Scaling Performance Marketing in Q4 🚀
Notes from a DTC panel that I hosted last week
Last week I moderated a panel with some killers in the DTC game.
We focused on how to scale performance marketing in Q4.
The vibes were good.
We all left feeling more excited about Q4 than we did going in.
I think Q4 is always a stressful time for marketers, but after our discussion we all centered around one common piece of advice:
Control what you can control and ignore everything else.
I think the boogeyman topics boasted on X/Twitter like election season and Meta issues will mostly be forgotten when the consumers show up like they have in the past.
And, according to a report from eMarketer, it’s going to be the biggest sales season yet.
eMarketer is forecasting Black Friday sales growth of 5.5% year-over-year and Cyber Monday sales growth of 7.8%.
In this post, I will share some of the discussion topics that we went through during our panel in hopes that it will help you plan your peak season.
Let’s get to it!
Scaling Performance Marketing in Q4: Key Takeaways from our DTC Panel
The recent panel that I moderated focused on one crucial question:
How do we effectively scale performance marketing efforts during this peak season?
And, we landed on the following sub-components to ensuring a successful holiday season:
Prioritizing early planning
What’s your offer strategy
Understand your top traffic sources and landing pages
Identify your top creative concepts for scale
QA your data flows and plan for a code freeze
Avoiding common pitfalls
Prioritize Early Planning
The fist big topic was all about prioritizing early planning.
The earlier you start planning the better, but don’t worry if you feel like you are behind.
I feel like we all do.
A good plan will help with the pre-launch anxiety.
Here are the main things that we recommend brands to focus on for their planning.
What’s your offer strategy
The first piece of advice in holiday planning is to lock in your holiday offer as early as possible.
That way you can begin creating all of your design assets with the offer that will be leveraged across your top platforms (Meta ads, landing pages, emails, etc.) during the sales season.
Q4 is not a time to be bashful about your offer.
Try to promote it everywhere you can.
Nik Sharma shared a helpful list of offer types in his newsletter a few weeks ago that I will repost here for reference:Bundle sale - Build a bundle including best sellers and products that you need to get rid of or drive sampling of. I would recommend having a discount higher than anything you’ve run during the year. Most brands will be around 25% to 60% off for BFCM.
Multiple Bundles — Very similar to the above, but you have a few bundles that you merchandise specifically. This is great when you have a hefty number of new customers to bring in, as well as returning customers who might have different shopping preferences.
Tiered Promo — Something like, “Spend $50, save 10%; spend $100, save 20%; spend $250, save 30%”
Gift with Purchase — Once someone spends a certain threshold, or even without a threshold, they receive an additional gift in their order.
Buy X, Get Y free — Another way to wrap a gift with purchase promotion, or an easy way to sell complimentary products (i.e. a suitcase + a free organizer inside)
Site-wide % Off Sale — Automatically applied evergreen discount for a set %. You can also do these as category specific %’s — i.e. “20% off shampoos, 30% off hair tools, 40% off shower caps”Understand where is your traffic coming from
The key thing Nik mentioned in his newsletter was to try to keep your offer simple.
Your grandma or a drunk person should be able to understand what your offer means and how they can get it.
Understand your top traffic sources and landing pages
The second piece of advice is to understand where your website traffic is coming from.
You’ll want to make a list of your top traffic sources and make sure that you are ready to feature your offer across those platforms when your customers are most ready to buy.
For example, if your top traffic source is Meta, then you probably want to start planning out how your account structure, creatives and paid landing pages will look when the promotions go live.
You will also want to understand what your conversion rates are and make sure that you are baking in enough time for last-minute tests before you go into code freeze (more on that below).
Additionally, you will probably want to make sure that your Google search results and email flows are on point.
That could mean planning for new promotion extensions and ad headline changes in Google.
And/or, dialing in your email flows and campaign calendar ahead of time to make sure you are present in the inbox when the promotions go out.
The key thing here is to understand where you audience will be during the BFCM week and then working backwards from there for how you want to show up in those high sales moments.
Identify your top creative concepts for scale
The next piece of advice is to understand which creatives you can push during the season that will help you scale.
You will want to ensure your messaging and visuals are compelling enough to cut through the noise.
I’ve actually seen the best performance from re-purposing the top performing ads in my ad accounts with the offer badge or end card added in.
I don’t think you need to do a full holiday photo shoot here.
My recommendation would be to just find your top 5 creatives from the quarter and remix them with the offer and holiday angle.
This will reduce your production costs and it helps you lead with creatives that you already know perform well.
QA data flows and plan your code freeze date
The last piece of advice for planning is to make sure you QA your data flows and plan for a code freeze.
You will want to check that your are sending high quality conversion signals back to Google and Meta to make sure that you are capturing as many conversions as you can.
This will help the platforms optimize around your top performing creatives and landing pages.
Tools like Elevar can help you set up server side tracking and improve your Meta event match quality scores if you are looking for a third party provider.
For the code freeze piece, try to lock in your processes early.
And then plan to stop pushing major changes on your website and landing pages a few days before your offer goes live.
This will ensure that there are no last-minute technical glitches that could jeopardize your performance.
Q4 is not a time to be testing major pricing changes or website redesigns when your offer is live.
Make a plan for your major tests in advance that way when your offer hits you are putting your best creative and landing page experiences forward.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls: Lessons Learned
We wrapped up our panel with a candid discussion on mistakes brands often make when scaling performance marketing efforts.
Here’s a few items that we covered:
Building a spend and sales plan: Try building out a spend and sales plan ahead of time that way you can adjust between scenarios if you see performance deviating from your expectations.
Overloading Promotions: Relying on old promotional strategies, like copying your Labor Day sale, without adapting them for the current year can lead to diminishing returns. We advised using first principles thinking to approach promos (IE: What will resonate best with my audience this season?) and adjusting the promos if needed to improve performance.
Creative Testing Overload: Testing too many creatives without filtering through your brand’s specific needs can lead to wasted resources. We noted that marketers sometimes fail to trust their creative strategists, but those partnerships are vital for making ads that perform.
General Advice vs. Brand-Specific Strategy: The panel cautioned against taking general marketing advice and applying it without adapting to your brand’s unique context. Performance marketers should also try to pair closely with creative counterparts to align strategy with execution.
Final Thoughts
With Q4 fast approaching, I hope these insights are a helpful guide to your scale efforts during peak season.
From early planning to data-driven testing and collaboration between creative and performance teams, the key to success (IMO) lies in preparation, adaptability, and leveraging the right tools for your brand’s specific needs.
Are you ready to scale your performance marketing for Q4?
Feel free to DM or email me if you want to chat through any of your holiday plans.
Good luck!
Love it!!