With children unable to take part in trick or treating this Halloween, why not lift their spirits by theming your shop and putting on a few activities? After all, Halloween is on a Saturday this year and with very little spend, you can still make this year’s event special for children while encouraging footfall to your shop at the same time.

We’ve put together a few ideas here to get you started:

– Run a Halloween colouring competition. There are plenty of free templates online – we’ve found this fish-themed one that you can easily add your logo to and then upload to your social media page for customers to print out at home and colour in if you’d rather not hand them out in your shop. Customers can upload photos of their masterpieces to your social media sites and the winning child receives a prize, a £10 voucher for a local toy store, for example.

– Encourage children to come in and tell you a scary joke and if they can make you laugh, they win a prize – glow sticks are relatively cheap and make great Halloween gifts.

– Rather than have a bowl of sweets for children to help themselves to, hand out individually wrapped sweets to those children that come in in fancy dress.

– With lots of families deciding to stay in for the night and putting on a scary film, why not put together a Halloween family fright night feast meal? Two portions of fish and chips, two kids meals, some sides and a drink for a set price. You could even offer a discount for customers eating earlier in the evening to help space out orders. 

– Run a competition asking customers to share photos of their spooky family meals on social media and offer prizes for the best ones. 

– To bring in the families, why not offer a kids eat free promotion when accompanied by a paying adult for any children coming in in fancy dress?

Team up with other local businesses to all carve a pumpkin each and create a pumpkin trail for children to look out for and follow.