Show Notes

Fourth quarter is just around the corner.

As we start slipping out of summer, and into cooler temps (thank goodness!), now is when to start planning for the upcoming holiday season. If you’re like me and have a lot of family events over the next several months, planning ahead will help take the overwhelm out of your marketing.

Want to Work with Jennifer and her Virtual Marketing Experts Team?

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.

Watch the Podcast Here:

Hey there. Thanks for listening and welcome to the marketing matchmaker podcast. If you're looking to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact all while staying true to who you are and the people you serve. This is the show for you. I'm Jennifer Tamborski, digital marketing strategists, fractional CMO, and founder of Virtual Marketing Experts. My team and I work with six and seven figure coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs who are tired of playing the guru game of one size fits all marketing. They're ready to create a business and marketing strategy that actually builds relationships with their ideal clients creates massive shifts in their business and rapidly increases their revenue. As your marketing matchmaker, I'm going to help you find the perfect marketing match for you. This show will teach you how to reach your ideal client, connect with your audience, build that perfect relationship and generate more revenue. All through a process I like to call dating your ideal client. Now let's go have some fun!

Hey there, welcome back to Marketing Matchmaker. I hope you are having a fabulous summer so far. And in fact, I think for a lot of us, we are actually wrapping up summer. I know in our household, in our family, I just spent last weekend going school shopping with my youngest. My other two are ready to go to school. So we are getting into that planning stage of making sure we have everything in place for the school year so that they can have the most successful school year ever, which I think is our goal for our kids when it comes to schooling every year. And honestly, that's kind of our goal for our business every year, right? Having the most successful year that we've ever had. And every year we wanna top that last year. What, what did we do last year and how can we make next year even more successful?

So at this time of the year, I really like to start planning for the fourth quarter. I know it sounds kind of crazy because we're only in August and the fourth quarter seems so far away, but the reality is for me at least, and I think for a lot of business owners, the fourth quarter is inundated with so many opportunities for our business. And it's also inundated with a lot of family things going on.

I can't even count the number of holidays that happen in the fourth quarter, October, November, and December are full of things. And in fact, there are times when we're off for entire weeks because of holiday seasons. So I find in my business and in my client's business, if we can start planning now for the fourth quarter, we are better able to create momentum along the rest of the year, and also better able to help hit the goals in our business that we want to hit.

So this month we are actually going to dive deep into planning for the fourth quarter. Today's episode is all about the planning, and then we're gonna start breaking it down into pieces of different things that you actually need to create and implement and set up so that you're ready for getting, hitting those fourth quarter numbers and hitting your goals for the year.

So the first thing that I do when I start thinking about the fourth quarter is looking back, right? We wanna look back in order to look forward. Assessing where our business is right now can really help us to determine what it is we need to do in order to close out the year strong. We still have a lot of time left in the year to hit those revenue goals. However, we won't know if we need to make changes or pivots, if we haven't looked back at the last year to really assess what is going well, and what's not.

So right now, what I'd want you to do is pull out your profit and loss statement. Really look at those revenue numbers and understand if you are on track to hit your goals for the end of the year. And if not, now's a great time to see what we can do to help you along the way. If you are, great, maybe you can exceed those goals, which would be completely fabulous as well.

So while I know that looking at your revenue can be intimidating for some, some people don't wanna look at their numbers until they go to their accountant. But the fact of the matter is as business owners really looking at our numbers and understanding them will help us to create profitable businesses. To really understand where our finances are at every point in our business journey helps us to create those pathways and those roadmaps in order to grow and succeed, and hit those revenue goals. So if you have not looked at your revenue in the last couple of months, now's a great time to really look at it and see, am I off to hit my goals? And if I am, what are we gonna do about it? Am I on track? Great. How can I make this year even better and exceed those goals?

The other thing that obviously once we've looked at our revenue and we know where we're at, and we know what we wanna do, then it comes down to, well, what this show is all about, right? Marketing. Marketing For the fourth quarter can be daunting for some people because of the amount of work that goes into it. But generally it becomes daunting when you wait till the last minute.

Yeah.

When you wait till October to plan for November, or you wait until November to plan for December or heck maybe you're planning October and November in October and November, that becomes overwhelming. At least it does in my world. Especially because I know that November, October, November, and December have a lot of holidays in it. And for me, there's a lot of time off involved with family. And I wanna make sure that all of the things in my business are continuing to run smoothly for myself and my clients.

So if we start planning now we're better able to achieve those marketing efforts and make it feel like a breeze when it comes to really continuing on with that momentum. So when you're looking at your marketing efforts, we're going to do the same thing as we did with our revenue. We're going to look back to look forward, look at what you've done in the past year. What has worked well let's plan to do some more of that, what didn't work so well, what can we tweak? How can we make changes? What plan can we make that is going to make your fourth quarter, the best it's ever been.

Maybe it's planning out a black Friday sale, which by the way, I'm gonna break down on another episode this month, or maybe it's planning some kind of other new launch or new product, service, solution, program or funnel that you want to get out in the next several months. Figuring out what has worked in the past year for you to grow your audience and really develop not just the quantity of leads, but the quality of leads.

The quality of leads is so much more important than the quantity. Yes, you wanna have a large volume of leads coming in because more leads mean more sales. However, if those leads aren't going to convert into sales at some point, then there's no point in having them at all. So making sure that what you have done is producing quality leads that will generate sales along the way is super important.

So right now we're gonna look back so that we can start planning for looking forward. That step one for your marketing plans for the fourth quarter, step two is to create a budget. Just like looking at your revenue numbers. If you have not created a budget for your marketing, you're leaving money on the table. In the long run. Marketing is an investment in your business. And when you invest in your business, it's going to give you a return on that investment.

It's the whole point of investing in yourself and in your business. So if you are not currently investing in your business in your marketing, you're really leaving tons of money on the table by not bringing in those audience members and those clients. And those leads that will continue to generate revenue for your business.

That being said, we wanna make sure that we have a budget when it comes to our marketing, and that can come down to your revenue right now. Like where is your revenue at? And what is it that you have budgeted for the year? Where are you in spending that budget? Have you overspent? Have you underspent, did you not have a budget at all? And you need to create one now?

Whatever that scenario might be for you having a budget going in to the fourth quarter for your marketing is going to be super helpful. Reality is, is the fourth quarter is the most expensive quarter to advertise in. So if you are planning on running ads of some kind, you need to make sure you have the budget to support that because ad costs go up in late October and don't come down until January-ish. So keeping that in mind, going forward is going to really help you to create realistic opportunities for yourself.

Step number three is develop a strategy. When you have looked back at what has worked this past year, I hope that you're also looking at what channels have worked for you. Do you use YouTube? Do you use Facebook? Do you use Instagram, LinkedIn on and on and on Snapchat, whatever. Which one of those channels are working best and which ones really aren't working at all creating a strategy around the channels that are really working well for you will help you to create and generate those leads.

And in the long run, knowing what channels are working for, you will help you to continue to grow your business. Having a strategy behind that knowledge helps you to really accelerate the growth of your business. So make sure that you sit down and really create, map out a strategy for the fourth quarter. What is it you wanna do when you wanna do it? How you wanna do it, all of the pieces that go around really creating a business for you.

Now, I will tell you this; and it's while it's not a secret to marketers, it is, I don't know, not necessarily talked about enough. The fourth quarter is a horrible time to try to launch something without having some kind of audience behind it. Reality is, is if you want to launch some new thing in the fourth quarter, you need to start generating your leads right now, keep in mind that your marketing efforts generally pay off around the 90 day-ish mark after you've started them. So if you start generating leads right now in 90 days, when you do that launch, you will actually have a pool of people to launch into. It will save you time, money, effort, and frustration. If you really start planning for that now.

So if you know that you want to open doors to a new program or a new course, or you're wanting to create a new mastermind group, or even if you have a mastermind group and you're looking to open up the doors to the next one, make sure that you're starting that process now.

The thing about planning now means that later you are going to feel less overwhelmed and less anxiety about it. Some of the things that you're gonna wanna make sure you, you create is your marketing collateral, which means content and video and images and all of those kind of things. And if you think about it, the holidays are so much fun when it comes to creating those kind of collaterals, because you can pick up, let's say Halloween and create a whole theme around Halloween and the whole month of October or fall or whatever the thing is that you may enjoy talking about, or the branding portion of, really run with that and start creating that collateral now.

Start creating those blog posts and those, those social media posts and the videos and, and all of the pieces that go along with really creating an effective marketing presence online. If you do it now, it will save you so much time. And then you won't feel so overwhelmed when you have other things coming in that involve family, or just time off for yourself.

Lastly, make sure that you know what your goal is for the fourth quarter, right? If we do not have a goal, we won't know if we've reached it. If we don't know what that goal is, we, it makes it really hard to make that plan, to hit that goal. And without a map, without a plan, without a blueprint, without whatever it is you wanna call it, it's going to end up creating frustration and time and quite possibly failure when it comes to this year-end marketing effort.

Really creating those goals and also remembering to stay flexible and adaptable when it comes to the plan itself. I mean, let's be honest. I had a client, I don't know, two weeks ago in the middle of a launch. And I get an email from her that says Facebook has kicked her off for no real reason, whatever Facebook's reason was that day. But she was off Facebook for 24 hours in the middle of the launch when she was supposed to be online, giving, you know, some videos and, and being there for her audience. And she was flexible and adapt it all and still pivoted and had a successful launch. And it was amazing.

So keep in mind that while we want a map and while we want a blueprint and while we want to be able to have the what, why, how, and when everything is going to happen, having a little bit of flexibility and adaptability will make our lives easier along the way. So if you really want to grow your business, increase your revenue, and scale your impact, make sure you plan for the fourth quarter. And if you need some help, head over to yourmarketingmatchmaker.com and sign up for a free 30 minute call to see how we might be able to help you do just that.

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.