Q4 Marketing Tips To Boost Your End-of-Year Marketing Strategy

During the final quarter of the year, brands and businesses face one last opportunity to make a big impact before the end of the year. Whether it’s optimising your ad spend, improving your website performance or crafting seasonal content that converts, our team shares their effective marketing tips for a strong Q4 plan.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Tips

Q4 is one of the most competitive times of the year for paid search, with consumers actively looking for deals and gifts. A carefully optimised paid search strategy can help you capture high-intent traffic, maximise ROI, and ensure your ads stand out during peak shopping periods.

Plan and Prepare in Advance:

Plan your budget in advance to cover your entire Q4. Make sure you leave room for increases on key dates.
Prepare seasonal creatives.
Ensure conversion tracking is working correctly.

Analyse Historical Data:

Identify and prioritise high-performing products from past Q4s.
Analysing historical data for performance patterns is useful for planning your budget.

Showcase Your Offers Clearly:

Have a clear plan of all the offers you will be running throughout Q4.
Ensure landing pages reflect them clearly.
Test all promo codes to make sure they’re working correctly.
Stay competitive on offers and pricing.

Use Automation and Monitoring:

Use automated bidding strategies for learning prior to peak Q4 dates.
Monitor performance to avoid budget exhaustion during peak hours.
Check the Merchant Center for disapprovals.
Use promo assets and Merchant Promotions to boost visibility.
Use scripts for account/product monitoring.
Refresh and update audience lists.

The holiday season is prime time for paid social media campaigns, with audiences spending more time on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Q4 is your opportunity to reach the right people with targeted, engaging ads that increase brand awareness and drive clicks and conversions.

Launch Your Campaign Early:

Launch early to avoid high Q4 Cost Per Mile or Cost Per Thousand (CPM).
Run warm-up campaigns (video views, engagement, etc.).

Carefully Consider Your Budget Allocation:

Prioritise 60–75% of spend for peak weeks. Use automated rules to scale when performance is strong.
Stay price-competitive and adjust pricing if needed to boost volume.
Consider setting up automated rules such as budget increases once Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or conversion volume target is being met. With Black Friday in particular, running this rule daily can help maximise your efforts.
If your products are not selling well, keep checking the market and see if your price is competitive. Don’t be scared to drop your product pricing to sell more volume.

Monitor Engagement and Performance:

Marketing materials can fatigue quickly, especially on TikTok! Ensure you are monitoring engagement rates and performance and quickly swap those out with fresh new material.
Preparing ‘swap outs’ in advance can help make this process more efficient.

Market Your Products as Gifts:

Highlight the gifting potential of your products and use urgency (e.g. limited stock, end dates).

Build Your Audience:

Leverage Meta’s algorithm. Larger audiences often yield better results.
Create and target warm custom/lookalike audiences.

Have a Fast and Mobile-Ready Website:

A fast and mobile-friendly website is crucial in 2025. Slow and hard-to-navigate websites are the last thing you want when you’re paying to send traffic there!

Utilise Email Marketing:

Email sign-ups can be a key way to squeeze every last value out of the Black Friday period.
The more sign-ups to your newsletter, the more future Lifetime Value (LTV) customers you may get! Make this a strong focus on your website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tips

Q4 is a critical period for capturing high-intent traffic, especially as consumers search for seasonal deals, holiday gifts, and year-end services. Focusing on your search engine optimisation can help your brand stand out during this competitive time.

Identify Key Products:

Focus on boosting key product ranges for Black Friday/Christmas.

Target Seasonal Search Terms:

Use tools like Semrush to find seasonal search terms your audience is likely to use (e.g. Christmas gifts under £30).

Create Dedicated Seasonal Pages:

Create/update landing pages with relevant keywords.
Use relevant keywords for your page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and within on-page content.

Ensure SEO and PPC Are in Sync:

Align SEO and PPC to stretch your ad spend further.

Add Seasonal Content to Your Strategy:

Target seasonal informational queries with blogs.
Use schema markup for visibility in AI tools.

Keep Seasonal Pages Indexed All Year Round:

Do not ‘no-index’ category pages like ‘Christmas Gifts Under £30’ once Christmas has passed.
Use Google Search Console to catch indexing issues.

Organic social media is a great method for building engagement, brand awareness, and community during Q4. With consumers spending more time scrolling for inspiration and festive ideas, your social media content needs to be timely, relevant, and shareable.

Plan and Schedule Ahead for Key Dates:

Prepare content in advance for key dates like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year to reduce last minute pressure.

Highlight Your Offers Organically:

Showcase promotions through Stories, Reels, and carousels, don’t just rely on paid ads.
Use countdown stickers and “link in bio” CTAs.

Utilise User-Generated Content (UGC):

Encourage customers to share photos with your products.
Repost UGC to build trust and engagement.

Run Engagement Campaigns:

Host giveaways, polls, Q&As, or holiday-themed challenges to boost interaction and reach.

Digital PR and Outreach Tips

Christmas is the busiest shopping season of the year, so it’s the ideal time to get your brand in front of audiences looking for Christmas gift inspiration. Through digital PR and outreach, early planning and the right angles can help you secure valuable placements in Christmas gift guides and seasonal features.

Start Planning for Christmas Early:

Journalists start sourcing products for Christmas gift guides as early as September (and even August!). Start planning in Q3 to get ahead and make the most out of opportunities.
Keep an eye out for any last-minute roundups closer to Christmas.

Make the Most Out of Gifting:

Identify the different angles your products could fit into as it’s not always one obvious one.
Think beyond “gifts for her” and “gifts for him” and consider the different budgets and topics journalists write about (e.g. “last minute gifts under £20”, “luxury stocking fillers”, and “wellness gifts for Christmas”).

Get Your Products Pitch-Ready:

Gather all the key product information (e.g. URLs, pricing, and USPs).
Make journalists’ jobs easier by providing high-res, cut-out images for easy use. It’s also good to add in some lifestyle imagery and provide a good variety of images to choose from.
Have your product samples ready to send out.

Tie In Seasonal Themes:

Align your content and pitches with seasonal themes.
Health, wellness, and productivity angles work well after the festive period (e.g. “New Year, New You” focus).
Only use festive themes if they fit your brand naturally. Relevance is key to journalists, so don’t force an angle if it isn’t relevant to your brand.

Email Marketing Tips

With so many seasonal sales, product launches, and holiday promotions competing for attention, your email marketing campaigns need to be smart, segmented, and perfectly timed. Well-crafted email campaigns can drive conversions and keep your brand front of mind through the busiest shopping season of the year.

Build Anticipation for Key Seasonal Dates:

Update sign-up forms and campaign content for Black Friday/Christmas.

Utilise WhatsApp Marketing:

Use Klaviyo’s new WhatsApp integration to send service messages for free or marketing campaigns right in their messages.

Focus on List Management:

Clean your lists to keep your costs down and segment active users.
If you have a big email list consider throttling email delivery to prevent your website from being overloaded.
Grow your email lists and entice people to sign up by offering ‘Early Sale’ discounts.

Review Your Flows and Automation:

Refresh email flows with seasonal messaging.
Consider adding incentives and delivery deadlines (e.g. Last Order for Christmas Delivery) to encourage pre-Christmas shopping.

Review and Learn from Black Friday Campaigns:

Use Black Friday data to understand audience behaviour and refine future campaigns.
Successful tactics could be incorporated into your January sales strategy.

Media Production Tips

Q4 is the perfect time for brands across all industries to elevate visibility and build emotional connections through seasonal content creation. From holiday campaigns and festive visuals to end-of-year reflections, your media production should capture the warmth and energy of this period.

Social media content in particular is a big focus for many brands. According to 2025 social media statistics from Hootsuite, short-form video content performs best across all platforms. Alongside this, Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform.

Make Your Content Emotional and Seasonal:

Photo and video content needs to fit the moment, build connection and conversions.
Content should also be emotional and not just promotional.

Keep Content Fresh for the New Year:

Update your content bank as 2026 approaches.

Plan Your Q4 Photography Ideas:

Carousel posts: post yearly recaps such as “how it started vs. how it’s going”, “Our favourite projects this year”, and “2025 in pictures”.
Seasonal shots: use festive visuals such as holiday props, colour tones, and festive backdrops. You can also boost awareness of Christmas Jumper Day!

Develop Creative Q4 Videography Ideas:

Holiday campaigns should be story-driven (e.g., “The gift of [your product/service]”).
Tie into New Year goals (“Start 2026 with…”).

Web Design & Development Tips

Web design and development is also important for Q4 as websites become one of your most valuable sales tools this time of year. With increased online shopping, limited-time offers and peak seasonal traffic, your site needs to perform under pressure. A slow user experience could mean missed conversions, especially during busy Black Friday and Christmas shopping periods.

Improve Your Site Speed:

Compress images (e.g. with Smush or WP Rocket plugins).
Enable browser caching for returning visitors (e.g. with WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache plugins).
Use dedicated hosting to handle traffic surges.

Prepare Holiday Content:

Create dedicated gift guides and holiday pages to capture seasonal search traffic and boost SEO and engagement.

Add Personalisation to Boost Conversions:

Boost your Average Order Value (AOV) by using user data to personalise offers.
Present customers with targeted recommendations and incentivise them to reach a higher spending threshold (e.g. free delivery, extra savings) by suggesting relevant complementary products.

Expert Marketing Tips for Your Campaigns

For this Q4, these useful marketing tips will help you boost your brand and create effective marketing campaigns.

If you’re looking for more advice on search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, or other digital marketing services, our team is happy to help! Contact us today for your FREE consultation.