Inside Spirit Halloween’s year-round social strategy

At the July grand opening of Spirit Halloween’s flagship store in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, thousands of attendees had the opportunity to step inside a large box modeled after one of the brand’s costume bags and label what a costume based on them would include. For the brand’s CEO, Steven Silverstein, those enclosed items simply included “Steven,” “hat” and “shirt.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Spirit Halloween (@spirithalloween) That photo opp, based on last October’s viral meme of creating fake, hyper-specific Spirit Halloween costumes, exemplifies the brand’s community-centric social media strategy and the significant role that its social media presence plays in its overall business. Despite the transient nature of the brand, with its annual return each fall announced by its bright orange banners draped across previously-empty storefronts, Spirit Halloween has leveraged social media to develop and engage with a community of fervent Halloween fans. And that excitement for the spooky season isn’t limited to October, said Drew Griffiths, the brand’s divisional VP of marketing and social media, and Carly Korman, its social media manager. On TikTok, for example, the use of the hashtag #Halloween began to climb as early as the end of July. “We really focus on ‘How do we bring this Spirit Halloween experience to the masses and get them to create all this amazing content and see them in our stores?’” Korman said. “That’s something that I think really continues to drive us.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Does how you approach creating social media content during the Halloween season differ from your strategy throughout the rest of the year? Griffiths: It’s always Halloween here. We’re always thinking about our strategy, 365 days a year. There’s these hilarious memes out there that are like, “What the Spirit Halloween CEO does for 10 months out of the year,” and it’s like a picture of some guy rolling around on a pile of money. And I was just like, “Yeah, if it were only that easy to stand up 1,500-plus stores every year and tie in the marketing and branding overnight.” As the years have gone on, the love of Halloween and the fall season has gotten so robust. We have a content calendar that’s obviously heavier in September and October, but still fully goes throughout the year. We had our flagship grand opening on July 29 this year—earlier than ever—and there were 3,000 people there and 400 people camped out overnight in the parking lot. For every person that posts, “It’s too soon for Halloween decorations to be in my store,’ there are 100 of our fans that are like, “Not soon enough!’” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Spirit Halloween (@spirithalloween) Korman: We’ve seen such an appetite for Halloween even outside of peak Halloween season—which, for us, is really the three months leading up to Halloween. So, we’ve done campaigns around the holidays and making them ‘haunted’ and really tapping into that Halloween fanbase. And then ‘Halfway to Halloween’ [April 30] has become a big moment for us to really ramp up that excitement. Wherever we can bring the Halloween fun all year round, we’re all for it. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Spirit Halloween (@spirithalloween) Do you typically plan out your social content in advance, or is it more reactionary? Korman: We definitely plan out our content calendar around our standard products, costumes, decor, animatronics—all the things you see in store. But we love to have fun with trends and we have a great team who helps us really dive into those moments—like the Roman Empire meme—where we’re like, “Our fans would have so much fun with this trend. How do we make it our own at Spirit and get our Halloween audience invested?” We have a social media assistant and content creator who work directly in-house and really help identify these moments and who really live and breathe trends and Halloween. @spirithalloween Shameless plug: Get your roman costumes now. #SpiritHalloween #RomanEmpire #romanempireprank ♬ original sound - Spirit Halloween Griffiths: We have tentpole moments and big things planned through the season. We just did a huge takeover of the Blairstown Diner in North Jersey, which is the diner from the “Friday the 13th” movies, on Friday the 13th. So, we’re planning for things like that, or licensed partnerships. But we always need room for flexibility, because, in my opinion, that’s what a good brand will be able to do—listen to the consumer, listen to our guests and our fans. We're lucky we have a really good executive team who recognizes the importance of [trends] and allows us to react and create content quickly. They trust us to do the right thing for the brand and steward it forward based on what each social channel is sort of saying is the “thing of the moment.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Spirit Halloween (@spirithalloween) Spirit Halloween has found itself at the center of a few social media trends—how did you leverage those moments? Korman: We’re actually seeing a resurgence of the “costume bag meme” this year that took off last year. We posted a blank meme template last year, and that was a great example of a moment where we knew we should be part of the conversation. That meme is just so representative of Spirit. Can't believe spirit halloween sells this pic.twitter.com/41IMjXizeA— Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources (@waDNR) October 26, 2022 View this post on Instagram A post shared by Spirit Halloween (@spirithalloween) Griffiths: That was a great example of Carly and the team looking at the meme and saying, “What is the way we can do this that’s authentic to our brand and doesn’t just isolate it to a single costume?” So, our sort of foray into the meme was this wink and a nod and saying, “Hey, we’re in on the joke,” and letting people have fun with it. Last year wasn’t the first year of the meme—it was probably like the third year. But it really continued to amplify, so we really leaned in and had fun with it last year. We had an entire Twitter hashtag, #SpiritHallowMeme, and just encouraged people to keep pumping those memes out. And that meme made it everywhere—it made it to Jimmy Kimmel and all the late-night talk shows; it made it to all the news stations. I mean, I even saw it on CNN. And that was the fun part, just showcasing our favorites and supporting them and trying to interact with our fans and keep up with that sort of madness. Korman: When grandma is using the meme template on Facebook, you know it’s a pretty good one. People slapping the Spirit Halloween banner onto images of abandoned or empty places (literally or figuratively) has become something of a running joke on social media. How have you embraced that meme? Griffiths: Not only do we continually lean into that content, but we literally made it into a physical product. The back says ‘Find something dead inside; apply sticker; open for business.’ So, we’re all in on the banner meme. That was part of the fun when we did the diner takeover—a week before, we just put a banner up on the diner and walked away and everyone was like, “What’s happening?” who wants to do their own spirit takeover? 👀 pic.twitter.com/d6G4Uvg3xt— Spirit Halloween (@SpiritHalloween) October 18, 2023 In 2021, an artist group actually went and put a physical Spirit Halloween banner on Google’s headquarters. And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, we photoshopped the banner onto the Twitter building. We lean in where we think it’s appropriate, and we really love how people want Spirit Halloween to be everywhere. What role do creators play in your social media strategy? Korman: We have an amazing online community of superfans—many of whom are influencers and create amazing content. They live the brand 365 and, you know, really showcase our products and their [Halloween decor] setups and are just rabidly engaged. We ramp up with them throughout the season, but we foster that relationship all year round. For example, when we had our store's grand opening event, that was really a place for them to gather and to create content, and we really built relationships with some of the creators there. We also have the “Spirit Halloween Fanclub,” a Facebook group started by fans, where we have a close relationship with the admins over there and we do exclusive sweepstakes and let them in early on some of our product launches. It’s always critical when we work with creators that we make sure they truly love Halloween. I know that sounds silly, but we want to work with people who have a love for the brand and for Halloween, and we’re lucky that there’s such a large landscape of people who do. We engage as much as we can on their content as much as we can, and we love to see the reactions from the fans or the creator community when we comment on a video of them in the store or them building their animatronic setup. And our team loves to share that user-generated content, whether it’s in-feed or in Instagram stories. I think fans love to see themselves represented, but they also like that it gives other fans the avenue to be like, “Oh, I can create this makeup look, too.” It’s not just us posting a model whose makeup we did in our studio—it’s a real person who used our special effects makeup themselves. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Spirit Halloween (@spirithalloween) What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken on social media, and did it pay off? Griffiths: The first year of the pandemic, right after Los Angeles had canceled trick-or-treating, we were getting inundated with press calls saying, “What are you guys doing about this? What do you think of this?” And we were talking about whether we should do a press release, but I was like, “We’re Spirit. None of that stuff feels right.” So, we took a picture of our hazmat suit, which was a new costume that year, and set it against a black background and added copy saying, “We’ve got this covered.” And that was our response. We posted that and it went on TMZ and a bunch of other places. At the time we were just like, “Yes, this feels so right. This is what we're gonna do.” But now, in hindsight, it seems risky for other brands—I’m sure a lot of other brands probably thought we were crazy. But going back to everything Carly has said about our fans, that [post] was exactly what they needed from us. It was humorous, but not too far. And it was just us saying, “We’re going to figure out a way to make sure you have Halloween, because we know it’s so important to you.” We didn’t answer any press questions after that. When we got follow-up questions like, “What does this mean?” or, “What are you doing?”, we’d just send them a link to the post. But the fans loved it—it got tens of thousands of likes and shares. Whether you call it a risk or not, we just felt strongly about it. Like, this is what we got to do for the brand—we can't listen to the rest of the noise of what everybody else is doing. We have to do what's right for us.

Inside Spirit Halloween’s year-round social strategy

Featured Stories