We are nearing the last quarter of the calendar year and for marketers, there are typically two big tasks that tag along this time of year: first, keeping your marketing on track to finish the year with strong sales and, second, to plan for the next year. Let’s take a look at both.

It was George Bernard Shaw that said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” During this last quarter of the year, you may be working for the unreasonable boss who is demanding you intensify your marketing efforts to meet your sales goals. Is that an unreasonable mandate? Is that like asking a strong man to push the earth an inch off its axis – energy wasted in futility? Does pushing harder with marketing really work? Yes it does if you go about in the right way. When marketing is built correctly, it informs consumers of your products and services with the intent of giving them enough information to entice them to consider buying. This transition from awareness to considering a purchase is what needs to intensify during the final push of the year. That is all predicated on how well you did in making your brand known before this point. If you have planned well, earlier in the year you started a marketing cycle in which you made potential customers aware of your brand. Then you presented two key marketing ideas to these prospects: how your brand could solve their problem (or make them feel better) and how it was different from other brands claiming to do the same thing. If you effectively communicated these two ideas to your prospects, you are ready to make the final push for a sale.

That leads to the second part of the marketing emphasis for the last quarter of the year: making marketing plans for next year. If there is a big push (like described above) at a certain time of the year, it is important that you build your marketing strategy around that push and back up from there. You will need to have some sort of awareness campaign to warm consumers up to your brand. Be sure to track not only how much traffic your awareness campaign is driving your way, but also how engaged those consumers are. You will have to make an appeal to their sense of wholeness as a result of purchasing your brand. You will also want to emphasize your uniqueness. In other words, why is your brand the best for them? Then build your campaign to make a transition to selling. Give a new customer an incentive to buy from you. Do this as a campaign during the most crucial purchasing time for your customers.

Don’t plan on stopping after the sale. The best marketing plans take into account the customer experience before and after the transaction. Keeping customers engaged with your brand is key to growing your business. So if you are putting together a plan for next year, don’t just look at the final push, but build around it - before and after – to market successfully throughout the entire year.

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Man and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw