One decision before October 31

Consumer brands crowd into Facebook and Instagram from November through December. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024, Meta ad costs ran 138% above their yearly average. You read it correctly, 138% ABOVE their yearly average.

If you sell to other businesses, or your product is one people take a while to decide on, you end up paying holiday prices for attention your buyers are spending on their families. Move paid social dollars into October or January, and give November to email and customer conversations.

This time of year, I watch businesses go one of two ways with marketing money. Some hold everything until next year's budget is final. Others rush to spend what's left so they don't lose it. The whole “use it or lose it” stressor always dumbfounded me as a marketing leader, this is where executive level members are putting undue pressure on their teams and breeding a culture of fear.

This fall, a client came to me with Q4 budget still on the table and a paid LinkedIn campaign already running. We put the money to work in October, before year-end pricing kicks in, pulled back to a small retargeting budget for November and December, and set everything up to relaunch in mid-January. Same budget, spent when it can actually do something.

Both of the usual reactions come from the same place: nobody has decided what the money is supposed to do.

I wrote up the full plan, plus where leftover budget works hardest if it has to be spent this year.

Before you move a dollar into October or January, check what it's been returning. Marketing Math has free calculators for customer acquisition cost, ROI, ROAS and cost per lead, all in one place.

My favorite for this month is the ROI calculator. It works from gross profit, so a campaign showing a big return on ad spend can't hide a thin margin. Five inputs, and you'll know where you stand.

Full disclosure: the name came first. The idea took a little longer to catch up.

I built The Good Measure the way I build most things these days, with AI as a second set of hands. The landing page, the graphics and the launch posts all came together fast. Everything looked polished. And something about it bugged me for days, like an itch I couldn't scratch.

I kept coming back to one phrase: measure twice, cut once. So I brought the feeling to Claude, my AI thinking partner, and asked it to tell me what I was missing. The answer was blunt: the name promised a point of view, and everything I'd built only described a format.

There it was, the thought I couldn’t fully form. I started digging. I pushed back on copy sounding like a robot wrote it. I cut every line talking about me in the third person. I caught a sign-up box offering you a way out before you'd even come in. Measure, measure again, then cut.

So here's my promise for this newsletter: I'll use every tool available to me, and I'll still hold the pen (and this is a practice you should follow too).