Halloween is typically a great holiday for bars. Getting dressed up and partying with friends while enjoying a few rounds of their favorite adult beverage is pretty par for the course. But with COVID-19 making large group in-person events impossible (or, at the very least, extremely risky), it seems that Halloween 2020 might be a bit of a dud for the restaurant industry.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Sure, you might not be able to enjoy the same energy or income from a normal Halloween season, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still tap into the spoopy season to enthrall guests and enjoy the holiday. You just need to think outside the box a little.
Here are a few ideas to help get you started.
Trick or Treat Delivery
A lot of towns are canceling door-to-door Trick or Treating this year because of the pandemic. It’s a huge bummer, especially for kids and families who enjoy hopping around town getting their sugar stash for the season or handing our candy to their neighbors.
That doesn’t mean you can’t bring Trick or Treating to your guests, though. Offer Halloween candy as part of your restaurant’s delivery program. This can be free candy with every meal order through your site or app, or having “Halloween Candy” as it’s own menu item during the season.
To make it extra fun, have parents sign up for a candy delivery on Halloween ahead of time. Build a delivery schedule/route, have your drivers get into fun costume, and drop off the candy orders to the front door (no-contact, of course) while blaring some Halloween tunes from their car radio. The kids will enjoy the surprise and it’ll build up some business and goodwill with your local community.
Spooky Cocktails To-Go
Halloween is as much an adult holiday as it is for the kiddos. With more US states relaxing the requirements of alcohol delivery from restaurants, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of it by building an alcohol to-go program.
Whip up some Halloween-centric cocktails that your guests can order for pick-up or delivery. Everything from Bloodwine (Sangria) to Eyeball Martinis to Witches’ Brew, there’s no shortage of spooky Halloween-themed boozy drinks you and your bar staff can come up with.
Virtual Costume Party & Contest
Costume contests are a pretty standard staple for the Halloween season. And while your guests can’t run the catwalk at your bar, you still can give them a reason to hop into costumes and show off for a bit by hosting virtual costume contests.
You can run this in a myriad of ways, but here’s a boiler plate version. Have your restaurant’s guests and online followers take photos and videos of posting it to your social media platform of choice. Have them tag your bar or restaurant’s social handle while also using a contest-specific hashtag, so you can easily track the entries as well as getting them to promote your business at the same time.
Encourage guests to really lean into their costume with character-appropriate poses, music, and – for the very daring – some dialogue. It’s a great opportunity for your guests to get creative and create some amazing user-generated content (UGC) for your platforms. So be sure share the entries in Facebook albums, IG stories, etc.
As for who wins – you can have your staff vote on their favorite or let your follows pick the winner. Or both! You can also have different categories of costumes for multiple winners. Regardless, make sure the winner(s) get a cool prize from your restaurant. The more enticing, the more entries which means more publicity for your restaurant.
Scary Story Live Streams
Who doesn’t love a good scary story? Get your staff, guests, and online followers in the spooky season by streaming ghost tales and other scary stories. This combines a fun Halloween-themed idea with video content marketing which performs quite well on social compared other content types. Host this on your Instagram, Facebook, or even Youtube.
How can this work? Have yourself or one of your staff dress up in costume and read some (short) scary stories for your followers to enjoy. Be sure to really dress your restaurant up too with spooky décor and lighting. You can even do a series of these throughout the month leading up to Halloween.
This is also an opportunity to market your seasonal cocktails we mentioned above. There’s no shortage of ideas and approaches for this, so feel free to let loose and get really creative.
