Show Notes

The biggest sales day is coming up, and planning now for your Black Friday and 4th Quarter launches and marketing may involve ads. Join me today and find out what you really need to know when it comes to planning for that holiday launch.

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Are you a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact? Connect with me at YourMarketingMatchmaker.com I look forward to hearing from you.

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Hey there. Welcome back to Marketing Matchmaker. I really hope you have enjoyed this whole August of really focusing on the fourth quarter. Man, it's coming up faster than we know. In fact, tomorrow is the 1st of September, which kind of is insane to me that we are already moving into September and fall is just around the corner. And we're going to start seeing all of the Halloween decorations coming out and all of those things that come with moving into the end of the year, which means we have about four months left of the year. And this is the perfect time to really, really focus on finishing the year strong.

So the last couple of weeks we've covered planning for your fourth quarter, whether that's creating a full on marketing plan or lead generation for the fourth quarter or simply black Friday, which isn't really simple and still, can be incredibly profitable for people this week.

I wanted to touch on something that well, a lot of people assume is going to be easy and ends up not. So this time, last year, actually it was closer to mid-October of last year. I had a potential client come to me who wanted to launch a product or actually a mastermind. And they wanted to do it within four weeks. So they wanted to do it right around Black Friday, the week before Black Friday. But right around that timeframe they wanted to run ads. They had a budget for ads spend of $500 and they had never run ads before they didn't have an audience. And they had only launched their mastermind one other time.

And they wanted to do all of this in four weeks.

So I had the unfortunate responsibility of letting 'em know that their expectations were just not going to be met. It's not possible. It wasn't possible to do what they were asking me to do. We didn't have enough time to really create an effective launch, especially when they had no lead generation already started and they had no lead generation funnel or any way to bring in leads created. So we would have to start that from scratch.

Also, they didn't have an audience already, which means that we had to start creating audiences from scratch. And the amount of money they wanted to spend on Facebook ads was not going to get them anything. I'm not gonna lie to you guys, it is expensive to run ads in the fourth quarter, ads cost go up. There's just so much more demand for the ads space, no matter what platform you're using, whether that's LinkedIn or Facebook, Instagram YouTube or Google ads, it just doesn't matter what platform you're using.

Ad costs rise, because you are competing with every other person out there who also wants to close out the fourth quarter strong.

Because spending and demand are up and creates an ad supply lower, this pushes advertising prices higher. So getting your brand and your message out is going to cost more. What does that mean? It means if you are currently running ads, you can expect to see an increase in the cost of your leads. So if you're getting leads right now, at $3, you can expect to see your leads go up to $5, which is one of the reasons that I was discussing in last week's episode with Black Friday of creating leads and generating before the fourth quarter. Because they're going to be less expensive and you're going to be able to have bigger leads.

So back to my story my friend that wanted to create this launch when we started talking about it, she had never run ads before. That is a problem in the fourth quarter because it takes a little bit of time to generate ads and your ad spend is higher. So if you only have $500 to spend, you're not going to be able to compete with Amazon. And we're all competing with Amazon. We're all competing with Walmart, right? Because their audience is pretty much everyone in the population. Whereas our audience might be very small and specific. Theirs is very broad. It's still a competition. We're still competing with them.

We're also competing with our direct competition. Those people that may be a couple of steps ahead of us in business and have more money to invest in their ads. So when you're running ads in the fourth quarter, keep that in mind. Really understand that as you're going into the fourth quarter, your ad costs are going to go up. And if you want to run ads, make sure that you have set aside the budget to do that effectively.

$500 is not enough money to run ads on Facebook. No matter the time of the year, it's just not. You are not going to get the results that you want, and you're going to end up wasting your money. Make sure that you are prepared to spend a minimum of $1,500 a month on ad spend before you run ads.

If you are not prepared to spend that every month, month over month, you're not ready to run ads. And that is okay. There are so many other marketing options out there. Ads aren't the only source of leads.

I just wanna be honest with you about what it takes to really run ads.

Now here's the really cool thing about ads. If you have spent time generating leads and they, you have an email list, you are able to retarget those people using ads. Which means if you have a thousand people on your email list, you can upload that email list to Facebook or to LinkedIn, and really send those messages, send the, the ads directly to those people that will keep your costs lower.

It is incredibly important to retarget your audience, especially in the fourth quarter. It can keep your ad costs down and really generate that warm audience into hot leads; people who want to buy from you.

It's the perfect time to really focus on all of the people in your audience. Now that only works if you've spent the last quarter or six months or year, really generating an audience to market to, if you have not, fourth quarter ads are probably not for you unless you have three to $5,000 in ad spend to spend it.

Your launch, your business, your marketing is going to increase in cost in the fourth quarter. Keep that in mind. There are things that you can do, however, right now, in order to make your fourth quarter successful, if you're going to run paid ads. One of them is really to plan and execute your full funnel strategy. So from introduction all the way through to commitment, how are you connecting with interacting, with engaging, with, and really creating a relationship with your audience?

That's the best way to really prepare for the fourth quarter, making sure that you have this full marketing strategy, the full funnel, from top to bottom done in a way that creates those lasting relationships with your clients. It's what we all want, right? We want lasting relationships with our audience that will create clients in the long run beginning early in the year.

Hopefully you have already started lead generating. If you have not, you need to start right now, spend the next six weeks pouring as much money as much effort as much time as you can in creating that effective lead source, that effective base of an audience so that you are better able to target and re-target them in the fourth quarter.

Here's another strategy of things that well, some people don't think about, and that's early incentives. Yes, Black Friday is the big Kahuna around there, around here. However, what if instead of Black Friday, you focused on the Monday before that, or even Halloween, or what if you focused on after Black Friday? Cuz I will tell you ad costs are the highest on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, that whole weekend. That is when it costs the most to run ads. So if you pivot your strategy so that you are not in such direct competition with people, you may find that you have better success.

Now I would suggest launching before Black Friday, rather than after Black Friday, because Black Friday and Cyber Monday is when people spend the most money. So if you can actually get them on the week before the Monday, before Black Friday or Halloween or something along that lines, you've actually created a profitable marketing strategy that will convert people into buyers before they've spent all their money.

One of the things that still works really well in the fourth quarter is awareness ads. And I know a lot of people are leery about running awareness ads. But the fact of the matter is, is finding your audience is incredibly important. And when you use awareness ads to do that, you're better able to, again, retarget them.

So if you've created video assets that are short, you're talking reels and stories and two minutes and under video that capture people's attention that really get people to watch your video. You are able to then send messages directly to them later. That whole retargeting thing. If you focus on that during the time when costs are higher, you are better able to create that audience to engage that audience and then retarget them in a way that will save you money in the long run.

The fourth quarter can be the most profitable quarter of the year. And with some advanced planning, it doesn't have to be the most stressful of the year. We get to really look at the fourth quarter at the ads in fourth quarter and assess how and what is going to work for us best. It may be that you don't wanna run ads in the fourth quarter. You wanna focus the majority of your money in the third quarter and then run emails as a launch or have some kind of a group on Facebook or on LinkedIn or a webinar of some kind that is going to bring the audience to you that you've already curated and you've already nurtured.

That will make your sales in the fourth quarter, much easier and really will help you to grow your business, increase your revenue, and scale your impact. If you are ready to really focus on your fourth quarter growth and need some help, go to yourmarketingmatchmaker.com and click on the marketing exploration call button, where we can sit down for 30 minutes and really determine what is going to work best for you in order to end your year strong.

 

Thank You for listening to the Marketing Matchmaker podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to hear your feedback. Please head over to iTunes and leave a review so we can hear from you. And if you are a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact connect with me at yourmarketingmatchmaker.com. I look forward to hearing from you.