With many brand eyes locked in on Q4, many are neglecting to plan for a season quickly emerging as another potential revenue boom: Q5.

Brands in verticals like health & wellness, personal finance, travel & hospitality, and career planning have a potential jackpot waiting for them in Q5: a broad audience eager to discover and engage with products and services to reach their self-improvement goals in the new year.

Playbook Media CEO, TikTok agency partner Julianna Wanner, and Oddacity founder Chad Bertrand put that topic in focus in a recent webinar aiming to outline the scope of the Q5 opportunity – and help brands chart out a strategy to capture it.

If you missed the webinar, here are some quick highlights (and we’ll link to the recording at the end):

1) Q5 is a high-intent season with lower costs than Q4

Our own numbers and TikTok’s 2023 data tell the story: engagement costs in Q5 aren’t as competitive as they are in Q4, and purchase intent remains high. Even after the holiday shopping season, 51% of TikTok users planned to shop in Q5 to treat themselves and/or focus on self-improvement.

2) Success starts by shifting your funnel approach

Time after time, our analytics models show that brands coming to us with stagnated growth are over-spending at the bottom of the funnel. Moving to a full-funnel approach with smarter budget allocation does more than increase your reach; advanced measurement models will show your overall acquisition costs are very likely to decrease as well.

3) Good organic content keeps the lights on

Authentic, engaging content on TikTok is imperative for building brand awareness and affinity at the top of the funnel. Brands that find and build human (not overly polished) connections with key communities and subcultures through organic content do more than build a great growth base; they get free insights on the kind of content that will move the needle when amplified through paid campaigns.

4) TikTok Search is beefed up – and bringing the engagement

More than half (57%) of TikTok’s exploding user base uses the search feature, and the platform has recently added a slew of advertising functionality, including keyword-based bidding and targeting, to help advertisers reach users demonstrating intent. The TikTok app gives users 5 search entry points (search page, comment related search, related search anchor, video detail search bar, comment highlighted words):

We’re still in the early-adoption phase of TikTok search, which means engagement costs are as low as they’re going to be before the ads are more widely in use.

5) TikTok is everywhere

TikTok placements and audiences aren’t just on the app; the platform has expanded its inventory to billboard, pop-up billboards, OOTH screens (restaurants, airports, rideshare, etc.)., with first-party and third-party measurement tools to help analyze impact.

6) The road to full-funnel growth starts with measurement

You’re not just going to snap your fingers and get extra budget for upper-funnel marketing to grow reach and awareness. The good news: you’ve probably already got budget that isn’t doing much for you and would be better off re-allocated.

To identify that budget, start with holdout tests or incrementality studies to truly understand the impact of your DR or retargeting campaigns. When we run those tests, we find, almost without exception, that brands are over-spending at the bottom of the funnel and would be wise to re-invest some of that budget in branding and reach campaigns.

Other key measurement tools to use along the way: TikTok brand lift tests, which provide hard evidence of the growth impact of upper-funnel campaigns, and MMM (media mix modeling), which uses historical data to make recommendations on how to adjust your budget and campaign mix. 

Moving up the funnel and away from the purchase event might sound risky, but with the right measurement strategies in place, you’ll be able to build your base of engaged users at far lower costs – and see the revenue growth that follows.

7) Big growth goals require great creative

Full-funnel branding requires a big investment in multi-media creative and a solid creative testing strategy. Whether you’re looking to expand on TikTok, Meta, CTV, or beyond, great creative is the difference between simply reaching new audiences and building at-scale brand affinity that will tap into Q5 intent and ease the burden on DR and acquisition campaigns down the road.

We ended the webinar (full recording here if you’re interested) by offering all attendees a free creative and measurement consultation with Playbook’s execs, and we’re happy to extend that here. Simply drop us a line to book a call and tap into your full-funnel growth potential.