Maximising Q4 Success: Creative and Paid Media Strategies for DTC Brands

Q4 Creative: Striking the Right Balance

What’s the first thing that comes to mind, brands should be doing when it comes to creative strategy in Q4?

Because you’re spending so much budget in a short space of time in a really competitive supply auction, the key thing for me is making sure you do have a mix of content that doesn’t just sell the discount. It still talks about the product and the need and the problem, as well as communicating the fact that there is some urgency here.

So it’s really trying to strike that balance between not just being like, “I’m 50% off for 3 or 4 days.” It’s like, what are you selling? Is everyone selling a discount? That’s the trap that everyone falls into.

And it’s a point that you made to me earlier: leave your paid ads doing the selling, and you will still benefit from the high conversion rate that you’ll get on site from your offer or discount code.

You should also drive some urgency, maybe intentionally putting things in retargeting pools or top-of-the-funnel ads that allude to the fact that, “Hey, there is a limited-time offer for Black Friday,” so you benefit from higher click-through rates on those ads. But don’t wholesale change every ad in your ad account on META away from what’s been working historically.

Yeah, and saying, “Hey, save 100 pounds now” when no one knows what they’re saving 100 pounds on isn’t effective. It’s important to still think like a marketer at this point. You just have this added benefit of a really good seasonal offer that you can communicate effectively.

What do you think of the ads that you’re running for a particular sale event?

Any other time of the year, turning off everything you have and switching on a completely new set of ads is just a ludicrous proposition. It never works.

You come to Black Friday, and everyone’s like, “Everything off, Black Friday ads on,” and it’s just like, step back a second. That’s a ridiculous thing to do. You should have an offer strategy, and you should keep what is working to still drive results for you.

Protect Your Black Friday Sales Strategy

So what are your thoughts on running lead gen activity, awareness activity, and traffic-optimised activity in the build-up to Black Friday offers? Do you think it really works?

I think it has its place if it’s done very well, but I don’t think that it should be done in the way that most brands think it should be done. I.e., let’s do a lot of lead gen activity at the top of the funnel to fill up the cookie pool with people who are basically saying, “Don’t buy from me now; wait for a month or a few weeks to then buy.”

And so you’re taking out, and I’ve seen this, quite a good chunk of customers who would have bought from you at that moment by just telling them not to buy. It’s like having a retail store and literally saying, “Everyone, we’re gonna have a sale in a month, so, you know, leave your name here, and we’ll let you know when you can come in and buy the product.”

It’s a ludicrous strategy in my mind. Where I think it has value is as a small percentage of your budget, particularly for maybe lapsed customers, where you can use it as a way to inform them that you’re going to have something coming up to set their expectations.

But I think running lead gen activity as your Black Friday strategy actually just cannibalises your sales earlier in the month.

Yeah, I think a brand that actually does this quite well is a brand called Solomon. They’ve done a really good job at building this kind of membership piece. Once you become a customer and create an account, you’re a member, and you get access to, say, 25% off a sale that will happen quarterly or so.

That’s a way they warm up existing customers via email, who are clearly brought into the brand, saying, “Hey, why don’t you come back and buy from us on this date?” They understand that, hey, our repeat purchases can be made with no cost of acquisition because we’ve already acquired them. Now we’ve got them in a great email flow, retention flow, and every sale we make is margin. So we can afford to give them 20–25% off on lines that maybe are going out of season, whatever it is.

They’ve really understood the fact that we’re paying to acquire these customers upfront and then converting them regularly on the back end in a controlled manner. Whereas, like you said before, if you just go out to everyone saying, “Hey, we’re going to do a sale or 25% off in three weeks’ time,” you’re actively paying people on a daily basis, still spending on marketing, and stopping everyone from buying.

So you’re kind of just reducing all of the gains you might get in that key sale period later down the line. There are ways of doing it correctly, and I really think it is probably on the retention side of things as opposed to on the top of the funnel.

Building a Winning Q4 Media Plan

So how does a brand actually come up with a media plan for Q4 on Black Friday? What’s the strategy? Where do you start?

Yeah, I mean, very broad question, but the first place that I would go is your KPI and understanding your numbers very deeply. For me, if you have the luxury of multiple years of trading, I would look back at what your typical CAC was for the period.

But not just that. It’s actually more important to look at your returns across that period. A lot of brands fall foul of setting KPIs correctly here because they see a lot of returns coming in, maybe in December or January, and not accruing those returns back to the period when the cost was actually acquired, which is typically across the sale of anything from Q4.

So doing some analysis on factoring in those refunds, what actually was your true CAC and your true costs, and building your media plan around the likelihood that this is probably going to be replicated again is a really great place to start.

Yeah, I suppose it’s just always me understanding the quality of the customers you’re acquiring at that time of year. Typically, people are shopping for discounts in November in particular. So really, whether it’s looking at how many people return the products immediately or just looking at lifetime value and lifetime contribution if you’ve got that lens as well, you can really understand if you’re spending the correct amount on acquiring these customers to still actually make it a profitable period.

Looking back at previous years, how those customers developed over time and how they compared to people outside of sale periods would be a really interesting piece of analysis to actually understand. Is it worth us going really hard on this from a business perspective or from a paid perspective? Or would we be better off waiting until December, post-sale, to really scale things up?

Because actually, it’s far more profitable for us then, even without the discount activity from November. I think just having that broader lens and conversation internally is quite important.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, you might literally find that you have a 25% increase in returns from refunds across that period, which massively impacts your costs and what you can pay to acquire a customer.

So getting under the skin of that and making sure that everyone from marketing to finance is aware of what those targets are is going to set you up for success in this big period of the year.

You’ve got your customer targets and your KPIs for the period across Black Friday and then Q4. Really, how do you go about setting a budget? Where do you put that?

So budgeting is a really interesting thing. Often, marketing teams will look at previous years, say for Black Friday, and look at what they spent last year. Okay, we spent X amount and got Y. This year, we want to do 25% more. So let’s just assume we’re going to be slightly more efficient and spend 25% or 20% of what we did the year before and hope for the best, and we’ll see what happens.

But in reality, that is just completely guesswork. You can actually apply some statistics and analysis to help a business really understand how much it should be spending and where on its media to get the maximum return on investment.

The key thing to do here is actually to use a media mix modelling technique, where you understand the value that each channel adds to your overall marketing mix. Then, using that modelling, you can understand if you spend your budget here, here, and here, you’re likely to get the best return for your investment based on the current price you’re selling at and the seasonality and time of year.

That’s something we actually help our brands do regularly: help them maximise the value from this peak season because you only get Black Friday once a year. For some businesses, they do 50% of their revenue in the last two months of the year. So it’s critical you get these sale periods right.

It’s also critical that you don’t overspend in terms of cost acquisition. So really making sure you’re coming out of the gates at the right level of spend is so important. You should really be recruiting data science help to optimise both the performance marketing mix you’re working on and your above-the-line activity as well, making sure that you’re not over-indexing on digital lower-funnel channels at a time when it might actually be cheaper to buy upper-funnel at a greater proportion of the mix to get the best returns for the business.

So yeah, it’s really important to do things properly, in my opinion. A lot of brands think Q4 is a time to just mop up bottom-of-the-funnel activity.

So you touched on top-of-the-funnel activity being important there. What are your thoughts on traditional top-of-the-funnel prospecting and more awareness buys in Q4?

I think above-the-line and upper-funnel activity, brand awareness buys on meta, say YouTube as well, add a lot of value. What they’re doing is ultimately giving you this sort of ad stock effect. Building awareness does lead to conversions, just over a longer time frame. It might be three months, it might be six months, depending on your category.

If you don’t do it, the problem is that only optimise for conversions in ad platforms means you only reach, say, 10% of the population in the country you’re targeting, because it’s constantly thinking people are about to buy now. It becomes very expensive as you spend more and more on that channel, driving higher frequency on a smaller pool of people.

So the real value of multiple touchpoints on these upper-funnel channels, above-the-line channels, is that it gives the optimisation systems on Meta and Google more people to serve ads to and more signals of intent that it can pick up on. It also builds trust, which makes you feel legitimate as a business.

I think that’s something that a lot of performance marketing-focused businesses can really get stuck on—the fact that they’re missing that kind of trust factor. Ultimately, mass awareness that you can achieve far more cheaply on brand awareness type buys than you can through conversion activity.

There’s a time and a place for it, don’t get me wrong, and it probably should be an always-on part of your mix. But it’s a real hack in Black Friday periods, I’d say in Q4, when it is very expensive to buy media on digital.