How Are Your Q4 Targets Shaping Up?

Are you clear on your Q4 targets?

If not, then now’s the time to start thinking about what those big goals are…. and how to get on track to hit them.

Crazy and frustrating as it can be, if you are a product business that counts on a healthy Q4 to hit your annual targets, it’s a year-round job to be sure you’re maximising that final quarter.

We talk to plenty of business owners who feel beaten and jaded by the annual bun fight to win e-commerce sales in November and December. It certainly can be brutal out there, and ads costs can soar, but the opportunities are immense. With a year-round strategy that always keeps one eye on the end of the year, Q4 marketing doesn’t need to feel like a rollercoaster.

As we head into Q2, what should you already have your eye on for your Q4 ads campaigns:

Understand Your Audience

As far as you can, analyse your buyer’s demographics and identify their pain points and motivation to buy from you. Back to basics, review your personas and test ads and copy designed to resonate specifically with them. If Shopify can’t pull the demographics you want, your ads platform perhaps can. Poke through the data and get clear on who your customers actually are. This isn’t to say you can’t grow new audiences, but the chances are there’s lots more opportunity where you’re already at. Getting clear now on who you are talking to and what messaging works will oil the cogs for later in the year.

Add a Lead Campaign 

There’s no doubt about it, ads are more expensive in Q4, but the warmer the audience you bring to those campaigns, the cheaper they’ll be to convert. Adding a low-budget lead campaign to build your email lists now, will give you some ripe audiences for conversions come November/December. 

Review Your Klaviyo

Are your email campaigns in good order? These audiences are going to be a huge support for your Q4 campaigns, so they need to be nurtured through engaging, relevant content through the whole year. In the busy, busy ads space shoppers will lean towards brands they’ve already built trust with.

Plan Your Offers

No, you don’t need to nail down your Black Friday offer in March. However, it’s really helpful to map out the offers you’re going to run in Q2 and/or Q3 with a view to building audiences for Q4. It will depend on your overall objective, but if, for example, you want to build one or two time purchasers to go in with a longer term loyalty offer for Q4, planning something enticing in for May or June and September should prime your audience for the big one. Getting the offers planned well ahead of time means you can absolutely get the maximum out of them on all channels (organic socials, YouTube, email, ads etc).

Optimise Your Landing Pages and Customer Journey

E-comm’s 101! It’s clearly important all year, but as the stakes rise towards the end of the year you don’t want to be testing anything new. Be on-brand, but highly functional, and look at where your conversions come in… the chances are more than half of your sales are coming through mobile, so make sure that’s the priority.

Creative, Creative, Creative

If we had to identify one element of ads that trumped all others in importance, it would be ad creative. Again, testing ad creative should be an ongoing process, but to get the full bang for your Q4 buck, come October, you want to be switching off all testing and only be running your highest-performing content. Using the rest of the year to finely hone what works saves you using pricier Q4 campaigns unnecessarily.

Half the job of creating successful Q4 campaigns is being clear, ahead of time, of what you want, and understanding what you need in place to achieve that. If you’d like to talk through your Q4 campaigns, feel free to book in for a free 30 minute discovery call with us.