8 things you can do to make Q1 less of a doozy than Q4

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Being a growth marketer in Q4 is not for the faint of heart. Every year, Q4 sneaks up on us again, and it’s like we completely forgot everything we learned last year about the importance of working ahead. Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks…

That said, there are plenty of things you can do now to work ahead, especially now that BFCM is behind us.

Here are eight of the best things you can do before the end of the year to make sure Q1 feels like less of a doozy than Q4.

1. Review the assumptions going into your growth model or finance forecast

If you have both a growth model and a finance forecast that pulls from your growth model, you’re already in great shape. Even if you have just one or the other, it’s important to validate that the assumptions being built in make sense.

If you expect Meta to be your primary source of scale next year, what’s the plan for getting there and how does that plan translate into the assumptions you’ll build into your growth model? If you’re expanding into a handful of new geographies in 2025, what assumptions is finance making about marketing reach in those geos, knowing not all cities, states, or countries are equal from a population standpoint?

Assumptions are just that, and they should be built in a way that forecasts growth on the whole. But they should also be viewed as collaborative stretch goals rather than totally outside the realm of possibility. Nothing wrecks morale and motivation like goals you know are entirely unobtainable.

2. Take stock of influencer and creator content, and whitelisting agreements

What influencer content performed the best for you this year? It’s worth revisiting agreements with those creators, and continuing or expanding on those partnerships. It’s also important to try to standardize your influencer agreement as much as possible so your team doesn’t have to manually keep track of individual contractual quirks.

While you’re at it, make sure you have whitelisting rights for an extended period of time for content that performs well (it’s worth the cost). You don’t want TikTok ads going dark on you unexpectedly, or creators revoking access to their Meta biz managers because you forgot to extend your rights.

And wherever you can, diversify creator content so you’re not reliant on just one or two long-standing ads.

3. Audit your search ad copy and search term reports

Paid search specifics often get overlooked — there’s often an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach to search since it’s intent based and not as “fun” to work on as paid social.

But there’s so much efficiency and scale you could be leaving on the table by ignoring your ad copy and search term reports.

Most brands hardly ever touch their ad copy. This could be for good reason — it’s hard to beat winning ads, especially as character limits on Google have become more restrictive over time. But checking on top ads to ensure both copy and extensions are still relevant and optimal for your business is something worth doing a couple times a year.

Your search term reports, on the other hand, are where you’re going to uncover some immediate opportunities, especially if it’s been a while since you perused these reports. It’s a mistake not to look at these regularly to add or negate keywords. You’ll probably find there are search terms you’re not bidding on that are converting efficiently, as well as search terms matching to your keywords (particularly if you over-index on broad match) that are not relevant, don’t drive quality conversions, and are costing you money.

4. Take a look at your top paid social creatives from the year

Grab all your top performing paid social creatives from the last year and drop screenshots and videos into some slides or a Figma board. What do they have in common in terms of hierarchy of information, messaging, and style or visuals? This is the time to use your qualitative brain, and create more of what’s working for 2025.

Bonus points: Do the same thing for your worst performing paid social creatives — both the ones that never got traction, and the ones that spent plenty but converted inefficiently.

5. Compare your source of truth to platform data

Most brands are using a CRM, BI tool, or some other database as their source of truth, instead of relying on Meta or Google conversion tracking as gospel. That said, in-platform conversion data is critical for real-time creative and budgeting decisions, as well as directional performance insights.

Compare your in-platform conversions to source-of-truth conversions by month. Keep in mind that platform attribution settings are likely to be more generous than any last-click attribution your source of truth is using.

There will almost always be a discrepancy, but if that discrepancy has grown over time, or is consistently larger than, say, 30%, you’ll want to investigate and fix what’s going wrong so you can make sure you trust platform data for those real-time optimizations.

6. Organize all your backlogs and lists of crazy ideas, to prioritize them for 2025

You’ve probably sat in meetings this year that turned into brainstorms or problem solving sessions, came up with some great ideas of data to analyze or ideas to test out, and then never got back to those ideas because the day-to-day of your job got in the way.

Hopefully you jotted those down in a note somewhere, or maybe you even have a formal backlog. Run through your notes and organize them into a clean list, decide what’s still relevant and worth doing, and prioritize them accordingly to get ahead for 2025 planning.

7. Review learnings from tests from the year

You’re probably running a lot of tests, all the time. And you probably don’t remember off the top of your head what you learned from that one landing page test or ad copy test from last February.

First, make sure your test results are organized into a central tracking document. Then, go back through all the tests from the past year and remind yourself what you tested and how your hypotheses held up. Maybe some of the results feel really obvious to you now, while others still feel like they should have panned out differently.

In any case, compiling all learnings from the year should surface some patterns, and give you a great jumping off point for planning a testing backlog for 2025.

8. Review how you’re documenting learnings, change logs, etc for repeatable growth

One of the themes here is good documentation, organization, and note-taking. If you don’t have any formalized system in place for documenting learnings, test results, or change logs, start with the one that will be most impactful based on upcoming priorities in 2025.

If you do have some centralized tracking in place, think about both adoption and ease of use across your team. Is everyone updating trackers regularly? Are there duplicative docs that could stand to be combined? Is the information within them useful? Are key insights and timelines easily distilled? Now’s a great time to think about process improvements for the upcoming year.

If you missed it earlier this year, here’s the framework I always start with to build a testing tracker.

✨ One marketing thing: The best article I’ve found so far on the pretty scary changes coming to Meta for advertisers in the healthcare, financial services, and political categories.

✨ One fun thing: This mini-documentary (~23 mins) about what Japan teaches its kids from NYT will make you feel all the feels.

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