Here’s 5 Smart Ways to Plan Your E-commerce Sales Promotion

Ready for your next sales promotion?

For some ecommerce teams, it’s a time-consuming task deciding which items to markdown and how to publicize a sales event. However, sales promotions play an integral role in attracting customers.

A survey found that up to 50% of consumers make a purchase only with a promotion. Shoppers desire a good deal before they invest in your products. Moreover, your business may want the additional revenue.

“Sales promotions can give you the edge you’re looking for when it comes to revenue. Successful companies know that sales promotions are among the most effective methods of increasing sales and building customer satisfaction,” writes Emily Weisberg, content marketing manager at ThriveHive.

Take a strategic approach when planning your sales promotions. Below are five smart ways to help your team.

1. Select Specific Incentives

Sales promotions take various shapes and forms. Cater your incentives to fit your consumers’ needs.

Start by using customer analytics. Historical purchasing habits can uncover what promotions performed well. Social media comments also provide first-hand details on whether customers possess interest.

Next, match your findings with a sales initiative. From mystery discounts to purchased-based donations to bundle sales, several options exist.

Monetate “found that 56% of businesses agree that flash-sale campaigns are better received than regular campaigns.” Limiting the timeframe creates urgency for the customer to act now.

(Image Source)

Thinking about free offers? PaySimple’s Vice President of Knowledge Lisa Hephner explains the power of free incentives:

“Everyone loves free. Whether it’s free gifts, free refills, or free service segments, free sells. One of the most powerful free offers is free shipping for online orders, as evidenced by multiple studies where respondents highlight it as the most important factor in making a purchase decision.”

Figure out the best promotions for your customers. Review your data before moving forward.

2. Cross-Sell With a Purpose

Every sales promotions doesn’t need to involve discounting your signature product. Instead, it can focus on secondary items.

Cross-selling is another opportunity to provide value to your customers. Buyers love convenience, and they want to save time shopping at one place. And it eliminates the hassle of sifting through multiple ecommerce sites.

Align your promotions with products that complement one another. Give consumers the chance to buy everything they need from your store.

“Savvy marketers use this concept to increase sales by informing consumers how one product complements another. Cross selling can take several forms. Understanding your customers’ motivations helps you choose which approach to take,” says Sara Huter, a contributor at BusinessBee.

For example, if your company sells cell phones, your team can offer a promotion on the accessories, like bluetooth earbuds, phone cases, or charging cables.

(Image Source)

Research found that “cross-selling was shown to be much more effective when presented on the checkout pages versus the product pages.” So, add images of promotional products in the sidebar menu.

Plus, cross-selling aids with bringing in more cash flow for your business. Amazon credits up to 35% of its revenue to cross-selling.

Think differently about ecommerce sales promotions. Don’t remove cross-selling from your list of possibilities.

3. Microtarget Your Customers

Microtargeting isn’t a new technique to your team. Nevertheless, you may be failing to put it into practice.

Segmenting your audience lets your business offer the right promotions to the right individuals. Customization speaks directly to consumers—signaling that you know exactly what they need.

Melissa Jenkins of Mel Jens Designs believes “running a successful promotion is all about finding that delicate balance between audience segmentation, great timing and setting the perfect price or placing the perfect offer.”

Examine your data to segment properly. Try geographical locations, buying habits, income levels, or even past purchasing behavior.

Dealers United Auto Group created mock ads targeted for car shoppers within 25 miles of the dealership that possess an interest in pets. Specificity is vital for effective micro targeting.

(Image Source)

A study reveals that 51% of marketers believe sharing data across their organizations is a major issue. Avoid data limitations that will hinder segmentation for your sales promotions.

Create an open dialogue across departments to gather all data about your customers. You’ll have more knowledge to build an accurate buyer persona.

Pinpoint who needs to know about your sales event. Microtargeting is a benefit to your company.

4. Hype Up Engagement

Draw attention to your sales promotions with social media and email campaigns. This extra engagement will get people interested in your sales incentives.

Facebook users spend an average of 50 minutes a day on its multiple platforms. Work with your team to promote sales on your social pages. Or even enlist the help of industry influencers to spread the word.

User-generated content (UGC) is also another way to lure shoppers toward your brand. Actual consumers enjoying your products authenticates your value to hesitate buyers.

“User-generated photos are a great way to generate social proof. Prospective customers see that your products are regularly being purchased people just like them, and feel more comfortable doing something that others are doing,” says Dan Wang, a content specialist at Shopify.

Big box retailer Target retweeted a post from loyal shoppers who made a funny video in one of its stores. Encourage customers to submit UGC of them unboxing your products.

when @Target is having a sale http://pic.twitter.com/RIUu6p3zLs

— spooky addie |-/ (@blurrytylerjosh) October 15, 2016

Also, keep your email subscribers in the loop about promotions. Craft engaging emails that explain the benefits, provide social proof, and use a distinct call-to-action.

“When it comes to creating a high-converting marketing offer email, the final piece of the puzzle is using a prominent call to action button. This is important because buttons make it clear to the reader what the next step is and encourage them to click-through,” states Aaron Beashel, director of demand generation at Campaign Monitor.

Shout your sales promotions from the rooftop. Get shoppers excited to participate.

5. Move Toward Customer Loyalty

Returning customers spend on average 67% more than first-time customers. Consider promotions as a pathway to retaining customers.

Give your customers an opportunity to discover your brand’s values and culture. Sign up shoppers for your weekly newsletter, or enroll them in your rewards program.

Customer loyalty centers around building worthwhile relationships. However, buyers may only be interested in your promotions.

“The use of sales promotions can be positively utilised in order to encourage brand loyalty and brand switching by companies. However, academic research suggests that consumers can become loyal to sales promotions rather than a brand,” states Zhorna Ali, a sales and marketing assistant at M3.

To avoid consumers from brand switching, companies must thoroughly personalize their sales promotions strategy. Focus on specific product categories to remain competitive within the market.

Rather than giving sales incentives to everyone, Bare Escentuals limits its promotions to its loyal fans called Beauty Insiders. In the example below, customers received three free items with any order.

(Image Source)

Create plans to engage customers beyond your sales promotions. Earn their loyalty.

Prep for Sales Promotions

Planning for your next sales event involves lots of time and decision-making. You want to boost your revenue and satisfy customers.

Choose buyer-specific incentives that will attract people. Cross-sell products that complement one another. And think beyond the promotion by focusing on customer loyalty initiatives.

Upgrade your sales promotion. Prepare for it today.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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Things You Need to Know About Instagram’s New Business Features

Things You Need to Know About Instagram’s New Business Features written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit Pexels

It has been a while since a large number of businesses on Instagram have been struggling to generate the level of engagement they have been looking for. The primary reason for this seems to be not having the necessary tools to find out how exactly how their content is performing as well as whether they are really being able to connect well with their target audience.

Apparently, Instagram realized this too, and hence recently came up with tools specifically designed to help businesses get more insight about their content’s performance as well as understand their target audience better.

So let’s take a look at these new Instagram business tools and how you can go about utilizing them to your advantage.

Business Profiles

Business profiles is a feature that allows business to stand out as a business on Instagram. It also allows them to put contact details on their profile, as well as choose how they wish to be contacted. Their potential customers would have the option to contact them with just a tap of the contact button, and even get directions to the business’ location.

However, it’s important to note that this feature would only be available to businesses that already have a Facebook page. So if you have one, you can simply tap the settings button and you would see an option to switch to a business account.

While there isn’t much to discuss this feature, as it’s simply about switching to a business account from a general one, you may still want to see how it looks using your personal account. This may help you figure out whether you need to make certain changes or remove some information that’s not needed.

Insights

This is probably the most important tool that you would want as a business. The lack of enough information to better understand the followers and the performance of the content were probably the biggest hurdle for businesses to market their products and services better on Instagram.

However, with the new Insights feature, that’s a thing of the past. Insights give you a very detailed overview of who your followers exactly are, including information such as their gender, location, age and more. Similarly, you also get to know a lot more information about your content that was previously terribly challenging to get access to, if not impossible.

Metrics such as your top posts, the level of engagement with your followers, reach and impressions are now easily accessible from right within the app. This information would go a long way in helping you come up with a significantly more effective content marketing strategy focused on your followers and target audience.

Shralpin is a great example that has used this particular business feature to great success, growing their Instagram account at a much faster pace after getting to know what skateboarders (their target audience) like to see and learn about.

You can follow a similar approach, too, by trying to understand your target audience better. Simply keep a track of posts that consistently generate more engagement, and start giving your followers more of what they want based on that.

Similarly, some other types of posts may fail to connect much with your followers, which would be apparent from the low reach and impressions, as well as the poor overall engagement. So you can simply work on making them more appealing to your target audience, or simply replacing them with what’s working well for you.

Also, don’t forget that you can create laser-targeted marketing campaigns as you would have access to so much information about your followers, including the city they live in.

In fact, you can go as deep as finding out what time zone (based on your followers’ demographics) they live in and post at the most popular times when most of your followers are active on the site. This is sure to take the engagement with your followers to a whole new level.

Promote

This is another great feature that may turn out to be very useful for businesses with a good amount of advertising budget. Simply put, you will be able to turn your best-performing posts into ads, again all from within the app.

What this means is that you won’t have to go through much trial and error, which is so annoyingly, not to mention “expensively” common while running advertising campaigns. You can simply use what’s already working for you and hence improve your chances of generating a great ROI quite a bit.

You will also be allowed to add a button which you can use to encourage your target audience to take whatever action you want them to take.

In order to make the most out of this feature, you would ideally want to pick posts that have not only been generating a good amount of engagement but also very likely to get more sales. Purely informational posts, even though very engaging, may not help generate a very good ROI.

As far as targeting is concerned, you would have the option to select your target audience or let Instagram do it for you. Again, you may get the best results if you select pretty much the same type of audience that has been connecting well with the post you’re looking to promote.

 

Brandon Leibowitz, owner of SEO Optimizers, been involved with digital marketing since 2007 and am well versed in marketing techniques to help both small and large businesses grow exposure online. 

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How to Use Images to Enhance Your Content and Social Media

How to Use Images to Enhance Your Content and Social Media written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit D.J. Billings

This is an excerpt from Master Content Marketing, a new book by Pamela Wilson of Rainmaker Digital/Copyblogger.

If you’re not a working artist, this post may push you straight out of your comfort zone.

“Me? Create images for my content? No way.”

The good news is that image creation (just like content creation and social media marketing) can be learned.

I’ll share a few rules of thumb to guide you as you get started. When you combine the rules I’ll teach with practice, you’ll become more proficient with image creation over time.

You may even find yourself looking forward to creating images! I believe that’s partly because images are processed in a different part of your brain than words. When you work on your images, you’re giving that hard-working verbal processing part of your brain a break.

Your Visual Cortex: An Unsung Superhero

Your visual cortex is a small part of your brain that’s hidden toward the back of your head. But its effects are massive: it produces the reality you see all around you. And it’s fast: it processes visual information 60,000 times faster than words.

Images “speak” a different language than words and convey their meaning faster, too. That’s why one of the most important things you can do to put a finishing touch on any piece of content is to add an image.

One of your goals is to create content that gets noticed and read, and great images make us stop and look. There’s proof for this: a 2013 study by MDG Advertising showed that content featuring compelling images averages 94 percent more total views than content without.

But images don’t just draw viewers — they boost understanding (and retention), too.

Text and oral presentations are not just slightly less efficient than pictures for retaining certain types of information; they are much less efficient. If information is presented orally, people remember about 10 percent, tested 72 hours after exposure. That figure goes up to 65 percent if you add a picture. — John Medina, Brain Rules

Images Invite, Explain, and Entertain

The best images add meaning to the words you’ve written: they convey emotion, evoke an atmosphere, and communicate opinions. All this without words! It sounds like a tall order, but the information in this post will help you find and use images that do all that.

You’ve spent time and effort writing an amazing article. Let’s put some icing on that cake with an image that draws attention to the content you created and helps boost comprehension, too.

Revisit Your Carefree Image Creation Days

As young children, we all start out as artists. The difference between the art we made when we were kids and the art we make now is that when we were kids, we didn’t care about whether our images “worked.” We enjoyed creating them, and that was all that mattered.

There’s no time like today to revisit your inner artist. And there are good business reasons to start adding images to your content.
Image processing happens in a different part of the brain from where words are processed, so putting images with your words will engage more of your reader’s brain.

Images are especially effective vehicles to activate associations. If you spark an experience or memory with your image, you can convey a meaning that goes well beyond the words on the page.

Block Out Time to Find the Best Image

Recreate those carefree “artist” days by blocking out time for image creation in your schedule. Some people like to “warm up” with images as the first thing they do when they get into their office in the morning. Others identify the times of day their minds seem to need a break from writing words or doing calculations, and they use those times to create images.

I jump between writing and creating images all day long. I look at my to-do list and check in with myself: “Am I in the mood for writing, or creating images?”

Begin with a Goal

What exactly do you want to accomplish with the image in your piece of content? What effect would you like it to have?
When they’re created for marketing our businesses, our image goals fall into common categories. We want to:

• Entertain: these images provoke smiles and spread goodwill
• Educate: these images share information and build authority
• Provoke: these images surprise and prompt an action
• Inspire: these images evoke emotion, encourage, or uplift the viewer

Decide what you want to communicate from one of the categories above and choose an image as a vehicle for your message. Having this information in hand will make it easier to get through the next step without wasting time.

Where to Avoid Looking for Images for Your Content

Before I talk about where to look for images, I want to talk about where not to look for images. And to do that, I need to share a few words about copyright. Stick with me! It will be short.

Literature, art, and photography are intellectual property which benefits from the protection of copyright. Finding an image floating around on the web doesn’t grant you the right to use it: someone owns it, and you may only use it if the owner gives you permission.

This permission is often conditional. For example, you may be allowed to use an image to illustrate a point in a purely editorial context, but you may not be able to use it in a commercial context.

I have known several people who have been sued for not paying attention to proper usage. They ended up owing thousands of dollars to the owner of an image because they used it without paying for it, thinking they had permission. These people didn’t set out to “steal” anything, but that’s exactly what they did.

Never use a web browser’s image search function to find images to use in your content. It is too tempting to find the “perfect” rights-protected image there. I also recommend you avoid image-sharing services like Flickr. Yes, some photographers add a Creative Commons license to their images which grants permission to use it. But I knew someone who used an image with a Creative Commons license and then, later on, the photographer changed the license and my friend had to stop using the image. It was an image that had been used to sell one of her well-known products for many years, and she had to scramble to look for a replacement.

Let’s keep you out of legal hot water and save you from future headaches, shall we? Here’s how to find images you have the right to use freely — images that will make your content more attractive and effective.

Where to Look for Images for Your Content

To find the perfect image for your next piece of content, you have three choices:

1. Find a free stock photo you have the rights to use.
2. Buy a high-quality stock photo you have the rights to use.
3. Create an image yourself.

You can also commission photography, of course, but that’s not very common for web content. Even major corporations use high-quality purchased stock photography. Let’s look at each of these three choices in detail.

Free Stock Photography

An important note: when looking at free stock photography, be sure to check the licensing on any image you use. In many cases, the image is free to use in exchange for crediting the photographer who provided it. Sites will specify what you need to say in the photo credit, so follow their directions carefully.

Pixabay.com: Pixabay is my favorite free photo site because it’s the one that feels most like a paid site. It features easy-to-search photos, illustrations, and vectors. Pixabay images are vetted by a team of volunteer editors and do not require you to credit the photographer. Creating an account on the site will allow you quicker access to images, which you can download in a variety of sizes.

Kaboompics.com: Kaboompics offers major image categories and has a search feature, too. Their image collection isn’t huge, but the images they do have are high-quality and quite large — large enough to be used for print design. The only thing you can’t do with Kaboompics images is to sell them: the site is devoted to keeping their images free.

TheStocks.im: TheStocks is a collection of stock photo sites all in one place — the majority of which are free. You can use the interface to browse collections and get a feel for the quality and style of the photos available.

Paid Stock Photography

Over the years that I’ve taught branding, I’ve met a few people who didn’t ever want to pay for the photography they used. And I have to confess I got more than a little impatient with them.

You see, I have art directed more photo shoots than I can remember. And I know how much work happens to create the professional-level images featured on paid stock photography sites.

Memorable images aren’t easy to create, and I think the hard work is worth paying for.

When you’re ready to make a very small investment in getting professional photography that you have the rights to use for any commercial purpose — and that you can run without adding a photo credit — take a look at these paid stock photo sites:

Bigstock.com: I love the oversized images, advanced search features, and vast archive on this site. It’s my go-to when I need an image that stands out.

Shutterstock.com: Polished, beautiful images with a robust search feature.

Adobe Stock: A massive collection of high-quality images with a price range that reflects the quality (it’s on the high side). Worth looking through when you need a specific image that will be memorable.

Create Your Own Images

Here’s a radical idea. Chances are very good that you walk around every day with a camera close by in the form of your smartphone.
What would happen if you began registering images of the world around you, a few photos at a time?

When you’re looking around, keep your eyes open for:

Contrast: Look for color contrast, light and shadow contrast, size or texture contrast.

Faces and emotions: Keep your finger on your camera button to capture expressions, emotions, and stolen glances that tell stories.

Angles: Dramatic angles and a sense of perspective that draw your eye into the image make a boring image interesting. Sometimes all it takes is positioning yourself or your camera above, below, or to the side for the image to come to life.

The Art of Image Searching

Some images just work: they complement your words; they add shades of meaning and entertainment value to your page.

And some images? They’re boring, they send the wrong message, and they aren’t worth spending time deciphering.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman group, which is devoted to researching website usability, says this about images:

“Users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that’s relevant to the task at hand. And users ignore purely decorative images that don’t add real content to the page. So much fluff — of which there’s too much already on the web.”

To find the best images, you’ll want to become skilled at searching for them. Here are the tips the pros use:

Start searching for one word, then narrow your results by adding words or subtracting. Searching a single word usually leads to an overwhelming number of results. Bring up the results from a single-word search, and see what you want more or less of. Most sites will allow you to add a minus sign before terms you don’t want to appear. If you’re getting a lot of results with children, for example, and you’re looking for an image of business people, add “-children” to the search box along with your original word.

Use style terms. Adding specific words like “vintage,” “grunge,” “white background,” or “close up” will narrow down your results. You can also narrow your results by orientation, so you only see vertical or horizontal images.

Step back and see what jumps out. When looking at a page of thumbnail images, ask yourself, “Which one stands out?” When an image holds its own among dozens of others, that’s a good sign that you’ve found a strong one.

Consider your text. If you plan to add text to your image, look carefully to ensure there’s an open area on the photo that doesn’t have a lot of busy text underneath it, so your text will be readable.

Consider where the image “points.” Many images look like they “point” a certain way. Sometimes a person in the image is looking off to the right, left, above, or below. Viewers will tend to follow their gaze. Sometimes the image has strong angles that send viewers’ eyes in a specific direction like they’re following an arrow. Make sure to use this to your advantage: position images so they draw viewers toward the text you want them to read. For more on this, read Point Out the Obvious with Images on Big Brand System.

Use a single focal point for high drama. The most dramatic images have a single focal point: an obvious visual “star of the show.” Sometimes you can achieve this manually by cropping an image to remove extraneous elements and focus your viewers’ eyes.

Train Your Eyes to Pinpoint Images That Work

Even non-artists can put the power of images to work for their content and social media marketing. Need more guidance? Ask me your image-related questions in the comments!

Pamela Wilson is the author of Master Content Marketing: A Simple Strategy to Cure the Blank Page Blues and Attract a Profitable Audience. She’s Executive Vice President of Educational Content at Rainmaker Digital/Copyblogger. Find more from Pamela at Big Brand System.

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5 Account-Based Marketing Pitfalls to Avoid

B2B marketing has been touting account-based marketing (ABM) as a key strategy that is helping to fine-tune prospects that are ideal for your solution. The tactic can provide an effective avenue for creating meaningful campaigns that appeal to these prospects, enabling you to increase your conversions.

Just because more people are investing in ABM because of its success rate doesn’t mean all these marketers are moving forward and using the concept of ABM correctly. Part of ABM's effectiveness is its ability to provide very relevant and detailed data. However, there’s so much data that it quickly becomes a complex marketing tool. This complexity has resulted in some common pitfalls like the six listed below:

1. Thinking It’s All About Digital Marketing

While all types of online digital marketing certainly offer considerable benefits in reaching these prospects, many companies often forget about the offline marketing platforms, mistakenly believing they are dead. In reality, many businesses still spend considerable time with more traditional marketing communications where they feel they can develop tangible relationships with companies that can offer them solutions.

Companies in particular and people in general tend to trust the physical presence more than the virtual world, especially when many of the business solutions they are considering come at a high cost or involve a major investment. Look at targeting accounts in specific regions and determine which events in those areas should be added to the strategy in conjunction with your digital tactics.

2. Not Maximizing Value of Existing Content

This is a huge mistake because new content may not be necessary for each of your targeted accounts. Not only does this utilize more resources than necessary, but you also are not maximizing the value from the existing content. Keep your content library organized and review existing white papers, eBooks, case studies and articles for content that can be re-purposed or minimally changed in order to suit various accounts.

There is so much information thrown at us on a daily basis that we cannot catch every noteworthy piece of information; creating the need for a few repeats here and there.

Even something as simple as changing the images that accompany the content can create something new and engaging for different accounts. You may want to add enough content that is relevant to an industry that your new account now represents while keeping the primary benefits in place. I personally do this by publishing daily on our blog.

3. Not Personalizing the Content for Each ABM Campaign

There’s also the risk when recycling content or even creating new content that it will not be personalized to the degree necessary to truly enthrall and delight those target accounts.

Again, the need to keep pristine filing of content so that you will have the ability and option to hone in on the personal challenges of each target and present that information in a way that shows specifically how you can address those personal business challenges.

Be sure to deliver this content in a segmented way through various channels like email marketing, social media, and smart content found on various landing pages. This will add considerable value to each ABM campaign and capture your targets’ attention.

4. Not Developing the Right Infrastructure with the Appropriate ABM Tools

In the rush to benefit from the ABM trend, many companies just ad-hoc campaigns in the hopes they can gain quick benefits. The reality is that a company needs to have the right infrastructure to support ABM campaigns, including the most appropriate tools.

Your ABM toolbox should contain tools like a CRM platform, social media accounts, content promotion tools, a content management system, and a marketing automation platform. I also love tools such as Visme for creating stunning photos. In selecting these tools, look for those that offer third-party integration so you can connect as many ABM tools as possible for maximum efficiency and lift-off.

5. Separating Marketing and Sales Rather than Encouraging Collaboration

Your marketing and sales teams cannot go off and do their own thing because they are missing out on opportunities to collaborate and are creating barriers to identifying the best prospects. Together, your marketing and sales team can become a powerhouse force that shares and agrees to certain metrics that identify target accounts as well as developing and managing more successful ABM campaigns.

The project work involved in an ABM campaign can also be split up amongst the two departments to balance workload and generate the most relevant content.

Consider these mistakes when creating and implementing your ABM strategy and design your campaigns so as to prevent you from losing ROI and to help you strengthen your account relationships.

The Modern Marketing Guide to ABM will help you increase your conversions and lead you away from more pitfalls, allowing you to make the most of your time and resources to create meaningful campaigns. 

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7 Spookily Successful Digital Marketing Campaigns for Halloween

Q: What’s the ratio of a pumpkin’s circumference to its diameter?
A: Pumpkin Pi

All jokes aside, Halloween presents a huge sales opportunity for B2C (and even some B2B) brands. In fact, Halloween is only second to Christmas as the most commercially successful holiday. And a recent survey found that Halloween spending is estimated to reach $8.4 billion dollars this year, the highest in survey history.

Depending on your line of business, this presents an enormous opportunity for marketing departments to help generate a ton of cash over a short amount of time. However, the bar is incredibly high and competition is stiff, which means that consumers are looking for clever, creative and memorable marketing campaigns. The seven spooktacular campaigns below made their mark this year.   

Burger King Dresses Up As Rival

This spooky marketing tactic has been all over the news in the past few days. A Burger King in New York draped their building with a giant ghost and scrolled the word “McDonald’s” on it. They also updated their marquee for the holiday to say “Boooooo. Just kidding, we still flame grill our burgers. Happy Halloween”.

In just a few short days the video already has almost 500,000 views on YouTube.

Chipotle Helps Customers Score A $3 Boorito

Each year, Chipotle runs a promotion offering discounted food to customers who show up in-store wearing a costume. I will admit that I have personally partook in this promotion more than I’d like to admit.

Not only has this one Facebook post received over 7,000 reactions, but nearly 3,00 shares as well proving that followers (and their friends) are keen on the deal.

Airbnb Offers Terrifying Experience

The latest Airbnb contest is not for the faint of heart. The travel giant offered two “lucky” people the opportunity to spend Halloween night in the Paris Catacombs. In case you didn’t know, the Catacombs are the final resting place of 6 million souls.

In order to win the full experience, followers were asked to share why they think they are brave enough to sleep in the Catacombs.

Petsmart Gets Cute

I absolutely love this post from Petsmart. In addition to offering pet lovers a clever idea for carving pumpkins, they’re also encouraging user generated content by asking people to create their own and use the hashtag #WickedCute as well as tagging the brand and the “pet celebrity” that they choose.

Energy.gov Educates Using Candy Corn

I was pretty impressed by this amazingly clever approach to showing how your energy consumption stacks up to the energy found in Halloween themed objects from Energy.org. Users can choose a number and energy type to find their output.

Additionally, the organization also created a special Energy Ghostbusters podcast that shares “scarily effective” ways to save energy.

REI Offers Zombie Survival Gear

This infographic from REI promises to supply you with the proper attire to survive a zombie apocalypse as well as “five critical skills to keep you from becoming a snack”. Not only is the release of this infographic timely for Halloween, but it also aligns with the premiere of the new season of the Walking Dead and will prove to be a piece of evergreen content for REI once the holiday has passed.

MAC Transformation Magic

The London Dungeon offers a truly unique theatre experience that features special effects, rides and the opportunity for patrons to hear, touch and smell the whole experience. Their latest campaign features the use of high-end Mac cosmetics to create an authentic (and truly disturbing) tutorial for turning yourself from fresh faced to wicked witch with some clever contouring.

TopRank Marketing Team Members Share Their Fondest Halloween Memory

This post would be incomplete without including halloween insights from some of our TopRank Marketing team members. Below you’ll find a glimpse into halloween of years past as our team reflects on their fondest childhood halloween memories.

Alexis Hall – Director of Client Accounts
When I was in first grade I was at the school Halloween party. And for three tickets you could place someone in jail for like 10 minutes. And my brother put me in. It had bars and I cried after 30 seconds so he changed places with me and served my time. It was traumatizing at the time.

Leila de La Fuente – Account Manager
When I was 6, I dressed up as my favorite disney Character, Nala from the Lion King. I walked around all day saying “get your paws off me” because it was my favorite line from the movie.

Caitlin Burgess – Content Marketing Lead
Every Halloween night my grandpa would come over for dinner. My mom always made baked spaghetti from a family recipe. After dinner my dad and grandpa would hit the streets with my sister and I, as well as the neighborhood kids, for trick or treating.

Kevin Kotch – SEO Analyst
When I was a kid, I remember trying to find the “best” houses which of course were the ones with the full-sized candy bars. Throughout the night while we were trick or treating, my neighborhood friends and I would have silly string wars. Things got pretty messy.

Evan Prokop – Digital Marketing Manager
I remember the thrill of running around in the dark causing mayhem. And, there was nothing better than coming home with a full sack of candy!

Tell us what you think! Which marketing campaigns did you find extra spooky and impactful this year?

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Weekend Favs October 29

Weekend Favs October 29 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

NetHunt – Enhance your Gmail inbox with an enterprise-level, CRM functionality.

Infinitweet – Say goodbye to character limits! With Infinitweet Chrome, you can write a message of any length and post it to Twitter as an image.

Established – Lessons from some of the world’s oldest companies as twelve business writers set out to find the answers to age-old questions and learn their secrets to survival.

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