In this week’s episode of the Christian Business Advantage podcast, we’re wrapping up our October series, “How to Market Your Business in the 4th Quarter of the Year“! We take a closer look at how to assess this year’s marketing efforts and set the stage for a successful start to the new year. We’ll cover essential steps, including analyzing your marketing metrics, gathering and using customer feedback, budgeting for next year’s initiatives, and establishing fresh marketing goals for 2025.
Whether you’re promoting books, services, or speaking engagements, this episode will guide you in reviewing what worked well, what to adjust, and how to make data-driven decisions for next year! I’ll share insights on how to gather valuable customer feedback and budget effectively to maximize your marketing impact. Don’t forget to join our free training this Thursday October 31st in the Christian Business Advantage Facebook group, where I’ll walk you through creating a fourth-quarter marketing plan that sets you up for success!
The four main topics we’ll discuss are analyzing marketing metrics, collecting customer feedback, budgeting for next year and setting new year marketing goals.
1. Analyzing Marketing Metrics
Review what worked in this past year. What are the efforts that you made?
Did you utilize blogging? Did you utilize being a guest on a podcast? Did you have your own podcast? Did you utilize social media?
What were the avenues that you used to get the word out about your books, services or your speaking? What worked well?
Another item to review would be networking. Did you attend some events this past year that were particularly profitable and allowed you to meet a lot of new people?
What gave you the best ROI or return on investment for the things that you utilized? Look back and see what you might want to continue to invest in and pursue in the new year.
2. Collecting Customer Feedback
A second step is to collect and use customer feedback to refine your offerings, especially if you are a speaker or a coach. You gain valuable customer feedback by creating surveys and having people fill them out.
If you go to speaking events, you could create a survey to see if people are resonating with what you are sharing. If you are a coach, you could create a survey and send it via email to those who were in your coaching programs or who are coaching 1:1 with you. These will provide feedback on what you are offering.
There is a strong program called Survey Monkey that I have utilized and used with my clients. I recently used it to create a survey and I noticed that there was an AI feature that helped me to create the specific questions. This was practical because sometimes you don’t know what to ask. I typed, “I’m looking to create a feedback survey, this is my target market and this is what I’m offering them. Help me to create questions.”
Sometimes you have to offer an incentive for people to actually fill out this type of feedback form. So maybe offer a one-time discount or even say you’ll be entered into a drawing or giveaway if you fill out this feedback form.
3. Budgeting For Next Year
Let’s talk about budgeting for 2025. Start planning for next year’s marketing budget and resources.
Think about what you’re going to invest in and what you’re going to utilize in the form of time and money.
Some things have a monthly fee and some come up once a year when you may attend a live event. We have to think about these as we prepare for next year and plan for what we are going to need to invest. So look over your budget.
What do you absolutely need to keep in the budget? What can you cut if you need to make cuts? Just spend some time thinking.
4. Setting New Year Marketing Goals
Finally, set new year marketing goals. You want to decide, what are your monetary goals?
What are some possible goals, like the number of speaking events or creating a new coaching program? Do you want to have a set number of one-on-one coaching clients? All of those types of questions will help you to look forward to the new year and decide what your efforts are going to be.
To make sure you’re putting this into practice and taking actionable steps, create a survey over on Survey Monkey to send out.
Another thing that I have found useful is to Google for a budgeting template. I’m a spreadsheet girl. I like spreadsheets, but there’s also printable templates if you want to write it out on paper. Spend time putting these ideas into action.
Remember my team and I, at Alyssa Avant and Company, offer lots of things that would help you with marketing! If you would like to schedule a free consult to talk about your 2025 marketing strategy, I would love to do that!
I hope this series “How to Market Your Business in the 4th Quarter of the Year” has been helpful for you. If you haven’t listened to the other episodes, go back and listen to those especially last week when I had business coach and strategist, Theresa Taylor on the podcast. Listen here to what she shared with us about using social media marketing in the fourth quarter.
I will be back next week with a brand new topic for the month of November!
Questions? Join the Group!
If you have specific questions about hosting a virtual summit, I’d love to get those because that would help me to make sure that I’m covering everything that you’re interested in knowing during this series on the podcast. You can submit your questions inside The Christian Business Advantage Facebook group. I look forward to seeing you there!
