memorable for your guests and yourself!