As the palm fronds turn golden and the air gets a tad cooler, Halloween offers businesses a bewitching opportunity to embrace the spirit of the season and boost customer engagement. With a little creativity and a dash of spooky flair, you can draw crowds and appeal to your ideal customers. Here are some spooktacular Halloween-inspired ideas to help your small business shine during this spine-tingling season.

One note of caution: as in all marketing activities, it’s important to know your audience. A scary phantasma, for instance, would likely not appeal to small children just as talk of witches and devils may upset some adults. It’s important to understand your customers and celebrate accordingly.

Now, let’s get on with a ghostly good time.

​If you’re like me—and almost everyone else in this country—the end of the year is a time to look back and assess. I enjoy the nostalgia and reminiscing that occurs at this time of year, but it can also be a time of dread. It’s a time to realize you either hit the mark or you didn’t. And if you did, you may be apprehensive about being able to do it again in the new year.
 
So, we make resolutions.

We tell ourselves we’re going to do X differently this year. And most of us fall short of X because we forget about it, or we fall back into old routines because they are easy and we know how they work.
 
But this year, if you’re going to take on a resolution, we have some tips for you. The goal is to make resolutions more intuitive and doable. Here are a couple of ways to do that.

​We’re down to the last two weeks before Christmas with some of the biggest shopping days of the season still ahead of us. Since every sale can help your future marketing, it’s essential that over the next few weeks you think not only of the money, but the data you can garner from each sale as well. But don’t stress. You still have time to implement these important activities for big results.

​Things You Need to Do During Small Business Season
Don’t let the biggest sales season go by without gathering this data and implementing some of these activities to help with future marketing:

​Okay, so this might not be a “secret” weapon, but email marketing can help extend the push to shop small that began on Small Business Saturday. These types of gentle reminders can keep customers buying from you all season (and all year) long. You just need a couple of great ideas, an email marketing tool (like MailChimp or Constant Contact), and of course an email list.

​Do you have dreams about owning your own business or becoming part of the gig economy? Making your own hours? Working from wherever you want?
 
Then you’re not alone. 

There are an estimated 582 million entrepreneurs (about 775,000 of them in the US) already working for themselves. And that number is growing. According to Guidant Financial, 27% of people polled in 2020 wanted to start their own entrepreneurial enterprises because they were disenchanted/dissatisfied with corporate America. And a lot of people are rethinking their current jobs because of COVID.
 
Whatever your reasoning, you may be hesitating because going out on your own means leaving your comfort zone and the things you’ve become accustomed to. If you’re looking to become your own boss, here are some things you need to know. 

​News stations are finally embracing the word that COVID numbers are going down and vaccine administrations are going up. That’s allowing people to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. If you have weathered the storm so far, you know your business is not completely in the clear. There are always unexpected challenges like freak snowstorms and mass electrical outages that are keeping us all on our business toes, regardless of where you sell or operate from. Nothing will tell you faster how interconnected we are than understanding how weather in one part of the country can stimy business operations in another.
 
But as we begin to see COVID numbers drop and (eventually) restrictions loosen, there are several common marketing mistakes you’ll want to avoid.
 

​As I write this, we are a week away from Christmas. And while it may feel like the holiday season has already been decided with everyone from the post office to mail-order businesses saying there's no way they can meet Christmas deadlines, now is the time that local small businesses can shine.
 
You have an advantage at this point over online stores because customers can come in and get a last-minute gift, service, or gift certificate. But you can’t just fling open your doors and let the world in. There are a couple of things you need to be doing to ensure that they feel safe. Still, It's not too late to implement these COVID precautions in your business. 

​Do you feel like your business is just shouting into the wind? Does it seem like the time you spend on social media is extensive but yields few results? Are you sick and tired of Zoom calls that take too long and accomplish too little? If so, it might be time to think about experiential marketing.
 
Experiential marketing is the act of creating a memorable experience that will be associated with your brand. Many smaller businesses think of experiential marketing as the type of thing that businesses with Super Bowl-esque budgets do.
 
And they're right. 

​Our lives and our businesses have changed a lot during the time of COVID. We have changed how we reach customers and likely how they buy from us. Some of us have had to shut down.
 
During this time, your website should be one of your strongest sales tools. Just as your business has changed, your content should have evolved as well.