Community Brand: Royal Oak Halloween Home Tour

The Royal Oak Halloween Home Tour is a free, self-guided tour of the best decorated Halloween homes in Royal Oak, Michigan. I started it in 2020, I run it on my own, and I pay for it out of my own pocket.

How it started
My daughter loves Halloween, and I kept seeing great houses posted in local Facebook groups with no easy way to find them all. I started saving addresses so I could take my family around town, and eventually I put them on a Google Map. That first year had 21 homes. I still find most of the homes myself by driving the city section by section, and friends text me when they spot a good one.

The challenge
There is no sponsor and no ad budget, and this year I am between jobs, so every dollar had to earn its place. Each season my goal is to reach more people and make the tour easier to use without paying for either one.

What I did
In the early years I noticed people were still landing on the previous year's map because I had never shut it down. Now I lock each old map at the end of the season so all of the traffic goes to the current one.

In 2023 I sent the map to the Royal Oak Schools superintendent, and the district added it to its weekly family email. Map views went from 18,221 in 2022 to 44,668 in 2023. I also started posting more deliberately in local community groups, which worked, and I pitched local influencers, which did not.

For 2026 I renamed the project from the Home Map to the Home Tour and built one visual identity that carries across a new Facebook page, a Google Site built for search, yard signs, and door postcards. To keep printing costs down, I saved old yard signs and designed wrappers for them, which gave me two signs for every one I printed. When I add a house, I leave a postcard in the door so the owners know they are on the tour, where to follow along, and how to reach me if they would rather be removed.

I also used AI to save time. I split the city into five sections and built a Google Maps driving route for each one, so visitors can tap a link and go house to house, and I used AI tools to edit the home videos I shot for social.

Results as of October 26, 2026
The tour has grown from 21 homes in 2020 to more than 80 this year, and the 2026 map has 33,680 views with Halloween week still to come. The Facebook page launched on October 1 and in less than four weeks it has reached more than 162,000 people, earned nearly 700,000 views, and gained over 2,200 followers, all without spending a dollar on ads. Reels made up 15 of my 51 posts but drove more than half of all shares. My total spend for the season was $76. WXYZ Channel 7 reached out to run a story on the tour, and the Royal Oak Review covered it in print.

What I took from it
The biggest jump in views came from getting the map into a channel families already read every week, which taught me that distribution can matter more than how much you post. I also learned that the operations side counts as much as the creative. Fixing where the traffic went did as much for the numbers as anything I designed.