Holiday marketing mastery: 11 tips to dominate growth in Q4

Q4 is the golden quarter. Holiday marketing mastery can make or break the year for many verticals, especially retail and e-commerce. The problem is it’s a busy, noisy world during Q4. Ad spend can be as much as 50% higher than an average month. And it’s pricier too: ad prices jump 20-30% during Q4.

(This year that price hike could get even worse in the U.S., with federal parties pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into digital advertising as the election cycle continues.)

So how can you dominate growth in the golden quarter? And what are some good-as-gold holiday marketing tips?

Good news: we just had 4 amazing marketers give us their best holiday marketing tips. (Check out the full webinar here on-demand, or keep reading for a few of the highlights.)

Holiday marketing experts: 4 great ones

We were super-blessed to have 4 amazing marketing experts who shared their expertise:

• Hannah Parvaz
  • Founder @ Aperture
  • Has led growth at 4 companies
  • Former app marketer of the year
• Sherwin Su
  • Senior Manager at Reddit
  • Also been at Pinterest and VaynerMedia (but he didn’t drop any F-bombs, shockingly)
• Mark Menery
  • VP @ Dataseat
  • Formerly Apptopia, Millennial Media, and JumpTap
• Janos Perei, Head of Growth @ Sybo
  • Sybo makes one of the most-downloaded games in history … Subway Surfers
  • Formerly at Voodoo and also a former CMO at Skill Yoga

11 tips to dominate growth during the Q4 holiday season

Here are some of the top tips from the webinar …

Q4 is not just about retail and e-commerce

“If you think about especially ad monetized games, it is a massive opportunity for generating revenue.”

– Janos Perei, Sybo

We typically think Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas … Q4 is all about retail and e-commerce.

Wrong!

There’s also more leisure time, and therefore more time to chill and relax with games.

Q5 isn’t just an Audi SUV (it’s also cheap UA)

“Sometimes there is a time period just after the Christmas days that is often referred to as the fifth quarter, which also provides excellent opportunities for a very progressive and quick scaling from about the 27th of December all the way to the first, maybe the second week of January.”

– Janos Perei, Sybo

Holiday marketing in Q4 can be expensive, with prices up 30% in some verticals. But just at the tail end of Q4 and the beginning of Q1 there’s an opportunity for those who are prepared.

Brand and e-commerce advertisers slow their spend, providing a quiet (and cheaper) space for gaming and other verticals. 

Health & Fitness, anyone?

There are pockets of affordability … try some brand spend

“If CPMs are doubling, how are you focusing on some buying some cheaper traffic, some awareness traffic during this time to start to prime people with your brand messaging so that then when you hit them in Q5 with all of these direct response ads and messages, people are gonna be much warmer.”

– Hannah Parvaz, Aperture

Yeah, you’re probably primarily a performance buyer, and so is Parvaz. But when your costs double, there are other ways that to stay top of mind that are a fraction of the price.

Invest there to keep your customers, users, and prospects warm, and then when you come with your offer later on, they’re primed to accept.

Conversion rates are jumping too

“Shopping and spending is gonna be at an all time high. So this combats a little bit of the price inflation because conversion rates are also about to increase.”

– Sherwin Su, Reddit

Important to remember when you’re getting sticker shock at the higher ad prices: this is a buying season, and people are in the mood to spend money.

While keeping some caution and continuing to test your hypotheses, don’t be too scared to open your wallet that you spend the entire season on the sidelines.

Remember not all Q4s are the same

“There’s Q4 marketing, but there’s also the specific  things about the specific time period that we’re in … we have all kinds of things going on economically, all kinds of political challenges, an election cycle in the US for instance … so it’s not just about Q4, it’s also about what’s going on now.”

 – John Koetsier

(Yeah, I’m quoting myself. Sorry not sorry.)

Q4 has a lot of repeating patterns, so there’s a temptation to treat each Q4 the same. But we have to layer on specific economic realities, or specific themes that are important in the culture this particular Q4, because they’re going to have an impact on consumer behavior and spend.

Adjust your brand promise for Q4

“Start to isolate what are different things that someone might be using your product or game for. Start experimenting around different features or benefits. Start seeing which ones are getting the most engagement at the top of the funnel for clicks. Start looking at which ones are converting best at the bottom of the funnel …”

– Hannah Parvaz, Aperture

If you’re a fitness app, in summer people might want you for offense: to get into beach shape. 

In Q4, that might morph into defense: burning off the extra calories they’ve ingested at the office party, the friend party, the family dinner, and all those bloody chocolates their family bought them for Christmas gifts because they couldn’t think of anything else to give.

(Oops, private pet peeve.)

The point is: be flexible.

If you’re a game, players might play at other times for a few minutes of stress relief from their jobs. In Q4, they might have more leisure time and be able to go deeper and spend more time — and more money — in your game.

In each case, there are different “jobs to be done” that your app can fit within its overarching brand promise.

Know your limit, play within it

“Have a very clear objective and understand your risk management policies … how far are you willing to engage in the competitive pressure? What would be the margins, the thresholds that you can expect and still tolerate in terms of the spend or what is maybe a cutoff point where you say, you know what … I would just rather preserve my profitability and start lowering my volume and scale until the fifth quarter opportunities arise.”

 – Janos Perei, Sybo

It’s like going to an auction, right? 

The item you want is up for big, and someone else wants it to, and you start bidding each other up and up and up, and you face gets red and your hands get sweaty and you start to have tunnel vision … and you might just spend way more than your super-shocked spouse thought you should.

Have a plan.

Figure it out.

Set your limits.

And if the game gets too risky, preserve some dry powder for opportunities that will inevitably arise later on.

Talk to your ad partners

“Talk to your partners … the ad demand partners who have done this for a really long time and understand what the market is gonna do, what the pricing is gonna do, what the landscape is gonna do.”

– Mark Menery, Dataseat

Hey.

You’re paying for a service. Sweat the assets. Or, in this case, sweat your partners. 

Get their insights on what to do, where to find pockets of affordability, and how to achieve your profitability goals at a budget level that works for you.

Adjust to weekly or even daily budgets

“We have had some advertisers who run relatively consistent throughout the year, and then come Q4 they move not just from monthly to weekly budgets, they’ll go from weekly to daily, and sometimes it’s becoming hourly.”

 – Mark Menery, Dataseat

In Q4 prices are up 30% or more. If you’re not careful, you can run through your whole weekly budget early, and be left with nothing for the last few days of the week.

So switch to daily budgets in order to ensure you have a continual flow of promotion.

Creativity isn’t just about creative; do something cool and unique with marketing strategy

“One of the things that worked well with some of my subscription products was creating a gifting package. And what we did was advertise that to our most active users through ads … very simple … vut what we saw then was dramatic numbers of sales through that. We also did a plan where we did buy one get one free with subscriptions. If someone bought through our website, we just sent them an additional code.”

– Hannah Parvaz, Aperture

Just buying more ads is a brute force approach to growth. Creative marketing strategies and tactics have the ability to double or triple your growth rate.

In this specific case, 50% of the company’s Q4 sales resulted from this BOGO gifting initiative.

(You may have noticed a similar holiday quarter growth strategy from Masterclass, which has offered a free gift subscription when you buy one for some time.)

Have some patience (even though you’re a performance marketer)

“A lot of marketers are really obsessed with instant gratification … if I dial this up, I wanna see immediate conversion rates and things like that.”

– Sherwin Su, Reddit

In the real world, you don’t ask someone for a date 2 seconds after meeting them. (Well, unless you Tom Cruise or Leonardo di Caprio.)

Allow some space for people to get to know you, get to understand what you do, get some degree of familiarity with your brand, your logo, your app.

Especially in retail, or even in verticals like gaming, some degree of warming up an audience is going to pay off in longer-term customers/users/players over time that are more profitable.

Which also means you need measurement capability that is more than just last-click.

So much more in the full webinar

I’m sure it’s hard to believe, but these are literally the top tips from about a third of the entire webinar. There is so much more I could have included here.

Check out the full webinar to get all the insights on holiday marketing in the coming golden quarter, Q4.