Will your Q4 plan make or break your Christmas sales?

I’m Catherine Erdly, drawing on 25 years in retail trenches, and this episode of the Resilient Retail Game Plan podcast is your hands-on guide to prepping a joined-up Q4 marketing plan.

Featuring insights from PR guru Rosie Davis Smith, email strategist Katie Farrell, ad creative powerhouse Narada McCoy, and social storytelling pro Emily Hansen.

We cut past the shiny distractions to give you product business advice you can bank on, including practical inventory management tips, cash flow strategies for indie retailers, and bite-size marketing moves that punch above their weight.

Whether you’re chasing a Black Friday bounce or looking to scale your product business without burning out, you’ll get a real-world playbook—no jargon, no hype.

Why listen?

• Build a Q4 campaign that links PR, email, paid ads, and social to tell a story customers remember
• Land genuine press coverage (gift guides included) even if PR feels alien
• Craft emails that sell when you’re too busy to write another draft in December
• Squeeze more margin out of seasonal ads—and shift your budget like a pro
• Batch social content in one afternoon so you’ve always got stockroom-fresh posts, even in peak chaos
• Spot (and dodge) the biggest cash flow traps retailers fall into at peak

Let’s connect: DM me @resilientretailclub on Instagram with your favourite takeaway or guest suggestion for a future podcast episode. Don’t forget to follow, rate, and review the Resilient Retail Club podcast in your favourite retail podcast UK app.

And if you want fresh industry insight, check out my Forbes articles on retail trends - https://www.forbes.com/sites/catherineerdly/

Mentioned in this episode:

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What if I told you that the success of your entire Christmas season could

come down to the plans you're making right now? PR can lead to some

great sales at Christmas time. The brands that win in Q4

aren't the ones that post the most or spend the most. They're the ones with

a smart joined up marketing plan that cuts through the noise when customers are

ready to buy. The lot of trends are just a voiceover,

maybe a text overlay. In today's episode, I'm sharing how you

can create a powerful retail marketing plan for Peak 2025

with insights from four brilliant exper who know exactly what works

during the busiest time of year. Welcome to the

Resilient Retail Game Plan. I'm Catherine Edley and in the next few minutes

you're about to get powerful real world retail strategies from

insights shared both from my guests and myself, backed up by

my 25 years in the retail industry. Keep listening to learn how

to grow a thriving, profitable product business. Let's jump in

with this latest episode.

In this episode I'll walk you through the four pillars of a strong Q4

marketing strategy. PR, email,

paid advertising Listen to the Resilient Retail Game Plan

podcast available on all podcast platforms

now and social media. Hey, Follow me on Insta with

advice from experts who know how to get results. We'll cover how to build

your plan, where to focus your energy, and how to pull everything together into a

cohesive strategy. Peak season isn't just busy, it's

make or break. For many retailers. The competition for attention is

fierce. Ad costs spike and customers are flooded with choices.

Without a plan, it's all too easy to end up scrambling, reacting rather

than executing. A strong Q4 plan means you can map

out your campaigns around key dates from Black Friday and Cyber Monday to

postal cutoff times, and align your stock messaging and

promotions across every channel. It gives you time to build

anticipation, create irresistible content and avoid last minute

panic. So where do you start?

Well, let's begin with pr, a powerful way to build trust and get your

products in front of new customers. Rosie Davis Smith from PR

Dispatch is an absolute expert when it comes to getting small businesses

featured in the press. Something that's particularly powerful in Q4

when gift guides can drive serious traffic and credibility.

Rosie the holidays are prime time for gift guides and press coverage.

How can small businesses without much PR experience pitch themselves for

inclusion? The really great news is that over 30,000 products

are featured in both print and online in the UK press on the lead

up to Christmas, so loads of opportunity to get your small business

featured. If you've never done PR before, Christmas Gift guides are a

great way to start. They are looking for really great

giftable suggestions to include. So the first thing

to do is to figure out which publications you

should be pitching to. Now one thing to remember here is Christmas Gift

Guides. They will cover content that they wouldn't usually cover any

other time of year. So for example, Country Living will include

gifts for kids and Stylist will include gifts

for men. So I always say cast your net as far and as wide

as you possibly can when it comes to Christmas gifts

gift guides. The next thing is the contacts. This is something we

can definitely help you with at PR Dispatch. You're welcome to go and have a

look, but making sure you are contacting the right person that

is doing that Christmas Gift guide is crucial. It's a waste of your time sending

it to the wrong person or sending it to a generic inbox. And finally, the

pitch. So Christmas gift guide pitches are really simple kind of

paragraph on who you are, what your brand does, why it's different that

USP and then product suggestions. Now when

you're thinking about which products to pitch in, I really

think having a good look at your collection and picking five

to 10 products that someone would give to someone else

is a really good exercise. So that might be because of the price point

it sits at. It might be because of the packaging that it comes in. Maybe

it's a really giftable packaging. You know, it's a gift soap set or it's a

hamper, or it might be because of what the product is. So the product

is actually something that you could really easily give to someone else. For example,

an engraved passport case if you like. They're the three things

you should do to start pitching to the Christmas Gift Guide press.

Can you share some of the results that might be possible with PR at Christmas?

Obviously, there is an increased number of products featured in

gift guides on the lead up to Christmas. We had a member

last year that was featured in the Times both in print and online,

and he said that the sales off the back of that one piece

was better than the whole of Christmas and the previous year. So

PR can lead to some great sales at Christmas time. But

it's not all about sales. It's about credibility. It's

about awareness. It's about trust. It's about funneling that

coverage through your marketing so into your social media

and into your email newsletters, highlighting products that have

been featured and also sending it to stockists. If you do get

featured in a Christmas gift guide. Alerting that stockist that the product that

they start has been featured and would they like to reorder is a

great way to maximize any coverage that you are securing.

If a small business hasn't done much PR before Q4, is it too

late to gain some traction? What last minute PR opportunities or quick

collaboration ideas might still be achievable during the holiday season to drum up

a bit of extra buzz? So your lonely Christmas gift guides

do start compiling in July and through August.

Short lead are September and October, but there are still online

opportunities in Q4 so if you are

starting PR and Q4 you haven't missed out. We always recommend that you do

start in Q3 to make the most of the Christmas gift guide opportunities that they

are still compiling online gift guides. And with online gift guides they

normally run multiple gift guides so they won't just do one. We've

seen 3040 on one platform for example, so it's

not too late to get some last minute Christmas wins if you

do start in Q4. I love Rosie's

point about PR being more than just a one hit tactic. Think of press

mentions as content you can amplify, share on social, add to your

website and build trust with your audience.

From PR and brand awareness. Let's talk about how to keep that audience engaged

through email marketing. Katie Farrell is an email consultant

and she's all about helping product businesses use email strategically

and in Q4 this channel is a real revenue driver.

Katie, if people don't have all of their flows set up, what would you prioritize

getting done ahead of Q4? Just have as much done kind

of as early as you can just in case you get too

busy. It would be a real famous email was the thing that

like got pushed to the bottom. If that's the thing that's like bringing

in your sales during the season. So if we can get as many kind of

campaigns prior prep as possible then that will definitely help

later. If you feel a little bit time poor, you know that okay,

I've already got my campaigns more or less ready to go and they can just

be rolled out a little bit easier. Katie, what are some of your top

tips for planning and executing Q4 effectively from an email

marketing point of view? I know people don't want to

hear this. When it comes to planning your

email campaigns for Q4 you need to

start early. This is not a turn emails out

on a whim on a Sunday night or even a Sunday

morning when you should have had this going out Already. I

usually start in August just because I have a

plan. It's kind of like a well choreographed dance at this

point. It's just a case of refreshing and

rolling out the plan that's already made. So

start early. That would be my kind of top tip. Ideally

in August, just because it feels like

school starts back quite late this year. And, you

know, by the time you have like a week or two getting back into routine,

it's basically October. And then you're like, oh,

and now it's Q4 and there's so many other things to do

in September. Organizing your stock, making sure that's good going

in if you're a maker or creator, you know, making the things

and making sure you've got enough stock ready to sell, that sort of

thing. So if you can get ahead with your email marketing,

that's like, ideal when it comes to actually planning. When I

open our kind of planning template, I tend to actually start

in December and, like, work my way back. I'll do a big brain

dump of, like, these are all the emails that worked really well last year.

So I'll go through, like, what did we send last year? What did really well?

What had a lot of clicks? What type of, like, content did well on

Instagram? What kind of angles should we repeat? Then I'll do a

brain dump of, like, what's different this year? Have I got new things coming

in? You know, am I launching a different product? Am I, like, kind of

opening my Christmas shop on a certain day? Like, kind of what's

happening with my business? And then what I'll do is open up an

actual, like, planning template. So whether that's like a calendar or

we do it on a Google Sheet spreadsheet template, I'll take a look

at, like, Royal Mail's website of, like, when are their last posting

dates? Which you can usually kind of tell as

well on the calendar if they haven't announced them yet, because usually it's a little

bit later in the season. But you can kind of gauge based on previous years,

when those posting dates are going to be. But also, like, when do you want

to sign off for Christmas? When do you want your last post run to be?

And I usually start with that and, like, work my way back. So

if you know your last post date is going to be on, like the Friday

before Christmas, for example, then you need to think about, like, what is my

leave time? Like, if you have your stock already and you're just

dispatching, then, you know, you can put in an email kind of 24

hours before or 48 hours before saying like, the sleigh is about to

leave, don't miss the last run kind of thing. So you need an

email then. And then you need an email like a week before. And then you

need your gift guides. Then you've got Black Friday. Then you'll have

like Christmas collection launching. So I usually just work backwards

and then take a look at my brain dump list at the same time being

like, where does this make sense to fit in? Where does this make sense? And

then I identify all my gaps in my calendar and

that's when I'm like, great. Now let's come up with like new ideas. What

types of content worked well during the rest of the year? Can we repeat those

and put like a sensitive spin on them or are we going to run a

competition? That kind of thing. And then we kind of fill the gap. So

yeah, I guess in terms of planning, I'd start at the end and just work

my way back. Email marketing doesn't have to be complicated, but it does

need to be consistent. Just like Katie says, if you get your welcome

flow and abandoned cart email set up, you'll keep converting even when

you're not manually sending campaigns.

Now let's look at how you can amplify your reach with paid advertising.

Narada McCoy from Bravada UK knows how to make ad budgets

work harder than and his advice for Q4 is all about timing and

creativity. So, Narada, should small businesses start ads early

or save budget for key moments? My recommendation for small

business is not to start ads early, but save that budget because

you need to learn about your customer. You need to learn about your organic

first. And then when you learn a bit about that and the kind of customers

that buy from you, naturally you can leverage that data to

then start looking at ads. If you start with ads early, you're building a business

that is reliant on ads. Algorithms change, platforms

change. You don't want to be beholden to those. So I'd say

budgets for key moments, things like Q4, summer sale, new

product launches, but not straight out the gate. What's the best way to

budget for ads in Q4? There's two approaches I would take.

You've got one where you can focus and ensure that

you've got that even split across October, November, December

with slightly less than October because we know when we hit November you've got Black

Friday, December's gifting period. That's approach I'd like to

take if I want to keep my margins Intact. We know if you're doing heavy

discounting in Black Friday, there's a situation where you might sell more but your margins

are not as good. So typically, if I'm working with a business

where the margins are really important, I put a lot of budget in December, a

lot of it in November and a bit in October. A couple of things to

be mindful of, cut off dates from delivery. So December is actually about 70%

of a month. And November, the cost of your ads is higher.

So you need to think about what you can do with the budget. With that,

your cost per click goes up. The fighting for more attention because

everyone's running ads during Black Friday, you've really got to think about it from a

week to week basis. It's not about trying to do a flat budget. It's about

thinking about those key periods where customers are looking for you most

and acting accordingly, but also preparing for those

peaks. We know Black Friday is going to be a peak. You can go two

ways. You can either spend more to stand out in that period or

you can pull back budget because it becomes a bit of a race

to the bottom where whoever's got the most money kind of wins. What's working right

now on paid social for product based businesses? The biggest thing I've seen

in paid social when we talk About Meta and TikTok is creative diversity.

To give you a bit more context on that, it's the way the platform's

changed over the last three or four years. You can no longer target customers as

well as you could explicitly just looking at audiences, what they're

interested in because those targeting is going away. We're going to a place where your

creative in fact does the targeting. So for example, if you've got creative, say call

it a UGC ad that has a lot of Gen

Z people in it or is very Gen Z leaning. You're going to target

Gen Z people that even if you target a broad audience. So you need to

allow your creative to target your customer rather than using the

audience to target. The best way to get performance doing this is

splitting your ads into things we call content pillars where you are

having creative diversity across the board. Where one of your pillars might be campaign

imagery or E Comm imagery. So you know that high production imagery.

Run ads like that, but also run ads that are UGC where you got

customers who are trying on your product, showing their product,

showing reviews of the product that is one of your other pillars. Another pillar could

be founder content where you're talking about your journey, the Business how it came

about, some of the new products as well. Already you've got three pillars there.

Sometimes the fourth pillar is looking at how you can use graphic design, maybe things

like AI even to build different types of engaging

ads. So with those four different pillars, you've got four very

distinct and different types of ads that will target different customers, giving you more

opportunities to generate revenue. But there's also creative

volume. What we suggest most of our businesses we work with is running 10

ads every two weeks, so that's 20 ads in a month and trying to hit

all four of those pillars, whether it's UGC, AI or edited

ads, E comm or high production ads, and founder content,

but having that volume within it as well, that's what's going to keep you ahead

of the algorithm, keep you in front of customers because you never know what's

really going to work. That goes across Meta and TikTok. I think Nurada's point

about creative diversity is gold. It's no longer just about targeting

the right audience. Your creative has to speak to your ideal customer

as well as.

So finally, let's talk about social, the glue that connects all of these

efforts. Emily Hansen from Emma Lilly is brilliant

at helping small businesses create social content that actually connects.

And her approach for Q4 is all about planning and storytelling.

So Emily, the holiday season means social feeds get

flooded with seasonal content for a small brand on Instagram or

TikTok with limited resources. What types of organic posts have you seen really

engage followers during Q4? Any holiday themed content

ideas that work well without a big budget or a full production team

behind them? The first one will be unboxing. So if you've got a

product that you can really carefully unwrap on screen, if you can get a good

mic so you get the ASMR in there but really get your

customer excited about what's going to be in the box.

You'd be surprised how much engagement that gets, especially when it's

done slowly so it keeps the watch time up. Second would be

looking at your customers pain points. Now that seems like quite a general tip, but

I mean really neat down. So we work with family brands a lot so we

don't just say are you looking for a great gift guide for mum? Because

isn't everybody? And it's, you know, it's really generic. So I would look at the

really specific scenarios that your ideal customer is going to be in.

For example, narrow down on toddler tantrums that are

likely going to pop up in the change of routines during the

Christmas period. And I might write some kind of hook that

directly connects the parent who is flustered, is tired,

and maybe even a really niche example of a toddler tantrum. I have

lots of them because I've got toddlers. You can look at a really

specific pain point that you think might be extremely neat. Actually, you'll find is really

relevant to your audience and then narrow down that and then how your product can

answer the issue. And then finally

ugc. Now a name brings a price tag, but it's

substantially lower than the lack of influencer content. You can even do

UGC style if you're happy as the business owner or founder to

be in the camera in a shot. But if you can get your

product in situ so that your customer can see where it would fit into their

life, that's also really effective. Consistency is tough when you're a

one person marketing team during the holiday rush. What are some tips or hacks to

maintain a steady presence throughout Q4 when you're busy

fulfilling orders and doing everything else without burning out or dropping off

the radar? Sit down. You can get a few

reels plans to go out each week across the month

and then you have a filming day where you try and film them all and

just get them all done and schedule them if you can. You could also work

on some B roll. So it depends how you like to work your organic social,

but if you feature a lot on it, then if you

can fill the role of you working throughout the day doing different

business activities and then you can use that for lots of different reels with

voiceovers, putting them into different trends, all those sorts of things. So it's a

combination of priming and just setting one day

aside to get a bulk of stuff filmed. And finally Emily, what are your top

tips for creating a social media plan for Q4 that

balances preparing in advance with taking advantage of latest trends?

You want to match a combination of a backlog of

content alongside having to jump on some last minute trends.

And that's when having lots of B roll can be really helpful because a lot

of trends are just a

voiceover, maybe a text overlay with

kind of out and about footage. So if you have B roll film, that can

be really helpful for getting advantage of latest trends without requiring

loads of extra filming. So that's why having a filming day comes in

really handy because you've got a backlog to work from if you can plan a

bulk of content that matches all your content colors and then

you have a backlog of b roll, then you can take advantage of trends without

taking up too much extra time having to stop the general running of your

business to film, you can use what you've already got.

Emily's reminder to plan content days is so useful. Having B

roll ready means you can jump on trends without scrambling. And remember,

Q4 is all about showing customers how your products solve real problems

or bring joy during the busy season.

So how does it all fit together? PR builds trust and gets new eyes on

your products. Email nurtures those leads and converts them. Paid

ads amplify your reach at the right time, and social media keeps your

brand front of mind, telling your story and creating excitement.

So how do you actually create a plan? Well, you need to start

by looking at your key dates, things like the postal cutoffs, Black Friday,

Cyber Monday, Small Business Saturday. Make a decision about

what you want to participate in and then plan your

campaigns backwards. Remember that the brands that

succeed in Q4 don't just do a bit of everything. They connect

their channels so that every email, ad, post and PR

mention works together to tell one clear story.

I hope this episode has given you some inspiration and a structure to start building

your Q4 plan. Plan. If you found this useful, share it with a fellow

small business owner or drop me a message on Instagram Resilient

Retail Club I'd love to Hear what your Q4 plans look like.

And don't forget to like, subscribe and follow the podcast to hear about each

new episode every Thursday morning. See you next week.