At Hot Topic, Halloween is more than just October 31st. It is a season - in the same sense that the holidays are not just about one day. The Halloween season includes visiting horror nights at theme parks, watching our favorite horror movies, going to a pumpkin patch and carving pumpkins, Halloween parties, cosplaying at LA Comic Con - and of course, Halloween night. Our objective was to showcase our Halloween assortment in their rightful setting - and with an activity that encompassed the season of Halloween.
While we'd love to photograph each Halloween costume in a different location, with a different model - it just wasn't feasible. Instead, we turned our 31 Days of Halloween campaign over to our brand ambassadors, HT Fanatics, to be the creative directors, photographers, stylist and every role that goes into creating a great piece of content. Each ambassador was given their costume of choice in advance of the kick off date of October 1, 2018. We partnered with them to give them the tools they needed - whether it was theme park tickets, studio space, props, etc. The content that was created was posted on their Instagram to amplify the Hot Topic 31 Days of Halloween message and reposted on the @hottopic Instagram and across all Hot Topic social platforms to reinforce the message of the season and offerings of our Halloween assortment. In addition, we featured our ambassadors through Hot Topic emails and hottopic.com.
This strategy and campaign gave us the tools to have one of our most successful Halloweens ever!
We reached 2.4M incremental customers through our ambassadors and their Instagram audiences.
In total with our ambassador posts and Hot Topic posts, we had more than 1M likes.
