By Suzanna Chaplin, CEO and founder, esbconnect
Q4 has always been brutally competitive for marketers. This year, though, the challenge feels like a broader one. Consumers have more choice, more places to discover products and more opportunities to research before they buy. They are also spread across more channels, and the way they use them is changing constantly.
Everywhere, old assumptions are falling like dominoes. Over-65s are taking to LLMs like ducks to water. Under-35s are opting for digital detoxes. People are watching social, rather than participating in it. YouTube is moving into the living room. Increasingly, consumers may ask an AI assistant what to buy before they even open a search engine.
So if your Q4 plan is a Black Friday banner on social followed by a retargeting campaign on search, maybe it’s time to ask where else people might be found.
Find attention where it is less contested
Search and social now take a very large share of advertising investment, making them increasingly competitive. Your Black Friday campaign quickly becomes just one of hundreds of similar messages fighting for the same attention.
So what’s the solution? Go somewhere less noisy.
That might mean using email as an acquisition channel, sending a postal campaign, or using community-based messaging. Don’t abandon social and search, but don’t assume they’re the only places worth being.
The UK advertising market tells the story. Advertising investment reached £46.7bn in 2025, with search accounting for 38.3% and social media 24.7%. In Q1 2026, total UK ad spend rose 9.3% to £11.7bn, with social media, retail media and search all recording strong growth.
Social remains important, but more people are watching and fewer participating. Ofcom found that 89% of UK adult internet users use at least one social platform, rising to 97% among 16–34s. Yet only 49% now actively post, share or comment, down from 61% in 2024.
Email and direct mail, meanwhile, offer something digital-first planning can overlook: space. DMA research puts the reported value of email at around £40 for every £1 spent, while JICMAIL data puts average time spent with a piece of direct mail at 108 seconds over a 28-day period.
For Q4, these environments are worth testing because they give you the elbow room to explain, demonstrate and persuade.
Retargeting still matters – but rethink it
More noise and competition only make retargeting more important. There are now ways to make email retargeting work harder – for instance, by identifying otherwise anonymous website visitors who are not on your CRM, and using their browsing intent to trigger relevant email follow-up, rather than waiting for someone to reach the checkout and abandon their basket.
That opens up retargeting to a much larger group of people who have shown an interest but may not yet have taken the next step. Secret Sales used email retargeting beyond their CRM to achieve an £18 ROI, whilst The AA used email-based audiences to reach prospects in paid social and email, building lookalikes from converters and lowering its CPA by 37.2% from its original target.
Retargeting also needs to do more than remind someone they recently looked at a product; it has to give them a real reason to come back. Why should they buy from you? What makes the product worth the price? What does the warranty cover? Retargeting should educate and nurture, not simply repeat the same product message.
That means rethinking the retargeting stack, too. Email can give you more space to explain. That is particularly important in retail, where brands increasingly compete with the secondary market. When someone can find the same product on Vinted for less, the answer can’t always be another discount – though discounts will certainly play a role in Q4.
Stop typecasting audiences
One of the most dangerous assumptions in Q4 planning is that you know what a particular demographic does online: young people are on TikTok; older people are on Facebook; everyone searches Google; nobody wants direct mail.
The reality is messier than that. Wealthier consumers are becoming comfortable with AI assistants, while younger consumers are experimenting with digital detoxes. So don’t typecast your audiences. If someone isn’t on the channel you expected them to be, ask where they might be instead.
That makes consistency more important. Identifiers such as email addresses, mobile advertising IDs and other recognised IDs can help brands deliver consistently across environments. If “the audience” isn’t on a particular channel, recognise them wherever they encounter you.
Targeting at a one-to-one level lets you learn more, and channels like email still resonate well across genders and age groups – particularly the older generations. Why reinvent the newsletter in Substack when you have a direct channel already?
And then there is AI
Perhaps the biggest change to Q4 planning is that many consumers may skip search and just ask an LLM to help them choose a product, find a gift or compare which option offers the best value.
Salesforce reports that the use of agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200% year on year, while traffic referred from AI chats grew substantially faster than overall traffic.
When AI systems are making decisions, brands need to make sure they have good information to work with: accurate product info, reviews, comparisons, demonstrations and FAQs, and useful content from YouTube and Reddit.
Plan the journey, not the channel
For Q4, don’t get too caught up in predicting which channel will deliver the most conversions. Think about how the different parts of the journey work together, and aim to:
- Find attention where fewer brands are fighting for it
- Reconsider your retargeting stacks – what new solutions are there?
- Use retargeting to educate and prospect, not just remind
- Give people reasons to buy new
- Don’t assume you know where different audiences will be
- Make the experience consistent as people move between channels
- Make sure the information they need is available wherever they are doing their research
People can’t be depended upon to follow the journey we’ve planned for them. So, this Q4, plan for more ways to meet them.
