6 All New Halloween Marketing Ideas for Salons and Spas

If your salon or spa isn’t cashing in on the consumer’s love of Halloween, you’re missing out on the fastest growing holiday for consumer spending, now second only to the Christmas holiday season, which is right around the corner.

This year, the National Retail Federation predicts that the U.S. adults who will celebrate Halloween in some way will spend nearly $90 per person this year on Halloween-related purchases. All told, that will mean more than $7.4 billion on Halloween related purchases.

In good news for local small businesses like salons and spas, 90% of Halloween purchases will be made in person, in store, at local businesses just like yours. Contrast that with consumers planned holiday spending: 56% will shop online; of those, more than half of their budgets will be spent online.

But holiday marketing ideas for salons and spas will have to wait for another day.

6 All New Halloween Marketing Ideas that Give Salons and Spas an Add to Revenue

A simple read down the list what people who live in your community plan to buy for Halloween provides inspiration for items that could be added to salon inventory at the beginning of September each year to provide additional retail sales revenue for your salon or spa:

71% will buy candy for Trick or Treaters (and probably for parties at home or in the office, too)
47% will buy decorations for home and yard
46% will dress up in costumes; only 1 in 5 will make their own
44% will carve a pumpkin
33% will throw or attend a Halloween party
30% will take kids Trick or Treating (in costume, with something to collect candy in!)
20% will visit a haunted house
14% will even dress up a pet in costume

Salon Halloween Marketing Idea #1: Stock up on Halloween Supplies

Your customers and others in your community will be buying up costumes, decorations, supplies for parties and pumpkin carving, costumes for pets and kids and items to help with Trick or Treating from local businesses. Why shouldn’t they buy some of those items from your salon?

Any one of the top ways your customers and other people who live in your community plan to celebrate Halloween could represent items that you can add to inventory in September and October each year as an add to salon retail revenue. Costumes for adults, kids or pets, or even non-costume costumes for people who don’t want to go all out but want to do something (such as a masquerade style mask or hat).

In addition, you could source local craft and hobby enthusiasts and sell home or yard decorations as salon retail or on consignment. You could sell Halloween party supplies, or sell branded plastic Halloween pumpkin candy containers, or even give them away to clients who spend up to a dollar amount that you establish on professional salon retail products.

Salon Halloween Marketing Idea #2: Set the Standard for Halloween Style

Holding a Halloween fashion show event each year would give you the ability to sell through creative costumes, whether you buy them as a wholesaler for retail resale in your salon or work with local artisans to facilitate orders for locally-made costumes. In addition, part of your event should be a demo on how to create the perfect Disney princess, zombie, vampire or other Halloween character makeup – along with the sale of the makeup items needed to create the look.

And it’s not just about retail. Boost October service dollars by setting up a make up bar during the week of Halloween and offer make up services to prep your customers and their friends and co-workers for office Halloween parties, neighborhood parties, kids face painting, etc.

Salon Halloween Marketing Idea #3: Adopt a Salon Theme

You don’t have to turn your salon into a haunted house (but you could!) to adopt a theme which can be celebrated during the whole month of October, or at least on Halloween. This theme could be displayed in the costumes you and staff wear on Halloween, or could be the theme by which the whole salon is decorated inside and out in order to spark customer engagement and have some fun!

Salon Halloween Marketing Idea #4: Throw a Halloween Party

In 2014, Halloween falls on a Friday and in 2015 it will fall on a Saturday. With one-third of those adults who plan to celebrate Halloween planning to attend or throw a Halloween party, you could easily lay the foundation for making your salon or spa the Halloween night out destination of choice for the evening or invite clients to stop by for a cocktail and candy at an open house event.

Salon Halloween Marketing Idea #5: Go Social

Thanks to sites like Pinterest, you could easily find a Halloween costume or party to share on your social networks every day in September and October that could help you sell styling services, make up (or Halloween make up services) or simply engage and indulge your customers and local followers in their love of Halloween.

Salon Marketing Idea #6: Plan for Post-Halloween Bounce Back

All of the extra things you do to help your customers and other local consumers indulge their love of Halloween can give you the opportunity to put a flyer in their hand with a holiday season bounce back offer and provide you with the chance to collect their email address so that you can start sending them your email newsletter, holiday and other seasonal offers all year long.

Elizabeth Kraus is the author of the newly released 2015 Salon Marketing Calendar called “Making the Cut.”

Written just for Independent Beauty Professionals, Making the Cut has hundreds of low-cost and no-cost marketing ideas which can help booth renters, salon suite owners, salon owners and salon managers engage, motivate and retain more clients in 2015!