Your 2024 marketing budgets should be done. I know they're not.

... which is why I've written a guide on annual marketing budgeting with the seasonality approach.

Long story (relatively) short:

Seasonality in marketing means that there’s a fluctuation between high-growth and low-growth periods for every business.

There are times of the year when customers line up to buy your product… And there are months when it feels like the whole world has forgotten about you…

Once you’ve been through a couple of annual marketing strategy plannings, you’ll begin to notice a pattern: these fluctuations are happening every single year.

For example, when doing the global annual & quarterly marketing budgets at Bolt, I realized that it didn’t make sense to invest the same amount of budget (let’s say 100% / 12 months = 8.3%) every single month throughout the year.

To make matters even more complicated, Bolt was operating in 25+ countries and hundreds of cities. The seasonality that, in the case of ride-hailing, depends on the weather and consumer patterns, was not the same across different markets.

The high season in the UK v.s. South Africa v.s. Australia meant very different things – and very different months of the year. And yet – not all marketing leads of international brands think in terms of local seasonality.

Perhaps it was the need to plan 25+ markets’ budgets in a few weeks’s time that led us (not just me, there was a whole team of smart growth people and data analysts behind the project) to look into ways to structure and automate our seasonal marketing planning.

While seasonality is different in every industry, the strategic tactics are still more or less universal. And that’s exactly what this guide will be about: understanding the basics of seasonal thinking and applying it in your own marketing strategy.

You can read the full guide in my blog (link below). We'll go through the full process of:

1. The principles of seasonal marketing planning
2. Understanding the seasonality in your business
3. Building the toolset and structure for seasonal strategy
4. Implementing the marketing strategy in sync with seasonality
5. Revising the marketing strategy as the market changes
   ​

Newsletter reader extra

In the seasonal marketing budgeting guide, I use screenshots of a Google Sheet.

You can access the sheet on the link below, make a copy, and use it for your own 2024 budget planning.

✅ ✅ ⮕ Access the marketing budget planning spreadsheet ⬅ ✅ ✅

Coming up next week: How to do a marketing audit in 10 questions

What better time to review and adjust your marketing strategy than the end of year?

In next Friday's newsletter, I am going to share the TOP 10 critical questions that I ask when doing marketing audits.

Merci! 🐿️

This is the second Marketing Things newsletter and I appreciate all of you who have subscribed. Send your feedback and thoughts by replying to this email.

Thanks for reading!
Karola

Refer friends, get rewards Got friends who'd like this newsletter? Share your unique referral link (below). For every 20 referrals, you'll get one free 1-hour marketing consultation call (worth €300). [RH_REFLINK GOES HERE] PS: You have referred [RH_TOTREF GOES HERE] people so far Check your referrals ⚡️ by SparkLoop