Tis the Season: Here’s How to Make it Sing

Q4 is an interesting time in the channel. I have weathered many a peak, only to see the period get longer and the pressure to perform grow greater and greater.

What often hasn’t become greater, though? The budgets, the time, or the ability to balance everything for any performance channel lead carrying the weight of a forecast.

As we all know, it's not just one week or one day anymore, but a long period starting in September and running through to the launch of Boxing Day sales. Therefore..

Be present early; people rarely buy from a brand they’ve just heard of

PPC and Paid Social build audiences and prospect early. This can mean a lower ROI as you invest in being present while people are researching and not buying. But it means you can essentially create warm leads: people who have interacted with you, maybe saved your content or screenshotted it in advance, and are excited or more open to buying when your offer hits!

Genie Shopping shared stats last year showing that over a third of Black Friday transactions came from clicks way before the day itself. Don’t rely on being discovered in the noise!

I saw this in practice myself when we did content on The Independent for a jewellery brand. We started in late October/November; the first couple of weeks yielded clicks only, but they were healthy clicks that kept building up.

Around two weeks before Black Friday sales started - their actual Black Friday sale had been live since early November, but it took a couple of weeks of the article being seen alongside all their other brand work to hit.

The real hook of this? It was being surfaced in Google AI Overviews for Black Friday Gifting terms as almost a top result. There was a massive spike in referrals via Gemini during this time, which was relatively flat through the rest of the year. I can hand on my heart, say it was this content.

Oh, and it went on to drive sales, but early on, the KPI was eyeballs on the brand! The same KPI that other channels had at this time.

Consumer journey reality vs. idealistic ‘my consumer doesn’t do that’ approach

The old funnel doesn’t really exist anymore, and customers ultimately shop in ways that don’t always fit in with an idealistic brand value. For example, people will hold out for deals; they will be savvy at using cashback and closed user group codes.

I always tell brands to take a step back and think of that consumer journey and how their products can be purchased. If you have a pretty developed wholesale strategy or sell on Amazon, there are multiple ways a customer can access you or get cashback/deals even if you don’t offer them yourself.

We can’t be idealistic and think that if you sell on a marketplace and on your own DTC site, and the marketplace has a good closed user group code or cashback rate, they will purchase directly from your DTC site due to their love of the product alone.

It’s an expensive time of year; customers are in an offers mindset and will make sure they get that deal. As a brand, the decision you make comes down to how much you want that consumer directly and the tactical things you can do.

I’m a firm believer in not racing to the bottom by eroding all your margins to compete. In fact, as a brand, you often have the ability to offer a higher rate on cashback or a stackable code site-wide.

For me, the win here is removing friction and thinking for the consumer!

If your closed user group code only works on full price and your whole site is on sale, then that code is pretty much redundant over a sale period.
If your sale period is a month long, that may represent a high percentage of customers who don't purchase.

What if you switch your code to a much lower, stackable code that works site-wide? Always think about margin, but I have seen this tactic work brilliantly with no invested tenancy and a happy consumer who, once they click through, has a great experience, no broken journey, and doesn’t head off elsewhere.

Decide how you want to be present; don’t break yourself financially, but be really honest about how a consumer may buy. I would rather pay the best cashback rate I can to close a customer than spend through the nose on high CPCs as competition rises just to try to get that customer to check out.

Going early often does work, and so does consistency

There is a lot of tension for brands on when to launch a sale, and tension for consumers about when to buy and whether they will miss out on a better price.

There is no real science here, other than that I’ve typically seen earlier work better a lot of the time (you can cut through the noise). And actually, if you are offering your best price from the start and have no intention of going deeper, then own that and make it a core message!

This can be pretty powerful for brands:

Set your best sale price at the start.
Say it’s your best price with no more discounts.
Reassure your customers that if they like that product, buying now is okay! They are not missing out.

I actually love this approach for products that might be higher priced or have a slightly longer consideration cycle.

If you go down the line as a brand of having extra discounts around the big weekend itself, create opportunities to cut through the noise with your placements and reasons to buy from you. A lot of the big marketplaces are the ones that go really heavy around the Black Friday weekend itself and have deep pockets; you need to be able to get your discounts out there.

This is where that audience building and being present earlier can come in—messaging around delivery or exclusive stock can maintain a point of differentiation. Or, if you can and you have a better margin than maybe a big marketplace, use that to create those slightly better cashback rates or stackable offers.

Looking ahead

This is undoubtedly an exciting time of year! And perhaps peak 2026 will look even more different, with more research than ever happening within LLMs, with ads in ChatGPT, and with Google leaning more than ever into the upper funnel.

The affiliate channel really comes into its own in Q4; the unstable CPCs and costs of other channels can mean affiliate marketing provides some certainty in reaching consumers in a more efficient way.

But it’s not just efficiency—it’s the realisation that some affiliates are the places consumers actively choose to shop through. If the funnel is dead, then don’t think of affiliate partners as top and bottom, but as demand capturers: