Blake Beus 0:00 q4 advertising like Black Friday just happened. Everybody's gearing up for q4. And you you were saying? You're getting asked a lot of questions about how to plan and prepare for the holiday season? Greg Marshall 0:15 Well, you know, in a lot of ways we all of us adults never quite fully grow up. Now, let me explain to you how I remember in school when you had a paper and you knew that paper was going to be due months in advance, but then you wait to the last minute to do it. Similar to the advertising strategies, and q4. If you're trying to do it in q4, it's too late and too expensive. No. And I actually recommend if you're going to do you should be planning your q4 advertising. Now for next year, yeah, right. So I usually advise my clients, they should be investing the most money possible in the month of January to about June to July. And the reason why I advise that is because that's when ad costs are the lowest. And ad costs are the most expensive, and q4. So what you want to do is you want to invest heavy early on, build up a big email list text messages, customer base, retargeting audiences. And then when q4 comes, you can keep your ad spent either the same, or even drop it and invest more into sending out the texts and emails. That's how you'll get fantastic returns. Blake Beus 1:28 Right? So and a lot of people don't don't think about this and don't think about what you're how our ad costs calculated. And so I always tell people, it's kind of like the stock market if you're bidding on on sets of eyeballs. Yep. Right. And so the more people that want those sets of eyeballs, the higher the cost is because you have to bid more. Yep. To get that attention. And so if you understand that concept, then you can plan based on seasonal thing. Yeah. But so yeah, you're you're saying spend more, put your dial in your strategy. Do all of that from July, with January, sorry, January to July ish. So you have everything down? Exactly. build your email list, because email, email marketing is cheap. Yeah, this is why it has such a high ROI. Yep. Greg Marshall 2:17 And email, text message, all that stuff, drives the most repeat purchases the most sales and and you pay the lowest amount. And you have to look at as you're investing for q4 early on. Yeah. And if you wait too long, your list will be too small. Your retargeting audiences will be too small, and you won't be able to capitalize on q4. And this is when most people want to really make things happen. So I feel like investing heavy, January especially, is a good idea. So yeah, I personally think January investing in January is the most important simply because that's almost a hangover, all the spin of q4, everyone leaves the market. And so then this your CPMs your ad costs will go down. You're just not competing with as many people as you are, right now the month of November and this specially November, right? Because of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Blake Beus 3:23 So what do you like? Like, because the other thing I talked with people about? And I want to get your thoughts on this? Because I don't think we've talked about this specifically. But should should part of your planning process include what offers you're going to offer in q4, and then also in q1 next year or whatever. And yeah, what do you recommend people? How do you recommend people think about those offers? Everybody's looking for a deal on Friday? What like How should people structure Greg Marshall 3:49 those? Well, I still think you should come up with your offers, and then that will actually drive who you want to advertise to anyways, right? Because you want to make sure you have the list of people that would be attracted to those offers. And then when you think about offers, you have to think like, you know, let's say you're in retail, right? Or you're you're you're selling clothing or products, physical products, you have to think like Okay, can I get shipments in on time? Yeah, to make sure I have enough volume and stuff to sell. What is seasonal? Like, what is popular during that time? What are people like, willing to spend more on or less on? What are your biggest profit margins and really think that through? Because if you do instead of a last minute trying to think of a deal, you never make your best decisions. Last minute, like thinking about, I need to hurry up, put some out there. Instead, think about the offers away in advance and just think, what is it that I if I had like I have a client right now. I did a great job over the summer of planning on getting the inventory that she needs now to sell to basically not prevent her from scaling it up. And she's out At this most you did $100,000 in sales with this product. And before we've kind of done that multiple months, multiple times in the past, but we couldn't because we didn't have the inventory. But we use this strategy of planning out our offer is going to be this product when Black...
