Q4 Marketing step-by-step guide
You may still be padding around a sunny backyard in flip flops, but it’s already time to prepare for Q4 - arguably the most important highly scrutinized quarter of the year.
While it can sometimes feel like the end of the year is a time to play it safe and cross your fingers your budget projections hold fast, it’s also a crucial time to connect with highly engaged audiences, ready to spend.
As you prepare to enter the busiest marketing period of the year, we’ve put together a sort of cheat sheet of some important dates, goals, and strategies that will help you and your team start the holiday season calmly, not chaotically 😉.
How to plan for Q4
First, make sure you and your team look back at campaign performances thus far. That means making the time to critically examine ROI by campaign, channel and creative, budget allocation fluctuations, competitor performance, emerging industry trends, and developments in acquisition channels.
It’s important to take this bird’s eye view before diving into specific strategies in order to avoid what the Harvard Business Review recently called a marketer tendency to “get bogged down in tactical experiments, such as whether customers like green or yellow, instead of testing the relevance of new offerings, innovations, or customer segments.”
Budgeting is key
As end-of-year budget reconciliation approaches and ROI by channel is increasingly scrutinized, it is especially important to measure tracking and attribution. If your current media partners are not giving you a complete enough picture of your overall performance, it’s still time to make a change. Be especially careful, when reviewing past results, that you are not being flooded with irrelevant data to hide the fact that performance is not where it should be.
The advertising world is grappling with new privacy regulations, signal loss, profound consumer behavior shifts, and emerging channels like CTV, so marketers need to watch increasing CPMs and unreliable data from walled gardens like Meta or Google very closely. Video is still king of the digital universe (with a 95% consumer retention rate vs 10% retention of printed content), but successful platforms, rates, and formats are shifting daily, so reevaluate often.
You would also do well to consider the current economic slowdown as an opportunity to tweak your end-of-year strategy. While some organizations will probably be slashing budgets, take a look at the areas that will yield the most immediate results and make a strong play for those while your competitors least expect it.
Financial upheaval is a great opportunity to refocus on performance spend, and push brand awareness campaigns into the next quarter. According to a recent E-Consultancy newsletter, the downturn might actually be a motivator to increase spend for some: “We’re likely to see some businesses aggressively increase their spend in an attempt to take advantage of the downturn and increase the gap with their competitors.”
Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment just because the fiscal year is coming to an end. If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that market conditions can change at the drop of a hat and you won’t be able to adjust if you’re not ready. While companies have been talking a big game about innovation and testing, only 47% of marketers in a recent IAB survey reported actually increasing investments in online experimentation and A/B testing. Don’t let that be you.
Meet your customers where they are
To keep it all straight, here’s a calendar of not-to-miss dates. Whether you’re advertising on linear or CTV (or both!), we humbly suggest you print it on the biggest piece of paper you can find and stare at it until the year mercifully comes to a close.
Whether streaming, cable, or broadcast, TV viewing notoriously peaks in cold weather: surging during the chilly first quarter of the year, tanking in the second quarter, staying low in the third, and picking up again in the fourth quarter. That means that while you may have been getting good results on mobile during the Summer, you definitely want to turn your attention back to TV in the Fall.
TV viewership surges in Q4 are a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, since distracted Summer audiences push networks and sports broadcasters to wait for Fall to launch premium series or sports seasons, but they also spend less time watching TV because Summer programming is notoriously uninteresting. The advent of on-demand video should have broken that paradigm - if I can watch whatever I want whenever I want, who cares what season it is? - but guess what, it didn’t! In fact, on-demand viewing has followed typical linear tv viewership patterns for the last three years.
This Fall, exciting NFL team trades (Broncos) and coach promotions (Raiders) will make the NFL playoffs especially exciting to watch, and long-awaited new shows like The Lord of the Rings or Interview with a Vampire and old favorites like the Bachelor franchise, Grey’s Anatomy, Atlanta, and Shark Tank, you can expect a large, engaged, and active audience for your television campaigns.
Fall and Winter are notoriously hectic seasons for B2C brands and the consumers they cater to. At this point, it’s old hat to complain about the break neck speed at which store displays change between September and December: “I can’t believe back to school displays are already replaced by Halloween candy!,” “I can’t believe there are turkey decorations everywhere already!”, “I’m not ready for Christmas/New Year’s!”, “I need to get rid of my Christmas tree before friends come over to watch the Big Game!”
How to dominate seasonal advertising in Q4
Football season
Football season, notorious for exorbitant upfront costs and inflexible scheduling has turned a new leaf with CTV apps like Sling and Fubo now offering consistently low pricing (when purchased through a mature DSP like Vibe) and campaign flexibility.
Early last year, the Super Bowl saw its traditional TV ratings take a dramatic plunge; however, according to CBS, the Big Game pulled in an average of 5.7 million streamers per minute, a surge of 68 percent when compared to 2020.
In fact, 74 percent of marketers report that buying CTV ads in conjunction with live sporting events can be more cost effective and impactful than classic sports sponsorships.
Over the last couple of years, with the surge of cord-cutting, mainstream sports audiences are switching platforms but maintaining their viewing habits: watching programs in one hour or longer stretches, with a second device in hand. That means they are more likely to see your ad and to act on it in a trackable way. We would call that a home run.
Need some stats before you make the big trade? Let’s check’em out:
According to the Future of TV report, 44% of sports watchers are consuming their favorite sports outside of linear TV, and that figure rises to 65% among adults ages 18-34.
According to multi-market Scarborough research from 2020-2021, the median household income of sports streamers was $92,100, and the linear sports viewers was $78,900. The higher income audience is attractive to many advertisers.
According to the Nielsen Sports Fan Insights Study in 2022, sports streamers are nearly 70% more likely to take action after seeing a brand during a live game.
Other findings from the report show that Live sports streamers run across all age segments, and are more likely to discover new products, remember ads, and make a purchase than traditional TV viewers.
Working with an agile CTV platform with premium channel partnerships now allows advertisers to take advantage of unexpected spikes in viewership for nail biters, overtime, or unpredictable game drama to create opportunities to reach highly engaged fans.
The flexible CTV format also affords marketers the opportunity to advertise in-game, outside of a traditional ad pod. Seeing the ad come up during the action is a very powerful opportunity for visibility.
Holiday Season - e-commerce and foot traffic
Much like football season, holiday marketing spend can be crazy expensive, which is why CTV’s flexible pricing model is more important for your team to consider than ever. As you develop your Q4 strategy, it will be especially important not to limit yourself to premium channels, and consider programmatic buys with a trusted DSP partner.
AVOD apps are gaining in popularity and inventory, leading Ad Exchanger to report that programmatic impressions increased by 80% from 2020 to 2021, comprising 23% of total transactions on digital video inventory. Brands can now access a breadth of inventory sources with a uniform targeting methodology.
Meanwhile, real-time reporting can help you develop flexible campaigns that will adapt to customers’ journeys as the holiday season progresses and you get feedback from brick and mortar and online outlets.
E-COMMERCE SPOTLIGHT
E-commerce habits have been in constant flux as they reflect the vagaries of a global pandemic, stimulus check spending, a potential recession, and who knows what else; but flux can be a good thing! Now is the time to jump in and do some experimenting before the mad holiday rush. It will be especially important to experiment this year, as walled garden e-commerce solutions lose their appeal (costs per sale last year went up 27%!)
Now is the time to try new e-commerce strategies like CTV. Research conducted by McKinsey and the IAB shows that 70% of Americans tried new shopping channels during the pandemic, and that 44% of younger consumers (millennials and Gen Z) experimented with new brands. Of those that tried new brands in the past year and a half, 84% said they plan to stick with the new brand.
FOOT TRAFFIC SPOTLIGHT
While television is still the best vehicle for brand awareness, CTV is also a powerful performance channel, so it can help boost your marketing mix way lower in the funnel than traditional TV. For example, zipcode and city targeting allows you to reach customers in and around your brick and mortar locations. You can then compare CTV ad exposure to foot traffic as proof of efficacy which is important before an end-of-quarter reckoning.
Creative that works
Make sure you keep that new performance goal in mind as you develop Q4 creative.
Every brand will be fighting for consumer engagement so you need to keep your message clear, concise, and impactful. Keep your logo on the screen at all times, repeat your CTA at the end of the video, tailor your message to the targets you can now zoom in on thanks to CTV tracking, focus on one core message per ad, and keep it short and sweet. Fifteen second ads typically perform best on CTV, so you’ll need to pack all of your awesome into one powerful little package.
Some examples
While the last quarter of the year can be a whirlwind of deadlines and dreaded budget reviews, don’t forget it’s also your biggest opportunity to shine. Experts agree on the clear benefits of new channels like CTV, but marketers aren’t taking full advantage of it yet and “those who target the right users with the right creative will likely cash in.” So don’t be afraid to be bold, try new channels, strategies, and creative choices, and make this your most successful quarter yet!
$500 Free Credit. Take Vibe on a test run!
1. Register (if not registered already)
2. Setup and launch your first campaign
3. Redeem your credits by sending "Q4 GUIDE" to support@vibe.co
4. As soon as you spend $500 on the platform, we'll credit you $500 free credits (edited)
* offer available until Sept 30th 2022
