It goes without saying, Q4 is the busiest time of the year for many businesses and the build-up can undoubtedly be overwhelming, especially when you’re unsure where to start or what to focus on.
But with all the pressure put to the side, Q4 is the best time to see a significant increase in overall brand revenue and finish the year off on a positive note!
To help you prepare your business for the quarter ahead, we’ve compiled the ultimate checklist so your brand can put its best foot forward for this final quarter.
Define Goals
It’s time to think SMART:
Specific- Set goals specific to what you want your brand to accomplish during Q4, and clearly lay these out using organisational tools.
Measure – Are you able to measure your goals? Ensure you have appropriate tracking and events set up in advance.
Attainable – Are you being realistic with your goals and targets? Take time to investigate budgets, resources and prioritise quality over quantity.
Relevant – Are your specific goals relevant to your business (and competitors!)
Time bound – It goes without saying, start planning ASAP! Ensure all targets, goals and content is prepared in advance, therefore you can execute all ideas to the highest standard and keep things running smoothly over the busy quarter.
Website Audit
Ensuring your website is at its peak performance is always vital, however, it’s particularly important when going into Q4. It’s recommended to have your website audited at least twice a year or on a quarterly basis. With the increase in store traffic, having a site that runs at a high speed with effective branding, imagery and copy will guarantee an increase in sales.
Tip: when onboarding with Social Nucleus, you will have an in-depth website audit performed by your dedicated Account Manager.
Email
It’s time for a glow up…with your email marketing. Having consistent and well communicated email flows prepped prior to Q4 could be vital for retargeting potential customers. We recommend creating a series of automated email flows triggered by the most common actions taken by your audience.
Welcome flow
Abandoned cart
Thank you/post-purchase flow
Instructional
Product review
Personalised flows (i.e birthday or anniversary)
Tip: Creating a simple pop up on your site to encourage signups is a great way to grow your mailing list.
Social Media
Keep the same level of consistency on your site and email campaigns throughout your social media platforms, to build hype around product discounts and anticipated sales.
This may call for an increase in overall social presence on your brand’s social platforms, for example creating original and trendy content that both advertises your promotions/deals and appeals to your current target audience.
Tip: Take extra time to create content that will increase user engagement during this preparation, as this will organically grow your social presence and appeal to a wider audience (as well as the algorithm!).
Plan for Q1
Planning for Q1? An obscene thought to many, but consistency is key in the world of digital marketing and keeping the same level of organisation and preparation will allow a smooth transition into the new year – set goals and keep your brand to the same standard.
And there you have it! We hope our checklist has helped make the Q4 planning process a little easier, so you can unleash your business’ full potential for this final quarter.
Looking to level up your quarterly planning? Book a call with Social Nucleus today – we’re ready to take your digital marketing to the next level for this quarter and beyond 🚀
Read on to find out how a marketing growth partner could help your brand reach new heights this Q4.
The busiest time of the marketing calendar year is coming up – the run up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s a whole host of marketing activities to do to ensure this period is a successful one for your business.
If you’re unsure of where to start, it’s worth investing in a team of marketing experts to get your brand out there, ready for Black Friday.
Sometimes a helping hand can work wonders for your online reach and brand awareness, especially if you need time to clue up on the world of social media marketing, paid social advertising, or email marketing, before you can get stuck in to strategy and content creation.
It’s more important than ever to establish an online presence for your brand, to get your message out there and reach your target audience. And there’s experts out there who can jump straight onboard and help you achieve your goals.
Like us, for example (!).
What’s a growth partner?
Unlike an agency, we don’t consider ourselves an ‘external source’ for marketing services. We’re a dedicated partner to your brand, working with you, not external to you, to achieve success.
By collaborating with you and your goals, we’ll draw from our experience of scaling brands to help you grow and achieve your vision. Our success truly is your success – that’s what a partnership with us means.
We’re here to work together, as an extension of your business, to strive for your growth. We constantly innovate, testing new ideas and optimising the tests that work.
Call us your fully-functioning marketing department. We completely integrate with the way your business works, instead of operating from the sidelines.
You can leave it to us to fire up your marketing strategy, clued up on all the industry knowledge and expertise that will help you get the results you’re looking for.
How we can help
Let’s break down the variety of services you might consider for Black Friday :
Paid Social Ads –
Reach new and retargeted audiences and optimise your success on the daily. By the time Black Friday rolls around, we’ll have a good idea of the type of copy and content that stops scrolls and gets clicks.
Paid Google Ads –
Build your brand awareness and boost website traffic with paid search. Make it easier for your customers to find your brand when they search for the products you sell.
Email Marketing –
Nurture a loyal customer base with email campaigns that engage, reward and bring value. Make sure your customers remember your offers and discounts when Black Friday arrives.
Social Media Marketing –
Take your social media output to the next level with content that gets you noticed and trusted- from Instagram to TikTok. Build your brand awareness and engage your audience with dynamic video, imagery and graphics that creatively capitalise on trends.
Brand Management –
Elevate your brand identity and build your customer base with a recognisable tone of voice, visual branding and messaging across your marketing channels. As it’s not just about short-term efforts to get conversions, but long-term trust-building.
How does a growth partnership work?
When you get started on your onboarding, we’ll get stuck into getting to know your brand, inside out. We’re talking competitor research, TOV research, and full audits across your ad accounts and content output.
We’ll get to know your brand culture, what’s important to you, and what you’re determined to achieve in both the near and distant future. Then you can be sure your new growth partner is fully onboard with your brand and can create the kind of content you’d love to see.
In the weeks leading up to Black Friday, we’ll be testing what works best, so we’re ready to build on this when it counts the most.
What are my next steps?
Why not get in touch and find out more about how we can help your brand this quarter?
We’re an innovative, creative and ambitious growth partner, ready to help you scale up 🚀
Want to start prepping for Black Friday, but unsure where to start or what’s best to focus on?
As we all know, Black Friday is the biggest time of the year for businesses and with this comes a lot of prepping and strategic planning to get the most out of it. In this article we will help clear up a few important focusses pre-Black Friday.
Pre Black Friday build up – Building up your traffic
Black Friday sales and traffic won’t appear out of nowhere, which is why building up your re-engagement and retargeting audiences is so important pre-Black Friday (the earlier you start, the better).
These specific audiences are already warmed up to your brand and products, therefore come Black Friday when presented with your best promotions these specific audiences are much more likely to convert, in comparison to an audience that has never seen your products before.
So, what are re-engagement and retargeting audiences?
Re-engagement audiences are people who interacted with your brand through watching or engaging with your brand’s social media content, profiles or ads, but haven’t visited your site.
Retargeting audiences are people who have visited/interacted with your website.
In addition to these audiences, you should also be building an email list. This can be done by offering your website visitors a newsletter, ebook, webinar, discount or something else of value in exchange for their email address.
An email list is another excellent way to present your Black Friday promotions to customers who are engaged with your brand, making them a warm prospect for conversion. This is also a different approach, as some potential customers may be more receptive with email marketing compared to Facebook advertising.
Know who to target during Black Friday
After building up your traffic before Black Friday, you may be thinking ‘who should see my ads on Black Friday itself?’ As mentioned above we recommend running ads prior to building up warm audiences to retarget, however there is more.
Alongside this, it’s a good idea to optimise Facebook’s lookalike audiences, which, in short, takes data from Facebook to create the best possible audiences you are trying to create. For example you can create a lookalike audience for:
– Your buyers from the previous Black Friday
– Purchasers from the last 30, 60, 90 or 180 days
– Ad engagers
– Social media engagement from the last 30, 60, 90 or 180 days
– Website visitors from the last 30, 60, 90 or 180 days
Facebook will then take existing data from customers who have taken the action you want, in order to find more people who may be similar to them, based on Facebook data.
To further optimise your audiences, you could narrow down these lookalike audiences with interests (depending how big your lookalike audiences are). For example if you were selling running trainers and wanted to build out a lookalike audience of people who have visited your website in the last 180 days, you may want to add an additional audience of people who are interested in ‘running’ or ‘Nike’ (or another running/fitness brand). We would usually only recommend adding one additional audience so that you can work out which interest/audience is performing best and why. If you add to many additional interests you will struggle to narrow down which is working.
Additionally you could also use the existing results you have from the ads you’ve run prior to Black Friday to determine which ads to run over the upcoming Black Friday weekend. If they’ve been profitable, you may wish to increase the budgets for this specific time to get the best results.
Make your creatives stand out
When data is scarce, time is limited and cost for ads are high, your creatives will be your best shot at efficiently converting your audiences on Black Friday.
Your creatives don’t just act as the main scroll stopper- they’re a way of telling your brand’s story and the way of visualising the solution you can provide to your customers. Promoting how your brand solves your customers’ problems instead of being solely product focussed is a good way to attract them.
During Black Friday, you’ll be competing with other brands for attention, so you want to stand out by being the best solution people are looking for. Just remember: be clear, get to the point fast, and offer your Black Friday deals.
Aside from painting your brand as the solution, it will also help to inform consumers about free shipping, discounts, and any other promotions you are running. So make sure your free shipping offers and discounts are visible to make your products more attractive at first glance.
Creatives aren’t all about crystal clear images, they’re about the message they deliver to people.
Reform your formats
During the build up to Black Friday is the perfect time to test & reform your formats & come up with creative ways to get potential customers’ attention. When it comes to ad formats, you can experiment and test new, scroll-stopping ads. If you have always stuck to using single images as your Facebook ads, it may be time to experiment with other methods.
– Video ads: Did you know 85% of social media users want to see more video content from brands? That’s no wonder, especially when you look at the drastic rise of TikTok, it’s not hard to see the way social media consumers are preferring to see their content and this is the same when it comes to advertising to, as we want our creatives to fit right in with the customers feed.
– Carousel ads: Allow you to have multiple images per ad, allowing you to showcase more products and/or go into further detail about the products you are selling, while expressing your brand across multiple images.
– Dynamic Product Ads: These particular ads allow you to show your desired website visitors the exact products they viewed or added to cart. Therefore this particular ad can be a reminder for those warmer audiences who have shown interest but haven’t quite purchased yet.
Tip: Every format and placement has its size and design requirements, so make sure your ads comply with these & also double check the ads are formatted correctly before publishing.
We hope this helps you kickstart your Black Friday marketing strategy and preparation before the big day!
However, if you still feel a bit lost or you think you need additional help with Black Friday advertising this year then you are in the right place!
Our team of marketing experts have experienced many Black Fridays and understand what’s needed to have the most successful Black Friday possible.
Want to start creating engaging email campaigns, but not sure where to start? You’ve come to the right place 🙌
In this article, we’ll show you how to create email campaigns that stand out in your audience’s inboxes – and ultimately, get clicks and conversions.
In the run up to Black Friday, email marketing is an important channel to be investing time in to elevate your sales.
No matter the email marketing platform you use, professionally-created email campaigns are a great way to creatively advertise your products with an audience that’s already invested in your business, and nurture strong customer relationships with a clear brand identity.
How can you ensure your emails stand out from the rest?
Building a strong campaign
So, what are the key elements you need to be paying attention to?
1. Subject line (/preview line)
This is the first thing your audience will see from your campaign, and it’s vital you ensure it entices your audience to click on the email and view it- so make it count!
Here’s some examples of email subject lines – which ones stand out from the rest?
Consider what would attract your audience’s attention as they scroll through their inbox and see your brand’s email. Have you got any promotions running? If so, include how much your products currently cost (for a limited time only!), or how much they could save.
Alternatively, use a powerful CTA to compel your audience to click – this could evoke a sense of ‘fear of missing out’ if they don’t click, eg:
Subject lines that create a sudden surge of interest, but don’t disclose all information unless the recipient clicks to read it, is a great way to raise your open rate.
Your email’s copy is the perfect place to communicate your brand’s personality and encourage conversions in a creative way.
Keep copy punchy and easy to read, to communicate your message in an engaging way.
An example of simple, punchy copy from H&M’s email marketing – smoothly leading to a CTA.
Bear in mind that most recipients will be checking their inboxes on their phones – ensure you get to the point in a few lines to sustain their interest.
Draw attention to any offers or discounts with bold text that the audience will see in an instant.
Include link buttons with CTAs to take them to relevant product page- these can appear more than once if your email is longer, to ensure your audience always has an opportunity to click and visit your site.
3. Imagery and graphics
Great, memorable emails include attractive graphics with eye-catching headlines, that show off featured products in their best light.
Even just a simple image and headline, like Schuh’s here, is a great way to communicate your brand identity and create an engaging send.
Aim to keep your recipients scrolling through your email without getting disengaged and clicking away. This might mean summing up copy in an easily-digestible infographic if you wish to communicate more information (eg a list of USPs).
Your audiences are unlikely to stick around and read large chunks of text. Break them up with professional imagery, text-based graphics and links, to keep your campaign engaging.
If you’ve got a larger product offering, it might be worth creating a product catalogue at the end of each send – so recipients can easily see your new/bestselling product lines.
Here’s an example of a simple product catalogue by Monki, which allows recipients to browse a portion of the product offering before clicking to view the site.
To make your sends more dynamic, consider creating GIFs that flicks between images, or simple animated graphics featuring moving objects.
These may take more time to create, but they could be a great way to elevate your campaigns and engage your audience.
Now we’ve gone through the essential elements you need for a good campaign – how can you get started on your email planning?
It’s definitely advisable to plan your email calendar in advance- for example, planning the month ahead each month, or even the next few months.
Campaign planning
Now Black Friday’s coming up, it’s more important than ever to plan ahead to achieve a higher volume of sales. Email marketing is one key factor in the effort to engage customers and boost your conversions.
Decide how many campaigns you’d like to send out each week, and what you’ll include in each of them. If you’re building a business, we’d suggest at least 2 a week to gain an inbox presence.
As part of the planning process, visualise what you want your emails’ layouts to look like, and what content you’d like to include.
We’d advise splitting your sends between sales-focussed campaigns and community-building campaigns.
With the latter, prepare short blog-style articles that would interest your audience – whether that’s telling your brand story, discussing a subject of interest to your niche, or giving product-based advice.
This is a great way to add value to your subscribers’ experience with your brand – making them more likely to purchase from you down the line.
For the remainder of your sends, focus on your products’ USPs (unique selling points) and features, and utilise persuasive, creative language to drive clicks and conversions on your site.
But when should you send emails for the highest click and conversion rates? Let’s find out…
Optimising your campaigns
By scheduling sends in advance, you can ensure you send out emails when your audience is most likely to open them, and buy from you.
Consider your target audience’s lifestyles and habits – when are they going to be checking their inboxes, their phones, or working on their laptop?
Target their lunch break, commute and after-work leisure time during the working week. Evenings are a particularly golden time for online purchases; your audience is often scrolling through their phone and catching up with their notifications after a busy day.
With blog-style campaigns, consider when recipients will more likely commit to reading your content. Perhaps steer clear from later on in the evening, to avoid tired brains that don’t wish to commit to a longer read!
As you begin sending out campaigns, you can start paying attention to the analytics- when are more customers opening, clicking, converting from your campaigns?
Send campaigns again at high-performing times for your audience, and test new times to see what the stats are like.
Keep an eye on your CVR (conversation rate), open rate, click rate and recipient activity (What are they clicking on? What are they responding well to?)
We hope this helps as you begin your email marketing journey! 💪
