Is Halloween your “Selloween”? How to prepare for your key business periods

‘Tis the season to be… scary! Halloween has come and gone again — the peak season not just for marauding ghouls and goblins but also for Australia’s costume and party suppliers. Here at Google we see a spike every year around this time in searches about Halloween topics. And we also see businesses like Dean Salakas at ThePartyPeople smartly timing their AdWords campaigns to capitalize on the public’s perennial interest in all things spooky.

ThePartyPeople is one of Australia’s most successful party supply stores, offering a large range of costumes, balloons and themed party accessories. About six weeks ago Dean started “flexing up” for the season by switching on his Halloween AdWords campaign and staffing up for increased customer enquiries. If you take a look at Insights for Search – our free tool to find out what search terms trend on Google at any given time – you can see what searches for Halloween have been hot this year. Unsurprisingly, most people have been looking online for costumes and costume ideas, followed by food, party games and decorations.

The graph shows the growing interest of Aussies in Halloween. By matching his Google AdWords campaign to this trend, Dean got so many orders he actually had to ease up on his campaign in order to fill all the orders. Right through Halloween eve, Dean and his team were still busy trying to keep up with all the enquiries and sales requests that came in over the last few weeks.

If you wonder how you can replicate Dean’s success, here are some tips to help you achieve similar results:

• Make sure you’re online — no matter the device. If you don’t yet have a website, you can sign up for a free one at http://www.gettingbusinessonline.com.au/. You can add your business listing to Google Places on Google Maps. And don’t forget all those customers with smartphones and tablets; with Google sites for mobile landing pages, you can set up a simple site that’s optimized for smaller screens.
• Find and understand your peak seasons. Look up your products or services on Google Insights for Search to determine their demand over the year, and then tweak your keywords to correspond with trending topics. Riding a natural wave is a lot easier than trying to generate your own initial momentum.
• Connect with the hot topics. Can you easily link your product or service to a popular search topic? For example, if you own a costume business that sells items modeled after the latest superhero movie, you might want to advertise against search queries connected to the movie or superhero.

Of course, you know your business better than anyone. But these tools give you a little extra data to help you make decisions.

And a final Halloween tip? Even though Hollywood keeps pumping out vampire romances, Dean told us that Aussies have been much more into zombie costumes this year. And yep — we are seeing that exact same trend in Insights for Search.

Posted by Ross Mcdonald, Head of Retail, Google Australia