The Best Way to Trunk-or-Treat
Trunk-or-Treats have traditionally been a part of car dealerships’ go-to fall festive events. They help to bring in new foot traffic, connect the dealer with the local community, and aid in gaining new customers.
Keep in mind that we are entering cold and flu season, plus the Coronavirus isn’t going away anytime soon, so car dealers must adapt their fan-favorite events to an enjoyable, family-friendly, and comfortable space for the whole community.
New Ideas for a New Normal
Since the onset of the COVID Pandemic in 2020, we’ve entered a new ‘normal’ regarding social events and interactions. However, now that we’re more or less in the post-pandemic stages, most outdoor events are basically worry-free for the general public. Still, you’ll want to add some concessions to help create a little personal space and to help keep those germs from spreading.
With that in mind, we’ve found a few easy updates and ideas you can utilize to make your trunk-or-treat event incredibly fun, fantastically festive, and super inviting for trick-or-treaters and Halloweeners of all ages.
Create a Variety of Spooky Experiences with Festive Decor
There are so many ways to create exciting, immersive, and even slightly spooky trunk themes for your event. Get creative and switch it up to offer an extra-fun variety of experiences for all of your attendees. We recommend keeping it on the lighter side, though, to avoid getting too scary and frightening the little ones.
Here are a few of our favorite examples:
To create a more predictable and orderly event, you can also turn your lot or showroom into a mystery tour! Caution tape is available online and is an easy way to section off the trunk-or-treat route within the lot, but still, have fun with it!
PartyCity.com even has a full crime scene kit that will allow you to make it perfectly clear where to walk. You can even add clues for your trick-or-treaters to find along the way and have them solve a mystery for a prize!
Know Your Target Audience
Do you want to know who goes to trunk-or-treat events? They’re largely parents and grandparents of small children.
Why? Well, that’s easy.
Trunk-or-treating is a simple, hassle-free way for parents to offer a fun Halloween experience for their toddler or young elementary schooler.
Plus, most parents will go out of their way to avoid dragging their little kids up and down every street in the neighborhood on a potentially chilly late-October evening.
Once you have them there, keep them around for a while if possible. Utilize those spacious, family-friendly trunks of your new or pre-owned minivans and SUVs, and invite parents to tour each one along the way.
Engage Your Crowd
Offer complimentary coffee and water for the adults, hot chocolate and juice boxes for the kiddos, and some simple Halloween-themed snacks or even hot dogs to keep their bellies warm and full.
You can also set up some fun Halloween music to enjoy and invite your attendees to stick around for some simple yet fun Halloween-themed games or activities to take place throughout the evening. Add some basic prizes to hand out to participants and keep the little ones excited and happy.
As we know, happy kids mean happy parents.
If you can achieve that result, you’ll make your annual trunk-or-treat an event that families can look forward to attending each year.
Get the Whole Community Involved!
Unfortunately, many car dealers have a little extra available space on the lot these days – at least for now, anyway! Why not take advantage of it?
Your Trunk-or-Treat Event is a perfect opportunity to invite some local businesses and organizations to come set up and join in on the fun. You can also reach out to a few popular food trucks to help fill the crowd.
This will provide more incentive for people to attend and also give them more to do and experience while they’re at your dealership.
Spread the Word!
Halloween is a fun time for adults and children to be creative, use their imaginations, and explore local neighborhoods. If your dealership does plan to host a trunk-or-treat event, we highly recommend that you make sure all of the relevant details are hosted on your dealership’s website and promoted on social media in advance.
Create a landing page on your website with all your event details and create Facebook and Instagram posts that lead back to this landing page.
Remember, even though trunk-or-treat events are a one-day occurrence, this online traffic can be retargeted with your digital marketing in the future, and you can begin to build a rapport with new prospects.
You’ll want to keep the landing page around so you can make updates as you prepare to promote it again each Halloween season.
You can also utilize social media posting to tag any local businesses or vendors involved to gain more eyes on your event. This is also another way to make it easy for your customer to find your event online as they plan their Halloween evening.
Have fun and stay spooky!
Trunk-or-Treat Example Sources
Jurassic Park | Candy Land | Unicorn | Hogwarts | Candy Mouth