5 Things Marketing Leaders Should Focus on in Q4

How to close out the year right by evaluating your progress and planning ahead

October is upon us, which means the dreaded Q4 scramble has begun. If you lead a marketing team, you know that whether your business is peaking in Q4 or slowing down, it's still arguably the most important quarter of the business year.

Here are five key focus areas that every good marketing leader should concentrate on during the final months of 2023.

1. Motivate the team for one final push.

For some industries, Q4 is a slower time of the year when purchase decisions are put on hold and budgets are cut. For others, it's the busiest three months of the year that can make or break a revenue plan.

Regardless of the industry you're in or your business' seasonality, every marketing team should be gearing up for one last big push. One grand finale if you will.

It's easy to take the foot off the gas in Q4, especially if you're ahead of your annual goals. However, keeping your team motivated to deliver right up to December 31st is important. It keeps momentum going and can also be a great time of year to say 'Thank You' to new or loyal customers.

So, build that Q4 campaign (even if you need to rely more on organic tactics due to budget), send out those holiday cards and gifts, ask for those testimonials and keep driving those MQLs / SQLs!

2. Do a bottom up analysis of how the year will end.

Don't wait until the end of the year to analyze how your team has performed. Use the data you've collected during Q1, Q2 and Q3 to do a deep dive into:

1. Marketing's revenue contribution to the business

2. The ratio between lifetime value and cost to acquire

3. Average cost per qualified lead and acquisition

4. Average number of qualified leads driven per month

5. The most efficient sources at driving acquisition and ROI

Doing this analysis at the very beginning of Q4 will help you to set a baseline (if you don't have one already), help you project whether you'll hit or miss your 2023 goals and help prepare you for developing 2024 plans.

3. Celebrate your team's successes.

Everyone gets caught up in day-to-day challenges and projects, making it easy to forget to celebrate your wins along the way.

Don't rely on your holiday party or company gifts to make your employees feel valued. Take the information you analyzed and turn it into a reason to celebrate the work the team has achieved thus far.

There is no better way to head into a new fiscal year than with a team who feels valued and energized to take on even more in the 12 months ahead.

4. Align with leaders on 2024 goals and priorities.

Whether you are the Chief Marketing Officer or lead a function within the larger marketing team, you should understand what success means to the business.

Meet with your CEO, your senior leadership, your boss and your peers from other departments to align on how 2023 is closing out and to set your sights on 2024.

If you're part of the senior leadership team, then take an active role in shaping the company's goals for next year with marketing being a key growth lever. If you're not a direct participant, then make sure you have transparency to their goals and priorities ASAP so you can develop your own plans for supporting the overall business.

5. Develop a 2024 plan (and budget) using a top down approach.

Once you've aligned on the key business goals for 2024, you should develop a strategy for how marketing will contribute to not just meeting them, but beating them.

While annual plans rarely stay the course for an entire year, it's important to still set a roadmap for Q1-Q4 so that you have time to build toward success quarter-over-quarter and set realistic timelines.

Use the benchmarks you collected from Q1-Q3 2023 data to reverse engineer a model that starts from the top down, but can be adjusted from the bottom up too. Meaning, if you drove on average...

... and next year the business wants to 2x its growth then, at the same rate of efficiency you'll need to drive...

How will you and your team do that?

You can become more efficient at the same (or similar) spend levels — reducing your cost per acquisition to get more from your budget, increasing your conversion rates along the funnel and improving your organic efforts to drive more leads at little to no cost.

Or you can spend more — ramping up your investment on your most efficient channels, expanding your marketing efforts by activating new channels and heavying-up spend during key months and in key markets.

The reality is, you should be doing BOTH: becoming more efficient while also ramping up spend, especially if you're leading a marketing team at a high-growth company. However, you'll need to build the strategy, budget and projections model to sell in that bigger level of investment.

Q4 can fly by in the blink of any eye.

Don't wait until December or even January to dive deep into your 2023 performance, align on 2024 goals, set your annual plan and keep your people motivated for the days and months ahead.