The end of the year will be here before you know it. We’re creeping into Q4, and the time to plan is now! This Q4 marketing checklist will help you review your activities, identify ways to improve, give your brand a final boost before the end of the year, and help you get your marketing assets in order to start strong in the new year.

For marketing to be effective, it needs a variety of aligned elements that work together to produce a cohesive brand, vision, message, and strategy. To give your marketing what it needs to succeed, here are the eight essential marketing assets your brand should own, manage, and regularly review.

If you want to improve your marketing, don’t jump right into launching more tactics. Don’t simply create more content, send more emails, or spend more on ads. Instead, take a step back and focus on your strategy. Create an updated marketing strategy to guide your next steps.

As our team reflected on this year, a common observation of success surfaced -- consistency. When we align well with clients, we find we are receiving valuable feedback from their teams to keep our processes moving along in a timely manner. We find marketing efforts to feel fluid, with room for creative adjustments based on frequent collection of new data points. While many factors can lead to ineffective marketing, consistency can be attributed to great marketing.

Marketing isn’t black and white. There isn’t one strategy that works for every brand, nor is there one plan that produces the exact same results for every industry. Marketing is an uncertain science that requires testing, review, and optimization to improve its effectiveness -- which is why marketing analytics are so important to review, interpret and use to make adjustments to your strategy, messaging, and tactics.

A marketing strategy is like a living, breathing entity. It’s continually changing and adjusting to the environment. It needs room to grow and evolve, and it can’t do that if you just set it and forget it. When you ignore your marketing strategy, it can quickly grow stale. Changes in customers, demand, markets, competitors, and culture happen. If your marketing stays the same during these external changes, it can become outdated, out-of-touch, and ineffective.

If you were to play your own version of ‘Billy On The Street,’ asking 10 unsuspecting passersby to define marketing, you’d probably get 10 different answers. Here, we take out the guesswork.

Humans have sought to market their goods and services for as long as, well, goods and services have existed. But digital marketing has revolutionized everything. Here, we talk about four areas of focus so you can get the most bang for your marketing budget buck in 2020.

Defining your brand isn’t a new concept, but now more than ever, many companies understand the importance of using their brand to connect with potential buyers on an emotional level. Therefore, it’s paramount to not only define your brand but to live it out. And branding isn’t just for larger companies with a jumbo marketing budget - it’s a crucial component to small businesses and startups. In fact, these companies should rely on leveraging their branding even more than larger more-established companies in order to stand out from the noise.

Well, we blinked and 2019 is a few short months away. Can you relate? As you’re entering Q4, you most likely have your 2019 budget, business and marketing plans on the brain. Feeling overwhelmed with how to set your 2019 marketing strategy and don’t know where to start? We’ve got some things for you to consider. We’ve dug into the research and compiled a list of the top digital marketing trends for 2019 and where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.