Leaves are falling, scarf weather is here, and many people are thinking about the upcoming holiday season. However, for anyone in the marketing world, it’s time to think about the 4th quarter — and how you can plan to finish the year on a high note!
Here’s a handy 7-step checklist to help you plan your 4th-quarter marketing efforts:
• Define your goals for the rest of the year. Did you have a list of business goals at the beginning of the year? It’s time to see if you’ve accomplished them. You’re almost there OR you have a lot to do quickly. You can’t wait until the end of the year to do this — it’ll be too late!
• Develop your content strategy. Take a look at the content you’ve published so far this year, and map out a plan for these last three months. This is an especially important time to talk about topics that are relevant to your target audience — because they’ll be pretty distracted this time of year; between holidays, vacations and planning for next year.
• Review your SEO results. Track your website traffic from the year so far, and set a goal for Q4. Based on your year-to-date results, you may want to make changes to your SEO strategy. For example, if you identify popular keywords that you weren’t using before, add them throughout your site so they have a strong presence.
• Audit your digital and social efforts. This is key to understanding what your online presence and social media have allowed you to accomplish so far this year. What did you do well? Where can you improve? What was your most popular web page, blog post, online promotion and social media post? How many followers do you have on each social network? Are you engaging with customers, prospects and industry leaders?
• Schedule your email marketing for the next few months. Remember, like we said above, many people are distracted this time of year — but you still have emails to send, and you want them to be opened and read! So be picky, be smart, and you can pretty much avoid the end of the year madness in both November and December.
• Get ready to gather your year-end reporting. Hopefully, your marketing strategy was successful in the past year. You’ll want to look at your ROI, year-over-year sales numbers and other important marketing stats. HOWEVER, if you don’t have any marketing to report on, stop waiting — contact us and we’ll help you plan for next year!
• And, of course, start preparing for the holidays! Get those holiday cards printed and order promotional products for gifts you can distribute for Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas and the following NEW YEAR. Stay “top of mind” with everyone you need — in Q4 and beyond!
Have any additional ideas for the Q4 checklist? Add yours below in the Comments section!