It’s almost Halloween, but you’ve still got a week for seasonal posts featuring your brand. The good news? Halloween posts are easy to sponsor, quick to make, and fun for everyone. Read on for an evidence-based look at how to create winning Halloween content.
What kind of Halloween content performs? Makeup and costumes.
My friends at Everpilot took a look at the engagement across 6,000 Halloween Instagram posts in October. Using hashtags to divide them into recipe posts, costume posts, and makeup posts, we found that makeup posts were getting nearly twice the engagement as recipes.
Food is good, but pics of people sell!
Next we filtered those lists to just those that included brand mentions. Were there any formulas that top performers were following to feature brands and products?
As you may expect, the basic equation for these posts was almost always the same: take a product, make a stunning costume with it, and share broadly. But we found a variety of way in which the brand was actually mentioned: some posts leave the brand out, causing commenters to ask for it. Others provided a full inventory of products used in the description. A third batch just flashed the brand in view of the camera for a second.
Makeup brands were the most frequently mentioned, and that makes sense: Halloween is the ultimate “get ready with me” post opportunity. But the twist is that Halloween enables any brand to be part of a get ready with me post. And that’s an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up. Paper towels? No problem — alien antennas. Electric drill? Obviously, that powers the spinning head attached to your arm.
Anecdotally, the biggest slam-dunk branding opportunity we found in our dataset was dog-fluencers. No, seriously — hear us out. The top-performing 30 posts included several dog accounts. All with cute dogs wearing even cuter costumes, but none with brand deals.
Our biggest surprise is surveying the top few hundred by engagement. How many terrifying costumes were there? That might be an odd comment to make, given that it’s Halloween, but at least in our dataset, the top-performing costume posts tended to be on the scary side.
If you need more inspiration, here are some posts from our Halloween dataset that included branded content. We tried to provide a mix below of different ways brands are incorporated, so you can see the variation.
kali.ledger transforms herself into an Avatar style creature
Using a toothbrush, fake ears, and everyday makeup. She doesn’t highlight the brands in the post, leaving multiple commenters to ask.
View this post on Instagram
alexaraemua transforms herself into a punk-rock circus clown.
Her post description calls out all the brands she used, down to the colored contact lenses and wig.
View this post on Instagram
itsannchovie shows a montage of five different characters
from an angel to a punk rock skull, all made with the same makeup brand advertised in the caption
View this post on Instagram
oatmilkmakeup goes all in with three posts for one brand
turning herself into a variety of goth princesses, Halloween-style.
View this post on Instagram
restingnailface shows some spooky nails
that change into flying bats when you hold them in water, calling out the polish brand you can use too
View this post on Instagram
And if you still want more inspiration, here is a larger list of costume influencers as a jumping-off point.
Happy Halloween!
