Halloween is such a fun time! Candy, costumes, movies and parties are all things we’ll remember from our Halloweens of years past. Memories can create opportunities for word-of-mouth marketing so why not take advantage of the festivities for your practice? Merely having a contest or activity is great, but there’s much more that can be done to make an office event successful.

What are you doing to ensure success at your next Halloween event?

Here are 5 ways to get your office excited about your Halloween Ideas:

#1 Plan Ahead

Creating something the day before Halloween is definitely doable, it’s just… a lot more difficult. You only have so many hours in the day. There are reasons your grade-school teachers used to tell you not to procrastinate, last minute projects are never as successful. Knocking out little bits and pieces of the project weeks before the final day is the best way to make sure you’re getting everything accomplished. Halloween fun can be such a big deal you might want to get posters and/or teachers made for the event. There’s no way you’ll be able to get that sort of stuff done the day before.

#2 Talk About It

Moving right along, now that you’ve planned your event out with plenty of time to spare, you’ll have the opportunity to talk it up to your patients and staff! The more excitement and build-up you have, the more likely it is to be successful. A perfect execution is rarely the result of an in office marketing event so if you’ve prepared your patients and team, they’ll have the time to promote it in the office and online.

#3 Be Enthusiastic

Now that you’ve planned your project and you’ve asked your staff to help promote it, it’s time to lead the team in enthusiasm! There’s no better example than for you to be the biggest proponent of the event’s success. You don’t necessarily have to dress up, show pictures of yourself in costume 20 years ago or show off pictures of your kids, but it helps. Consider every option and think through what’s going to motivate your team to get on board. Sometimes it’s easier to follow than lead and if you understand that early on, you can set the bar high for others to take charge in the future.

#4 Be Charitable

There are Halloween opportunities to help out your community as well as national not-for-profit campaigns. Either way, combining the fun in your office with a good cause is a powerful way to get your brand noticed.

Many of our clients at BuzzyDoc are choosing to link up with Operation Gratitude to throw a different spin on collecting candy on Halloween. You can read more about the program by clicking through the above link but in summary, it’s a program where each of your patients brings in their candy so you can “buy it back” per every pound they bring in, then send it to soldiers in the US military. Some of our clients are offering 50 points per pound (which equals $1 in their rewards programs) or more if they are really trying to create a buzz.

Quick tips

  • What are you paying per pound? Or are you giving points per pound? We recommend giving at least $1 per pound, or 50 points per pound.
  • Is there a limit to how much you can bring?I would recommend making as big of a splash with this contest as possible. What’s the worst thing that could happen, you send too much food to the charity? 🙂
  • Can non-patients bring in candy?It’s really up to you…if you think you can pull in patients’ friends, especially with their moms, into your practice, then I would say yes!
  • Where are you donating the candy? Operation Gratitude

#5 Take Pictures

No matter what you do, you should use it as an opportunity to show off how fun your practice is. To give you a non-doctor related example, some of the members of our team at BuzzyDoc have recently joined a CrossFit gym. We weren’t sure what we were going to do before we started searching for opportunities online yet when one of us found pictures of a CrossFit gym nearby, we were sold on how fun and team-oriented the groups were that were already participating there. Pictures can say 1,000 words, but if you can back it up and show how fun your practice is when the patients get there like the CrossFit gym did for us on our trial session, you could see a whole new level of success in your office.

In Conclusion

You can’t mess this up! Any effort is better than none and I guarantee that your ideas mixed with your local flair is better than any automated system we could create for you. Your patients must already love you if they chose you as their doctor’s office so why not let them show how much by giving them an opportunity to participate?