How Early Should You Start Planning Your Q4 Marketing Campaigns?

We know it might feel a little early to be talking about Christmas marketing. But if you’re working in an in-house marketing team, now is probably exactly the time you should be thinking about your Q4 marketing campaigns.

The final few months of the year have a habit of disappearing very quickly. There’s the usual day-to-day marketing activity to keep on top of, alongside campaigns, events, internal requests and everything else that comes up towards the year end. Then suddenly you’re looking at the calendar and wondering how you’re going to get everything done before Christmas.

This is why it pays to start thinking about your Q4 marketing campaigns earlier than you might expect.

When should you start planning your Q4 marketing?

There’s no magic date for starting your Q4 marketing planning, but 8-12 weeks before a campaign goes live is a good starting point.

And if you’re planning something bigger, it’s worth giving yourself even more time.

A campaign might look fairly straightforward from the outside, but there’s usually a lot that needs to happen before it can go live. You need to agree on what you’re trying to achieve, work out who you’re talking to, develop the idea, create the content and creative, get everything approved and then actually get it out into the world.

That can take longer than expected alongside day to day tasks, particularly when everyone involved has their own priorities.

Starting early gives you a bit of breathing room and it means you can make decisions when you have time to think, rather than because a deadline is getting closer and closer.

It also gives you time to step back and make sure the campaign fits into your wider marketing strategy, rather than becoming another standalone piece of activity.

Christmas marketing shouldn't be an afterthought

Christmas campaigns are often left until quite late in the year. It’s understandable since there are plenty of other things to focus on, and Christmas can seem a long way off when you’re sat in the middle of September.

But by the time November comes around, you’re competing with everyone else for attention. You’re also trying to get content approved, creative produced and campaigns live at a time when businesses are getting increasingly busy.

For B2B marketing teams in particular, there can be a temptation to keep Christmas marketing fairly simple, and while there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s what your audience needs, it’s worth thinking about whether there’s more you could be doing with the final few months of the year.

Could you use the period to share something useful with your audience?

Is there a particular product or service you want to put more focus on?

Could you create a piece of content that helps your customers plan for the year ahead?

It doesn’t have to be a big Christmas campaign just for the sake of having one.

We’ve previously looked at whether B2B Christmas marketing actually matters, and the short answer is yes. The approach might be different to a consumer Christmas campaign, but there are still opportunities to connect with your audience and set yourself up for the new year.

Look at the whole of Q4, not just Christmas

Before getting caught up in Christmas content, look at everything you already know is happening between October and December, because Christmas is only one part of Q4.

Are there any product launches? Industry events? Important dates? Sales activity? Reports or publications? Anything your sales team needs support with?

Once you have all of this in one place, you can start to see where your marketing activity fits together.

This is often where a bit of forward planning makes life much easier for internal teams. Instead of creating a new idea every time you need something to post or send, you can build a campaign around a central idea and use it across different channels.

That way you’re getting more from the work you’re already doing, rather than constantly starting from scratch.

It’s also worth thinking about how your website, content, social media, email and paid activity can support one another rather than planning each one separately. We’ve written more about this in Why an Integrated Marketing Strategy Beats One-Off Campaigns.

Give your creative time to do its job

Another reason to start early is that creative work takes time.

If your Q4 campaign needs new design, animation, video, photography, a landing page or printed materials, you don’t want to be starting that conversation a couple of weeks before you need everything.

There will be ideas to develop, copy to write, designs to review and amends to make. And, inevitably, someone will be on annual leave at some point.

Giving your creative team more time makes the whole process less stressful and usually results in better work too, as you have time to consider different ideas rather than going with the first one that will meet the deadline.

Whether you need content marketing, campaign creative, digital support or something more specialist, having the time to properly develop the idea makes a difference.

For in-house teams, this can also be a good point in the year to look at where you might need some extra support. If you know your team has a busy Q4 ahead, bringing in an agency or freelance support early can help take some of the pressure off.

At Monitor, we regularly work alongside in-house marketing teams, providing extra strategy, creative and digital resource when they need it. Our digital marketing team can support everything from content and SEO to campaign execution, while our wider creative team can help with the design and production side too.

Don't forget about January

There’s also a useful opportunity in planning your Q4 marketing early: you can start thinking about Q1 at the same time.

The work you do in the final few months of the year doesn’t have to stop working on January 1st.

For example, if you’re planning to launch a particular service in January, maybe there are questions your customers are likely to have at the start of the year that you can start answering now.

You can also use Q4 to look back at what has worked during the year.

Which campaigns generated enquiries? Which content actually got people engaging? Where did your website traffic come from? And, perhaps most importantly, what didn’t work?

Those insights can help shape your marketing plans for the year ahead too.

If your website is going to play a bigger role in your Q1 plans, this is also a good time to make sure it’s ready. Whether that means creating new landing pages, improving existing content or making changes to support SEO and conversions, website planning and development can take longer than you might expect.

Start with what you actually want to achieve

One of the easiest ways for Q4 marketing to become a list of disconnected activities is to start with the channels.

Instead, start with what you want the marketing to achieve.

If you need to generate more enquiries for a particular service, build the campaign around that. If your priority is staying in front of existing customers, your approach will probably look quite different.

Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, it becomes much easier to decide what you actually need to create.

And it might turn out that you don’t need a huge Christmas campaign at all.

This is something we see quite often. Marketing teams can end up trying to keep every channel busy, when a more focused approach would probably have a bigger impact. Start with the objective, then work out what needs to happen to achieve it.

So, how early is early enough?

If you have a Q4 campaign in mind, start planning it now rather than waiting for the quarter to arrive.

You don’t need every social post written and scheduled months in advance. You don’t even need the finished campaign concept straight away.

Start with:

What does the business need from marketing for the rest of the year?

What are the important dates?

What campaigns or projects are coming up?

What will need creative support?

What do you want to carry into January?

Getting those conversations started early can make the difference between a busy Q4 and a chaotic one.

And if you already know your team is going to be stretched, it’s worth having the conversation about additional support sooner rather than later.

Need some extra resource for your Q4 marketing? Get in touch with the Monitor team and let’s talk about what you’ve got planned.