How to Master Your Q4 Marketing Strategy

Q4 can be an overwhelming experience for business owners, marketing teams. The stakes can be incredibly high with the holiday season, peak gifting, and of course the rise in consumer activity. So today what I want to do is actually walk you through a bit of a structured roadmap for effectively managing your marketing strategies during what is a really critical period. From leveraging and building an audience in preparation for holidays like Black Friday, to optimising ad costs and focusing your metrics on reach and sales, and ultimately driving conversions and revenue, I’ll offer you some actionable insights to alleviate the stress and to set your business up for hopefully a solid end of the calendar year.

Hi, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is really designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing and help to challenge you to move away from random acts of marketing towards planning intentional marketing strategies.

And here we go. We’re entering the fourth quarter of the year, which can sometimes be a really challenging time of year for business owners and for marketers and marketing teams as well. Obviously, Q4 can be intensely busy period for e-commerce and retail clients of ours. However, I find as well that it’s also just as busy for other businesses in our key service-based industries as well. They enter peak gifting season, holiday festivities, which affects all sectors, not traditionally tied to holiday sales as well.

So staff and team are looking and booking in annual leave during that time. Clients and customers, they have that “before Christmas” deadline as well, which always boggles me when people have “before Christmas”, like Christmas has got this thing that they need to get done by that actual date. So it does require a bit of careful resource management from a business side as well. And from a marketing side, there are some key events that we have to navigate as well, which include things like Black Friday, there’s Christmas sales, Boxing Day as well. These are all key things that you need to be thinking about and preparing for.

And we understand that this quarter can be really stressful for our clients as well. And their expectations of their marketing is obviously much higher during this period. They’re trying to squeeze out every piece of revenue out of this quarter to finish off that calendar year nice and strong, and hopefully allow them to take a bit of a break over the Christmas period as well.

So in today’s podcast, what I wanted to do was share some of my thinking around the stressful period of time, a time that offers us as an agency an opportunity to really be that stable, reliable partner for our clients in what can be a stressful, high-pressure time of the year as well. So to do this, what we do is we focus on following the core strategy that we set up with clients, however, also enabling them to make agile decisions to ensure a strong end of year. So it really does go back to having that core strategy first and foremost, and having that to be able to rely on, but also to be able to fall back on when you do need to be a little bit agile as well.

And this last month especially, the conversation, a core part of conversations that we’re having with clients, has been around preparing for Black Friday. Black Friday in particular is one of those big sale periods now that is getting more and more popular, and retailers and e-commerce businesses are using that as one of the cornerstones of when that holiday season really does kick off. It really seems to start the peak trading season, and offers that real crucial window of opportunity for businesses to really try and boost sales. And it also sets a tone for the entire holiday shopping season as well.

And the big learning I want to get across today is that the preparation for Q4 actually begins yesterday. And I know that’s scary, because if you haven’t thought about your Black Friday or your Q4 just yet, then don’t worry, there’s still time for you to start thinking about it and still making preparations and planning for that. But by October, it is a crucial time to actually implement processes that increase your reach, ensuring that now is the time that you are being seen by your prospective customers, and starting to build trust and engagement with your core audience.

So I’m going to delve into this a little bit more and explain why I think this is the case, and why you should be thinking about your Q4 and your Black Friday sales yesterday, and why that should be at the forefront of what you’re thinking about right now. And the first thing is thinking about our paid reach. So here’s a summary on what I’d suggest you need to be thinking about right now. The focus, again, is that from September, so from now all the way through to November, you should be thinking about how you can expand your social media audiences from a paid perspective. Now, why do I say this?

I say it because the organic reach in social media platforms is likely to get really saturated during the peak season. And this means that it’s going to make it so much more important for you to be able to build your engaged community beforehand, as in right now. So you need to be building that engagement, building that community, getting seen in front of more customers, like, right now. Then, as we move into the peak season, around that Black Friday time at the end of November, your content strategy should then shift towards more of a direct response type, which will help drive conversions.

So let’s break that down a little bit more strategically. What I’d be suggesting you’re doing now is accounting and thinking about that eventually there is going to be a rise in advertising costs, especially in terms of CPM, which is essentially how many people your brand can be exposed to. So obviously, during peak season, advertising costs rise. We know that. We can see that from past years, and that just makes complete sense. The more advertisers that are trying to advertise during that time, that means it drives up advertising costs.

But those ad costs haven’t risen just yet. So now is the time that you actually need to be cashing in. You need to utilise the lower ad costs that are available to you right now in September and October by running reach-optimised campaigns right now. So this is where your marketing strategy comes into play, as you’ll still need a reach campaign, but it needs to be reaching your ideal core audience. That core audience isn’t going to change just because you’re planning a Black Friday sale.

So just because you’ve got a Black Friday sale coming up doesn’t mean that suddenly you need more people to see your product. You still need your core people to see your product, but you want to get them involved in your community, having a look at your brand, having a look at your offering now, so that by the time it comes to the deals that you have for Black Friday, that it’s a no-brainer that they want to purchase and buy from you.

So you want to be seen by those people, and then you want to share your product, share your authority, share your place in the market with these people, with this cold audience. And we do this because, remember, the real power of advertising online will come down to your remarketing. And we’ve spoken about this lots on previous podcasts. Reaching the audience of people in a remarketing campaign, the people who are already familiar with your brand, they know your product or your service, and they know what you sell, they are so much more likely to buy.

So this then means that you can refocus in Q4 to actually driving conversions, and not just Q4, but around those sale periods, around Black Friday. It means you can refocus to driving conversions to that remarketing audience, because you’ve done all the hard work of reaching your core audience, all that hard work’s already been done, and you’ve been able to do it at a much cheaper rate.

So in summary, you need to be thinking now about the pre-peak period, September, October, right now. Focus on reach while that pre-peak period is still cheap, and emphasise trying to be seen by as much of your core audience as possible. And then, in the peak period, we then want to emphasise conversion activities, facilitated by that audience that you’ve already built, and you’re building, and using the data that you’ve already got.

So this is the key as well, is utilising the data of those people that you’ve already reached. And we know, traditionally, that remarketing campaigns are obviously much more cost-effective, because you’re only really reaching the people that have interacted with your brand. Maybe they’re on your email list, maybe they viewed some of your videos, or anything like that.

So that then begs the question about the type of content that we should be focusing on, both now and during that peak period. Content that naturally will increase your reach and help you to build an audience is what you need to be focusing on now. This is thinking of things like reels, like videos, they should be your priority.

Because I’m reminded, again, from another previous podcast episode, that building a strategy that focuses on building on-platform audiences are actually real powerful, as they don’t fall into any of the privacy and cookie traps that you read all over the place. So just to break that down a little bit, when you’re building an audience of on-platform people, it means that people that are watching your Facebook ads or your Instagram reels, or they are opening your lead form on LinkedIn. Those are on-platform audiences, and they don’t fall into any of the privacy issues that you may see and the cookie issues that you may read about, because it’s all activity that people are taking on your account, on your content, on Meta, on Facebook, on Instagram.

So what I suggest you do is focus on building the audience of people that watch your videos, that interact with your content, that open your lead forms as well. And creatively speaking, you should be using this pre-peak period, now, to test various content pieces. You don’t want to be testing your creative during a Black Friday sale. You want to be optimising your content during the Black Friday sale, and you want to be testing what’s working now.

So right now, have a bit of a focus on trialling different pieces of content. What’s working well with your audience, with your core audience? What are they resonating with? Do they like carousels, reels, videos, Instagram stories? What captions and copy are effective? What’s helping drive engagement and communication and driving video views? Really start to think about how you can build that community over time. And then, by peak season, the focus, again, should just be optimising what you already know has been working.

And now is the time to consider building unique landing pages for your pre-peak campaigns. So this is landing pages on your website. And this can work as a bit of a two-fold strategy. One, it’s going to allow you to actually cultivate unique audiences of people who are interested in a particular product or service, so then you can really remarket direct on that product.

So let’s say you’re working for a baby store and you focus just on strollers, and you drive a lot of people to a stroller page. Then you know you want to remarket all your stroller campaigns direct to that audience once the Black Friday sales hit. And these audiences can then be leveraged during those peak campaigns, and at a cheaper rate, because you’re using your existing audience that you built during a time where advertising costs were lower. It also allows you to actually measure the impact of your landing pages much more effectively if you’re testing and playing with your landing pages now.

And then the other big question that we get faced a lot is around budgets. How do we budget for something like Q4, Black Friday, Christmas, Boxing Day? How do you budget for any of those type of campaigns? And to be honest, it can be really difficult to answer, as it does differ from client to client, product to product. Each industry is different. We have a look at budgeting based on different metrics that Meta and Google actually provide from data available to them. And then we put that alongside some of the knowledge of your product and your costing and your margins, your return on investment that you’re looking for as well.

So, a blanket rule for budgets: I’d suggest you have a bit of a look at your year-on-year trends. Take a look at what you spent last year. What type of return on investment did you get? Then I would be thinking about how you can adjust your strategy to ensure that you are always searching for and looking for more cost-effective ways and times to actually build your audience when the cost of an ad is lower, as in now and over the next month. So that’s what I’d be thinking about. Looking at budget, but then thinking about how can I actually utilise that budget more cost-effectively? Stretch it out a little bit more and start some of that Black Friday building of an audience, as in right now.

Because we always know that reaching a cold audience, reaching people that don’t know anything about your brand, your product, your service, is always going to be much more expensive. So you don’t want to go looking for those people when, naturally, ad costs are going to be higher and much more saturated as well. You think about the amount of people that are going to be advertising their products and services and businesses over that Black Friday period.

So you want to try to get in early. Let’s get in early now and start thinking about how you can get your product seen in front of people now, so that then by the time the Black Friday sales come along, you’ve already embedded the idea of your product in their head, and they’re just waiting to see what kind of deals you’ve got. And they’re going to, obviously, help drive up your conversions as well.

And the remarketing audiences that we built earlier, they’re always going to be more cost-effective, as they’re reaching a smaller audience. A small audience of people who are aware of your brand, your product and service. They’re more likely to buy at the end of the day. And it means also that you might be able to get them to buy more, which is obviously one of the keys as well. And it means that you can actually increase the frequency that people are actually seeing your ads, because they’re in a much smaller ad set in your marketing, in your targeting.

So one of the big cornerstones, I honestly think, of a successful strategy of this time of year is a bit of agility. So consumer behaviour is unpredictable. Also, competitive behaviour can be unpredictable. Black Friday, it may have a particular date, but that doesn’t mean that people come out with Christmas sales in bloody October or November. You see that all the time as well, where Easter eggs pretty much are on the shelves in November. We need to remain agile so that we can make quick, informed decisions to our marketing strategy. Just remember not to go off the rails completely.

Again, this is why having a thoughtful, well-laid-out marketing strategy will keep you on track, even when life and hopefully sales gets really busy for you as well, because it is really vital for you to find and agree on metrics and goals, so that it’s really clear about what you’re trying to target, so that you can remain agile, you can change your tactics slightly, but you’re going to be still clear on what you’re trying to achieve at the end of the day.

So just because another brand has done something or consumer behaviour has changed, will that ultimately affect the goals and the metrics that you’re searching for at the end of the day? And this isn’t just looking at goals and metrics of individual channel metrics. I’d be thinking about how you can consider the overall impact you can expect your marketing to have over the Q4 period.

Are you looking to drive a certain percentage of overall site traffic, or contribute a specific amount to revenue from paid marketing, from your paid Facebook campaigns and Instagram campaigns? Or what role is organic social media going to play in this? What are some of the underlying measures for success in some of these early days that we’re talking about? Reach? Are we trying to get people engaged with our videos? What are some of those success metrics that we’re looking at there?

Because Q4 serves as the catalyst, peak trading season for many businesses. Both retail and service-based businesses are now going to face that “before Christmas” deadline that a lot of consumers are demanding. So right now, you need to start planning and optimising your marketing strategy, leveraging cheaper advertising rates, as in right now. Focus on building your engagement, attract new potential customers with brand-building content that then allows you to change tack and focus on conversions during the sale periods, and then utilise the audience you have already previously built when ad spends were cheaper and the market was less saturated.

Hopefully that’s given you a few thoughts about why you should be planning out your Q4 strategy now and implementing that as soon as possible. And it all does start with a strategy. And obviously, I’ve thrown in a lot of different ideas and content in this podcast. And look, the best way to actually do this and to make improvements is to start with that strong strategy, which is, of course, something that we do at the core of what we do here at Done By Nine, is building out marketing strategies, helping you to identify those customer personas, planning those tactics, formulating the plan on how you’re going to execute those tactics, setting those goals and those measurements, the budgets, all those different things.

So if you do need a bit of a hand in having a look at that, obviously, you can reach out to me or the team across at our website, donebynine.com. If you’re interested in learning more about some of the articles and podcasts that we’ve released over the year, you’re more than welcome to go to donebynine.com/podcast, and you get all the other pieces of content that we’ve shared previously as well. And look, if you’ve got a few questions about what we discussed here as well, you’re more than welcome to email me, jordan@donebynine.com.

And hopefully you found this podcast helpful, and you’re planning your Q4 for a strong end of the calendar year. And all the best with your Black Friday Christmas sales. And we’ll see you next week on the Marketing Mindset podcast.