Q4 & Holiday Marketing Starts NOW! 🎁⛄️ Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 366

0:01What up? Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's dig into some tips and some randomness. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast presented by Marigold. And yeah, I know it's hot everywhere. I know it's the summer. You're probably like, hey, I'm going to a barbecue this weekend. But you know what? That's actually not the mindset of consumers and business professionals coming out of the whole July 4th period. Believe it or not, towards the middle of July, we flip a switch. On our consumer side of our brains, we're actually thinking about the holiday season.

0:42And on the business side of our brains, we are thinking about Q4. And you're like, no, I'm not ready for that. I can't, I need some time, I need a break. Sorry, let me share with you some stats and then we can share with you some tactics that work really, really well, literally coming out of this, all this July 4th stuff. So Google came out with this study that this year, 34 % of US consumers are going to start holiday shopping in early July. That's up from 28 % last year. And Gartner reports that 32 % will start their holiday shopping in July as well. Now, what's wild is, do you realize that July 10th to July 15th, that is a peak spike day for the phrase holiday marketing on Google.

1:31That's according to Google's data. So it's not like you can wait around for you to start seeing decorations in Costco in October. It doesn't work that way. How about on the B2B side? So LinkedIn shared this data, which kind of really was upsetting. 68 % of Q4 deals start in the summer. Oh my goodness. And HubSpot came out with this data. There's 170 % increase in ROI when you launch during a summer low competition period. And the last one from Forrester, 62 % of sales teams who missed their Q4 targets because they had weak Q2 and Q3 prep. Listen, if I sent you an email right now and the subject line says, here's the latest trends for Q3, you'd be like, Q3, who cares?

2:18We're in it already. I don't need to know about the trends. I'm in it. What we care about right now coming out of this July 4th period is the end of year. It's the race to the end of year. So what should we be doing like yesterday? So on the business side first, we need to be talking about Q4. So after this July 4th period, what do we see? This is pretty wild. Subject lines that reference Q4 instead of Q3, meaning the quarter, in their subject lines. After July 4th, Q4 has a 14 % higher average open rate. So things like back from BBQs, let's build Q4. Or Q4 starts now, your roadmap inside. This is bananas.

3:01Okay, now on the consumer side, after July 4th, subject lines that reference the holidays have a 22 % increase in open rate versus those that don't. So subject lines, should we bring this back for the holidays? or secret holiday deal. And you might be saying there, well, I don't do that. I don't prep now for the holidays. I wait much longer. But would you like to be late to the game? Would you like your competition to get in front of your customers and your prospects for their Q4 buys or for their consumer holiday shopping? It's not always about what you do. It's about testing everything and getting in their mindset of the people that you're marketing to.

3:40So on the social media side, it's the same thing. your social media headlines. Coming out of the July 4th period, we see that Q4 themed headlines on the B2B side drive a 25 % higher engagement than those that are talking about Q3 content. And this is starting in July. So you do carousel posts and things like, here's what's coming in December. Yes, comma, already. Or we're already prepping our Q4 whatever guide. Whatever it is, on the consumer side, it's the exact same thing. You could be doing offers and social posts and things like, is your tree up? Or these will sell out this holiday season.

4:22And then you do a carousel of the hottest items that are going to sell out. Or the holiday comeback collection. Listen, I know it's ridiculous. I know it's like 5 billion degrees everywhere. I'm in South Florida. I get it. It doesn't feel like we should be thinking about Q4. But here's the thing. It is way better to be too early than too late. So what you want to do is you want to test this. Is this guy Jay who's super random? Is he onto something or not? Send out one email with a subject line that talks about Q4 or the holiday season. Post one piece of content from your company page or whatever that talks about pre-holiday or Q4 whatever.

4:58Okay. Rename an offer or a lead magnet, something related to holiday season or Q4. See if it actually does pull better. See if it actually does anything. It's an easy test and it's far better to get ahead of things than be behind things. All right. I have a super ridiculous topic for since you didn't ask, which I'm going to get to in a second. But I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Emma from Marigold. Oh, no, it's an ad. Let's ignore Jay. He's a dork. Maybe true, but this is not dork. So Emma from Marigold is an email sending platform. It is amazing for loyalty campaigns, retention campaigns, SMS campaigns, you name it.

5:40I've been using Marigold's platform forever. We sent out billions of emails. And just for the listeners of this podcast, okay, you can get 50 % off for three months of Emma. All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com slash Emma. That's jschwedelson.com slash E-M-M-A. I should have made the offer named Dork. That probably would have done better. But anyway, they're not dorks. Check them out. Great, great stuff. All right, let's get into Since You Didn't Ask. So I was looking at all this podcast stuff because, hey, I got a podcast. And I've come to the conclusion everybody on the planet has a podcast.

6:15It is now out of control how everybody has a podcast. What do I mean? I just saw this. I don't know if you saw this. Do you remember Blue's Clues, like the thing with the dude who had a dog, a blue dog, and they would look for clues to try to solve these little mysteries. And this guy was the host of it, Steve Burns. Okay. Well, that dude who, by the way, is now 51, which is kind of mind blowing. He hosted it. I don't know if like 15 years or whatever. He is now has a podcast. It's called Alive. And it's all about exploring life's like mysteries and complexities and whatever. And I'm like, what is going on?

6:53Everybody's got a podcast. So then I had to go down a rabbit hole and be like, well, who else has a podcast that I don't know about that is super random? So then I found, I don't know if you know about any of these, but I gave them all a try because I have no life. I tried Pod Meets World. Did you know this exists? This is all about Boy Meets World. The people are on Boy Meets World. Ryder Strong and Danielle Fishel and that dude Will whatever. This podcast, what they do is they rewatch the 1990s show and they share behind the scenes stories. This is wild. One of their most recent episodes was the name of the podcast episode was The Lizzie McGuire Movie.

7:34I mean, that is so random, and I can't believe they exist, and they pump out a lot of episodes. Then I saw another one because now I'm looking for everything ridiculous. Joey Lawrence from Blossom. I like Joey Lawrence. He hosts a podcast with his brothers that talk about 90s nostalgia. Their most recent episode was – this was the name of it. Tom Cruise's best movies. Okay. They ranked Tom Cruise's best movies. What? I mean, I thought my podcast was like useless. That's actually might be useless. And then I saw, this is my favorite one because I'm a, I'm a loser that watched this show a lot. So there was a show called Melrose Place, which was like a spinoff show to 90210.

8:19This was the greatest TV show of all time, Melrose Place. Okay. Everything about it was amazing. There is a podcast called still the place. This is wild. And it's with Laura Layton, Courtney thrown Smith and Daphne, uh, Zuniga. These are like the three big stars from Melrose place. And what they do is they revisit everything. Then that the show, like their most recent episode was called all I need is Jack Wagner. Now I'm dating myself here, but I'm going to tell you right now, this is the type of content that needs to be out there. This is amazing. I don't know about this podcast. By the way, Megan Markle's podcast stopped.

8:57She stopped her podcast at 14 episodes, which is kind of, you know, whatever. I will say here's our victory lap. We did pass her like the week before she stopped. So this podcast got ahead of hers on the business charts. So sorry, Megan. But anyway, I appreciate you all. I want do nothing else. Don't even you don't have to do anything about my show. You need to go and try those random shows. I don't know why, because that is an epic waste of time, and we all need to waste more time. I appreciate you being here, and yeah, happy holidays. Later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

9:32Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.