How to Prepare Your Q4 Marketing Strategy

Whether your company relies on the holiday season and the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) shopping weekend for increased revenue and growth or not, Q4 is a critical time of year for any organization. The last three months of the year are crucial for:

Helping your business to reach the goals you set at the beginning of the year
Setting your marketing on autopilot during a typically busy time of year
Being intentional with your marketing strategy for the new year

As you begin to prepare for this last leg of the year within your company, don’t leave these components of your marketing strategy behind.

Components of a Q4 Marketing Strategy

Website

First and foremost: is your website functioning properly? Nothing will make a website visitor leave your website quicker than:

Slow loading times
Broken links
Difficult-to-navigate pages
E-commerce errors

Go through every single page, blog post, and area of your website to double check that everything is operating as it should be. Additionally, having a mobile-friendly website in this day and age is non-negotiable, as Oberlo notes that nearly 52% of all global website traffic comes from mobile devices. When someone visits your website, they should have a seamless experience that makes it easy for them to find what they need, when they need it.

It may also be time for you to update your website. That can include:

Tweaking the copy to attract the right target audience
Adding new case studies or testimonials
Swapping out your calls-to-actions (CTAs)

With all the traffic that is likely to come to your website during this busy time of year, you’ll want to ensure that you’re capturing and retaining all of it.

Social Media

How do you feel about all of the social media content you have planned throughout the next few months? If you’re currently flying by the seat of your pants when it comes to writing your social media posts and don’t have anything in the queue, this is your sign to batch write as much content as possible. Not only will this help you to take advantage of all of the engagement that will be happening online but it will also ensure content is still being published consistently when things get really busy and you may not have time to plan posts as you go.

Additionally, use this time to take a deep dive into your analytics to see what’s been performing well throughout the past nine months. This will give you ideas of content you can create moving forward, based on what gets the most traction.

Email Marketing

Is your company sending newsletters to your email list at least monthly, if not more? With several exciting updates and changes that typically happen during Q4 in preparation for the end of one year and the start of another, it’s important to keep your subscribers informed of it all. Consider including the following:

New blog posts
Latest press features
Company updates
Tips
Service / product promotion

You can even encourage your subscribers to share your newsletter with any of their contacts that they think might benefit from reading it.

Another component of your email marketing strategy to consider is your lead magnet. Ask yourself these questions:

How is our lead magnet performing?
Does the content within need to be updated?
Should we change to a new lead magnet entirely?

This may be a big project for you to implement in only a few months, but it could be a great task to add to your list for the start of the new year.

Lastly, don’t overlook the health of your list. How engaged are your subscribers? Is there anyone who hasn’t opened an email in quite some time? As with any metric in marketing, the quality of your subscribers is much more important than the quantity of your subscribers. Cleaning out your email list to remove inactive subscribers can improve your overall numbers.

Blog

If you’ve been reading our content for a while, then you’ll know that we believe that blogging is far from dead. Although it isn’t necessary to release a new blog every week (unless you’d like to, of course!), publishing a new blog post at least once per month is a great way to expand and nurture your online presence. Blogging is known to:

Improve SEO
Drive website traffic
Establish thought leadership
Keep visitors on your website

And more. Start by thinking about what your company’s goals are — whether it’s to grow your email list, book leads, establish partnerships, or something else — and then plan blog posts that will help you get closer to reaching those goals.

Additionally, if you don’t have the time or resources to generate new content, you can update and republish “old” blog posts that may have outdated information. This is especially helpful to do if the blog posts are generating a lot of traffic and could benefit from a fresh perspective or new data.

Public Relations (PR)

Does your company offer a product or service that can benefit an individual or another company in the new year? If so, now is the time to start pitching publications about what you offer and why it’s important so you have an increased opportunity of being featured in the press at the start of the new year. This will be strategic timing on your end, as you’ll want to ensure that you receive increased recognition during your best time of year.

Pitching the press also will give you more content to share on your website and social media, if you land any features.

Sales

If you really want to ramp things up during this time of year, take a look at your sales strategy. Ask yourself these questions about your tactics:

What does our company have planned for networking events in the coming months?
Should we consider cold outreach?
Are there other referral sources we can tap into?

Even if the leads you receive don’t convert right away, they may be more apt to invest in your product or service once the new year begins. This helps you to plant the seeds now so you can sow them later.

Investing in Your Company’s Marketing

Receiving a Specialized Strategy from a Marketing Agency

Does the thought of planning your company’s Q4 marketing strategy make you feel overwhelmed? Working with a marketing agency to develop and execute a customized, intentional marketing plan for your organization allows you to focus on those revenue-generating activities and what you do best.

Reach out to us for a free consultation to learn how we can execute your marketing strategy for you and support you in a variety of ways.