6 Tips on Using Halloween’s Charms for Promoting Your Game
As soon as fall arrives, many people start preparing and hyping up for one of the most interesting holidays of the year — Halloween. With its trick-or-treat tradition, scary stunts and costumes, and its overall fear-inducing but fun atmosphere, this holiday is something many look forward to.
Halloween is one of the most popular holidays in the US, and it’s gaining more and more popularity in other countries too. It’s definitely the perfect time to up your game when it comes to your marketing efforts for your game. Below you’ll find 6 tips on how you can use Halloween to your game’s advantage and attract more users to download, buy and play your game.
1. Bring Halloween to your store page
Think of the ways you can make your store page Halloween-y during the spooky season. Change your app icon or feature image — add Halloween symbols such as pumpkins, witch hats, spiders or whatever else that comes to your mind that is closely related to this holiday. Bring the Halloween spirit to your Store listing and attract users who like and celebrate this holiday.
For example, you can see that My Talking Tom 2 has a new Store icon for the season, with a spooky orange background and a few bats flying around Tom.
Then, another game that made an effort to use Halloween as a user magnet this year is Books of Wonder Hidden Objects. They took it even a step further by adding special Halloween levels to the game, another thing you can do to boost your conversions during this season which will be talked about in the next point.
And another example comes from the developers of Goodville: Farm Game Adventure, where we see the main character of the game dressed up as a witch holding a pumpkin-shaped box full of candies ready for trick or treat.
If you have a game on Steam, you can create a Halloween-themed capsule image, especially if you have an update that goes with it. Here is what the developers of Bardbarian did for theirs.
2. Add Halloween-themed content or in-game event
Halloween is a perfect opportunity to update your game and add new content that will make users who love this holiday buy and play it. You can add Halloween-themed costumes, make-up, decorations, levels — anything that will bring this holiday into your game. For example, we have added a new coloring category for our Pixel Art Coloring Book on Steam with images related to Halloween and our users really like it, judging by the comments we received.
Then, when it comes to mobile games, Subway Surfers did a great job of its Halloween makeover. They did a full deal — they changed the icon, their screenshots and added some really interesting in-game events and offers for this scary season.
Also, as mentioned above, Books of Wonder Hidden Objects has added spooky levels as a way to celebrate Halloween and give those users who celebrate it something to enjoy.
In addition, Clash of Clans has also invited players to get their optional update named Clash-o-ween that is all about this holiday and its scary spirit.
Finally, many online multiplayer games really take advantage of this Halloween and create some cool events for their players. Some of the examples are War of Worldcraft, Destiny, Overwatch, etc.
It doesn’t matter if your game is big or small, mobile or PC, there is sure a way you can spice it up a bit for the Halloween season.
3. Treat your users with a Halloween Sale
If your game is paid or if it has in-app purchases, treat your users with a Halloween sale. Nothing attracts people more to buy something than when it’s on discount, especially during holiday seasons! Come up with limited-time offers users won’t be able to resist. When something is limited in time it evokes the feeling of urgency and fear of missing out so you can use this to your game’s advantage.
4. Dress up your social media posts for Halloween
You can also make your social media posts tailor-made for this holiday. Use all your creative powers and bring Halloween to your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter accounts — all the social networks you use to connect with your audience.
We have done this for some of our games. Here is our Facebook post for Talking Cat Emma Ballerina. And another of our examples is the Instagram post we made for our Doodle Art: Magic Drawing App
5. Create a Halloween-themed contest
Another tactic you could use is to create a contest with a Halloween theme. You can ask your users to dress up a character of your game for Halloween, share the screenshots with you, and then you choose the top 3 and give the rewards when the contest is over. Or you can give them a task to fulfill in the game.
For example, we have made a coloring contest for our coloring books on Steam — Coloring Book for Adults and Coloring Book for Kids. In these contests, we have given our users a chosen Halloween-themed image from the game to color however they want and share their work with us. After the contests end, we’ll choose the best 3 for both and reward them.
You can also utilize social media here if possible and create a hashtag that people can use to participate in the contest and share their works.
6. Make Halloween-y ad creatives
Prepare ad creatives that will match the spirit of this holiday. Use the Halloween symbols, color palettes and text copy to attract users during this season. For example, use orange and black since these 2 colors are the most prominent during this holiday, add some scary horror-like fonts — try to evoke the feeling of Halloween in people when they see your ads.
This is an ad we made for our app Ringtones for Android. We definitely went all Halloween on this one.
And we made this spooky Halloween ad for our Emma Ballerina. She’s absolutely ready for this scary season.
Conclusion
These are the 6 ways you can leverage Halloween and make its popularity work in your game’s favor. It’s surely worth a shot to try out something and see what your audience likes and what they don’t. Halloween is definitely one of the most marketable holidays and there are various opportunities to make its charms and magic work for you.
