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

Jay: 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.

Jay: 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, and on the business side of our brains, we are thinking about Q4. And you're like, no, I'm not ready for that. I, I can't. I need some time. I need a break.

Jay: Sorry. Let me share with you some stats and then we share with you some tactics that work really, really well. Literally coming out of this, all this, uh, July 4th stuff. So Google came out with this study that this year, 34% of US consumers are gonna start holiday shopping in early July. That's up from 28% last year.

Jay: 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. That'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.

Jay: 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.

Jay: Listen, if I sent you an email right now, the subject line says. Here's the latest trends for Q3. You'd be like Q3. Who cares? We're in it already. I don't need to know about the trends. I'm in it. What we care about right now, coming outta this July 4th period. Is the end of year. It's the race to the end of year.

Jay: 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, and their subject lines after July 4th. Q4 has a 14% higher average open rate.

Jay: So things like back from BBQs, let's build Q4. Q4 starts now. Your roadmap inside this is bananas. Okay, 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?

Jay: And you might be saying there, well, I don't do that. I don't prep now for the holidays. I wait much longer. 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.

Jay: So on the social media side, it's the same thing. Your social media headlines coming outta the July 4th period, we see the Q4 themed headlines on the B2B side drive a 25% higher engagement. Then 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.

Jay: Already, or we're already prepping our, uh, 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. Mark or these will sell out this holiday season and then you do a carousel of the hottest items that are gonna sell out, or the holiday comeback collection.

Jay: 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 wanna do is you wanna test this. Is this guy Jay, who's super random, is he onto something or not? Send out one email with the subject line that talks about Q4 or the holiday season.

Jay: Post one piece of content from your company page or whatever that talks about pre-holiday or Q4, whatever. Okay? Re rename a, an offer or a lead magnet, something related to holiday season or, 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.

Jay: To be behind things. Alright. I have a super ridiculous topic for, since you didn't ask, which I'm gonna 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, um, Emma from Marigold is an email sending platform.

Jay: It is amazing for loyalty campaigns, retention campaigns, SMS campaigns, you name it. I've been using Marigold's platform forever. We send out billions of emails. And just for the listeners, this podcast, okay, you can get 50% off for three months of Emma. All you gotta do is go to jay schon.com. Slash Emma, that's json.com/ema.

Jay: I should have made the offer named Dork. That probably would've done better, but anyway, they're not dorks. Check them out. Great. Great stuff. Alright, 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.

Jay: It is now out of control how everybody has a podcast. What do I mean? I just saw this, I dunno if you saw this. Do you remember Blues 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.

Jay: Okay. Well that dude who by the way is now 51, which is kind of mind blowing, he hosted it. I dunno, for 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? Everybody's got a podcast.

Jay: 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. 'cause I have no life. I tried Pod Meets World. Did you know this exists? This is all about, uh, boy Meets World.

Jay: I mean, that is so random, and I can't believe they exist and they pump out a lot of episodes. And then I saw another one because now I'm looking for everything ridiculous. Joey Lawrence, you know, from Blossom. All right, I like Joey Lawrence. He hosts a podcast with his brothers that talk about nineties nostalgia.

Jay: Their most recent episode was, uh, 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.

Jay: So there was a show called Melrose Place, which was like a spinoff show to 9 0 2 1 oh. This 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 Throne Smith, and Daphne, uh, Zuniga.

Jay: These are like the three big stars from Melrose's Place, and what they do is they revisit everything. Then the, the show, like their most recent episode was called, all I Need is Jack Wagner. Now I'm dating myself here, but I'm gonna tell you right now, this is the type of content that needs to be out there.

Jay: This is amazing. Um, this, I don't know about this podcast by the way. Meghan Markle podcast stopped. She stopped her podcast after 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 chart.

Jay: So sorry, Meghan. Um, 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 uh, yeah, happy holidays later.