Why You Should Plan Your Q4 Marketing in July

It's July, it's hot, and the last thing you want to think about is the holidays. But this is exactly the moment to plan your Q4, before back-to-school and fall sports fill up your calendar and the reactive, FOMO-driven decisions take over.

In this episode, Ruthie walks through a backwards planning framework for Q4, starting with your December 31st destination and working backwards through November and October to build the roadmap. She covers how to learn from last year's Q4, why the gift guide concept doesn't translate directly for service providers and what to do instead, how to make a calm decision about Black Friday before the FOMO hits, and how to map key dates and content runway against your real capacity.

Whether you sell a product or run a service-based business, this episode gives you a way to think about Q4 on purpose instead of scrambling into it in November.

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@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie (00:01.794)

Alright, so right now you've got some time to take a breath, right? And here's the thing, with everything going on around the fall and the holidays, it's like, what do they say? Ha Merry, happy Halloween, happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, all in one. There's like a meme about that that I'm butchering. But you know what I mean. Like once we hit back to school, it's like, well, the rest of the year is just freaking busy.

So planning right now on a summer afternoon is how you're gonna get ahead of that and making sure that you're not stepping into the holiday season, making reactive decisions out of FOMO instead of strategy. Because let me tell you, Black Friday promotions, the FOMO is real. Like you see your competitors doing something and then you're like, I should have done that. And then you think, like, I'll just throw something together really quick. And then you're up until midnight when

You don't want to be working on this in the first place. So we're gonna map this out together. You're gonna have a roadmap before we get to the craziness of the fall and the holidays. Now, I have taught this particular framework around Christmas in July for several years. This came from my background as a marketing director in retail and my long history in retail merchandising and retail management. But

Even if you are not a product-based business, this applies to you as well. It applies to service providers every single bit. And as we go, I'll kind of point out the two, well, the ways that the two might look different. So wherever you are, you'll know how to run this and plan ahead for your business. So when we think about Q4, we're gonna plan backwards. And you know I like to think about marketing strategy as a road trip. And the first rule of the road trip is that you start with the destination.

You don't get in the car and just start driving and like hope you end up somewhere good. Q4 planning is the same, but most people kind of run it in the wrong direction. They start in October, they look around at what everyone else is doing, and they start throwing tactics on their to-do list. A sale here, a post there, an email because it's been a while. And I want you to flip that. I want you to start with a real destination, which is the end of year and the sales you want to have by the end of the year and work backwards.

Ruthie (02:27.718)

So the question isn't what should I post in November? It's when you get to December 31st, what do you want to be true? Is there a revenue number that you want to hit by year end? Is there an offer you want to have sold a certain number of? Do you want your email list to have grown by a certain amount going into January? Do you want to end the year with a full pipeline so Q1 starts strong? Do you want to offer something new?

Do you want to reprice something either this year or next year? We're already starting to think about next year. But we're gonna get clear on the destination first. And then and only then do we map the route back through November and October to actually get there. That's the backwards planning. Destination first, route second. And everything we do today is gonna hang off of that one answer. So step one is actually to take a look back even before we look forward.

So before you plan this Q4, look at last Q4. And this is the step that a lot of people skip. And it's the one that I think makes your year or your this Q4 run smarter. You're not planning in a vacuum. You ran a fourth quarter last year and it is full of information if you go look. So pull up your calendar from last year, pull up your metrics. What was selling? How did we sell it? Were we running promotions? Was there a special offer or a campaign?

Where did your customers and your leads come from? Which channel brought them in? Should we double down on that channel? Or is there a new channel that we want to try to focus on and grow? What did email look like during the holidays? Was your audience opening? Were they clicking? Were they buying? Or was email just noise? And what promotions landed, or which ones did you maybe pour effort into that ultimately flopped? Been there, done that, let me tell you.

But did anything also come from referrals, collaborations, affiliates, or press that you could plan for on purpose this year? And ultimately, we want to think about the fact that any of those sources have a pretty long runway. So it's likely that even if they landed in your books in Q4, you planted those seeds back in Q2 or even Q3. And so for a service based business, this often looks a lot like asking which months booked well and where does your

Ruthie (04:52.77)

Best fit clients come from, and whether a year-end push even works for you in Q4, or whether your people are kind of checking out until January. You're looking for patterns. The things that worked are things that you can do again on purpose, earlier, or amplified. And the things that flopped are things that you can stop pouring energy into. Hindsight before foresight. And you'll plan a much better Q4 once you've learned from the last one.

So step number two, this is the section that I want you to hear the most, because this is where service businesses get often handed the wrong map. In the product and retail world, this step is all about the gift guide. And a gift guide is basically a blueprint of your hero products and how you talk about them through the holidays. It's the anchor for your whole holiday campaign. If you sell products, that applies. Like you should definitely have a gift guide.

You should pick your hero products and you should decide how you're presenting them. Who are they for? How are you packaging this? What does it look like? But if you're a service provider, make a gift guide seems like, well, why would I do that? So you have to do something a little bit more interesting, or we have to ask a few more questions. So you have to ask first, how does your offer fit into the gifting season at all? Because the answer shapes your plan.

If your ant offer is giftable, who is it giftable to? Is it something that someone would buy themselves, or would they buy it for someone else? Because the messaging is completely different. If it's a self-gift, you're speaking to the person who's had a long year, is ready to invest, is heading into a new year, kind of new energy, and the messaging is more like you've earned this. This is the year to stop doing XYZ.

And if it's something, if your service is something that one person could buy another, you're speaking to the gift giver. You know, really talking to that person about the problem they're trying to solve, which is find a gift for whomever your idle client is, right? So same offer, two different campaigns, depending upon who's buying and why. And you can run both of those, but you want to do it strategically, right?

Ruthie (07:15.65)

But what if your offer is not giftable at all? A lot of service offers aren't. And that's fine. And then you have to decide how are you handling November and December when a big chunk of your audience is in impulse purchase, holiday spending, gift giving mode. Well, maybe in November and December, you don't push your core offer in that window. Maybe you have a smaller, lower commitment that fits the season better.

Maybe you go quiet on selling entirely and use that time for something else, which we're gonna come back to in a few minutes. but the point is you decide on purpose instead of defaulting into a sales push that maybe doesn't match how your people are buying this time of year. So if your offer is maybe not giftable, maybe not something that she's gonna buy for herself, it's more of the like new year, new me energy.

And your offer, whatever it is that you sell, however you help people, it's a lot about a fresh start, a transformation, a new chapter, getting organized. Then the first half of December might not be your moment. People are not signing up for big personal growth commitments the week before Christmas. But maybe you don't fight for the impulse by attention in early December at all. Maybe your real season is late December into January.

When your audience is in resolution mode and fresh start energy. You plan your push there and you let the noisy first half of the holidays go by without forcing it. And knowing that ahead of time is honestly a gift to yourself. But here's the other thing about Q4. It's not just about selling. And this is an opportunity that I think gets missed a lot in marketing messaging. Fourth quarter does not have to be one long promotion.

There are real valuable things to plan content around that have nothing to do with a sale, such as Giving Thursday and philanthropy. If generosity and giving back are part of your brand, that deserves some planned content, not a scramble the night before you have the idea to post it tomorrow. And it doesn't have to be on Giving Tuesday. It could honestly be any time in November. That's a great time to talk about community and

Ruthie (09:36.153)

philanthropy and giving back or causes that you're involved with. The other thing that you could think about in Q4, if it's not all about sales and promotion, is client or customer gifting. What are you doing to thank the people who already trust you and pay you? Whether it's a planned gesture to the base you already have, or it's a way to say thank you and retain those clients.

That might be worth even more than chasing new sales. But you want to plan it now so it's thoughtful instead of rushed. And then finally, connection and community. Sometimes the strongest cue foreplay is showing up for your people and not selling to them. Think about some of the people in your network who maybe offer a solution or a product or a service that serves your ideal customer in a way that you don't.

Promoting that person is helpful for both your audience and your referral network and your relationships. So thinking about collaborations or even a gift guide, you could even do a like a service provider gift guide where you're sharing, you know, the things I'm gifting to myself as a whatever you are: real estate agent, travel agent, accountant, whatever. Or

Things I'd love to receive this holiday season or things I know my clients would love to receive this holiday season. And you do a fun curated gift guide around that. Now, that's not like a you have to do this, this you should do this. That's a if that sounds fun for you and it would serve your audience, it's a great way to create content in Q4 that creates relationships. Because at the end of the day, relationships lead to sales. So your takeaway here is that.

The product world hands you a gift guide and it has a clear job. You have a little bit more strategic work to do if you're a service provider in deciding how or whether your offer belongs in the gifting conversation is what your Q4 is kind of hinging upon, especially if it's not a sales sprint. And that's some more thinking. And that's the kind of thinking that I want you doing right now on a calm summer afternoon instead of in a panic in November.

Ruthie (11:50.617)

So we've thought about how our offer, our services, our products fit into Q4 in terms of gifting, but now we really want to think about Black Friday on purpose. Let me be transparent with you. As a service provider, I usually don't participate in Black Friday. And I want you to hear this clearly. You don't have to either. And you might decide that you're not gonna participate in it.

And then get FOMO and decide to jump in because that's what happens to me all the time. I think I don't need to do this. I don't need to do a Black Friday offer. And then I start seeing other people do it. A lot of people do it early November, or they'll do it the week before Black Friday. And I think, gosh, I should do that too. And then again, I'm like spending a bunch of time on mini launches or promotions or countdown timers that doesn't resonate with my audience anyway. It's a trap.

It's not a decision. The reactive spiral that hits you when you didn't make the decision firmly enough ahead of time is what leads to those panicked FOMO moments. So here's how I'm handling it going forward and what I would suggest you do as well. In a July planning session, like the one we're talking about right now, I plan a contingent offer or two. Something that I could run if I decide to.

I sketch it out so it exists in my brain and on paper, the bones of it, right? Whatever that offer might be, whether it's a special price, it's a bundle, it's early access, whatever it is. I sketch it out and then I wait until October to decide if I'm running it or not. That does two things. If I do decide to participate, I'm not building something from scratch in a panic.

And I've made the real decision calmly in advance. So when the FOMO hits in November, I can look around and go and say, nope, I've decided this back in July. I'm good. I don't have to reinvent the wheel here. Because the decision has already been made. And the feeling, that fear of missing out, the FOMO, that's a feeling. It doesn't get a vote here, right? So whatever you land on, in or out, big or small, decide now.

Ruthie (14:11.69)

On purpose because intentional beats reactive every single time. And in Q4, reactive gets expensive. Not always with sales or lost sales, but your time and energy, right? So step four is get tactical. Now we've got our destination. We know how gifting fits into our messaging, and we know what we're focusing on in terms of our offer for the season. And we've made a call around Black Friday.

Now it's time to map the route and start with key dates. And to be clear, these are the dates that matter for your business, not the giant list of every holiday shopping event that exists. For most of us, it's a handful. Maybe it's a launch date for an offer, maybe it's Giving Tuesday, maybe it's a year in deadline, the day of a cart close, a last call for gifting an offer or something that has to be sent.

But pick a few dates that matter to you and put them on the calendar. Also, put on the calendar when you are not working so that we plan ahead for that too. Then we're gonna build backwards from each one. This is backwards planning again, but like more miniature. If you have a launch on a certain date, you don't wanna start talking about it on that day, you work backwards. So if there's a key date for sales, when do we start talking about it?

What's the runway of content and emails that warms people up before that window? What has to be created by when for that runway to exist and actually work? Because you're kind of building two layers here. You're building the promotional calendar or the content calendar where the actual offers and sales and messaging happens.

But then within the content calendar, you're also creating like mapping out a to-do list for yourself, right? The things that you need to have created, whether it's a landing page or a checkout page, or even just messaging around the promotion so that you know what you want to say and how you want to talk about it. The mistake would be planning the promotion and forgetting the runway.

Ruthie (16:25.664)

A launch with no warmup is a door that you open to an empty room. So map the dates, think about the warmup, think about the runway, think about the to-do list to get ready for it, and then map backwards so that you're giving yourself enough time for each one. And then step number five is to really understand the shape of October, November, and December. You don't need every post plan today. Good Lord, please don't do that. You don't have to do that.

But it helps to know the general shape of each month. So you're not treating Q4 as one like undifferentiated blob. And here's a simple way to kind of think about those three months. October is the warm-up and decision point. If you haven't already made these decisions and you haven't started these projects already, October is the time to get it done. This is like get shit done mode, right? Your foundation laying here. You're getting your content rhythm steady.

You're nurturing your audience. This is the month where you're gonna make the final call on any contingent offers you've sketched out, and you're going into the rest of the quarter with a plan in hand, right? And then November is usually the push or your intentional choice not to push. It's the highest energy marketing month for most businesses. If you're running something, promotion, an offer, an open cart window.

This is like you're competing with a lot of people and a lot of brands, right? In the attention economy that we live in. And that's okay. Just be aware of that, right? And if you're sitting Black Friday out, then this is the month that you've already decided what you're doing instead. Again, maybe that's nurturing your audience. Maybe it's gifting. Maybe it's giving back to your existing clients. Maybe it's collaborations and community. Maybe it's philanthropy.

you've already decided what the rhythm of November looks like. And then December is really thinking about connection and wind down. For a lot of audiences, the buying energy fades after mid-month and people shift toward family and rest. And this is often where client gifting, gratitude, year-end reflection, new year new me, warm-up content might live.

Ruthie (18:45.834)

If your offer is fresh start energy, the back half of December is where you are ramping up because you're planning those seeds for the January push. So that's the shape. Three different months with three different jobs. And you can fill in the details later, but you've got the framework for the recipe mapped out so that you know you have a a plan to be intentional for the entire quarter. Now, before you lock any of this in.

There's one more pass, and it's one that separates a plan that happens from a plan that sits in a Google Doc and collects digital dust. You have to ask who is doing what and where does that fit into their actual schedule and capacity, whether it's yours or your team's. Because here's what's true about Q4. It lands at the exact same time of the busiest stretch of many of our family lives.

Back to school bleeds into false sports, which bleeds into the holidays. So a Q4 marketing plan doesn't live in a vacuum. It lives on top of your already full calendar. So I want you to take the plan that you've built today and run it against reality. Who is creating this content and when? And how long does it take? Where does this work fit into a regular work week in either October or November when a personal calendar might be already packed?

Is their capacity to create this content and create these projects, to execute these projects? If you have a team who's helping you, what's their capacity, not just yours? And what has to be ready before the busy season starts so that you're not creating from scratch in the middle of the chaos? Let me tell you, in my retail days, in August, I was definitely at Hobby Lobby shopping for.

ribbons and wreaths and ornaments because we needed to take photos for the Q4 gift guide that launched in October. We needed those photos ready by the end of August. And not many retailers have that stuff. At least they didn't five years ago. I feel like the the retail calendar has like sped up along with everything else in the world. and we are seeing holiday merch out in stores in August, but we didn't back then.

Ruthie (21:09.528)

But I had to think about it back then, right? Because we have certain things that need to be in place in order to execute that holiday strategy. But the most beautiful Q4 plan and holiday strategy, it does nothing if there's no one with the time to execute it. And this is usually the moment that a real question surfaces. You've mapped a plan, you've run it against your actual fall capacity, and then you realize like,

I cannot get all of this done on top of everything else that this season holds. And then you're like, well, then who cares? I'm just forget it. I'm just not going to do it. Or I'm just going to white knuckle it. I'll just do my best. It that doesn't mean that you're failing here. It's information. And it's exactly what we're actually going to be talking about next week is what happens when we map these big old plans and then realize we don't actually have the capacity to execute them. Because let me tell you, I know what that's like. Like your girl is really good at making plans over here.

But what I've had to learn as the marketing director for a nine-figure retailer with a scrappy team and or scrappy budget and small team, and now a marketing director for several clients across our agency is that it's easy to get caught up in the shoulds. We should do this, we should do this, we should do this, we should do that. And then realize I don't actually have time to do any of those things. We have to make decisions, we have to prioritize, and we have to plan for actual capacity.

And add capacity if necessary. So here's what I want you to take into the rest of your summer. Q4 is not a November thing. It's a summer planning activity. You back into it from the destination and you get honest about how your offer fits the season so that you can make your Black Friday call on purpose, you can map your dates in your runway, and check the whole thing against your real life capacity. So do that now.

And then the November of you gets the November version of you gets to sail through the holidays instead of scrambling through them. If you do one thing this week, I want you to block 90 minutes on your calendar before the end of July and start at the destination of December 31st. What do you want to be true? Write that down. And the rest can build back from there, what we've talked about.

Ruthie (23:30.42)

This kind of mapping is literally the heart of what I do with clients all year round, drawing on the whole route so that they aren't improvising in a busy season whenever it is in the year. And if that's the help that you're realizing you want, that's what literally what I'm here for. You can find a link to book a call to learn more about working with the consistency corner in the show notes. Because if you're ready for marketing director in your corner who is doing all of this for you, I'm here to help.

And next week we are going to pick up right where this leaves off and talking about capacity and making decisions. If you realize you're at capacity and can't run Q4 alone, what the next conversation is about and how you find the right help before the back to school season is in full swing while there's still time to do it well. You won't want to miss that episode. So definitely come back. I promise it's not a big old pitch fest. We're going to talk about opening up your capacity in ways that are not just marketing support and

options for you in opening up your capacity if marketing support is somewhere that you need extra space. So enjoy your summer afternoon. Send me a DM on Instagram after you do your holiday planning this month. I want to hear how it went and I will chat with you soon in the next episode.