How to plan and allocate next year's marketing budget quarter by quarter, starting in October

Every October I sit down with each brand I consult to and plan the year ahead, and over the past few weeks I've sat across from more brand founders and marketing managers than I can count. This year, more than any other, nearly every conversation has ended up in the same spot. When I ask what next year looks like for them, there's usually a slightly nervous laugh before some version of "honestly, we haven't even got through Christmas yet." I understand it completely, because the last quarter of the year is relentless for anyone selling into salons and clinics, with gifting packs to land and end-of-year targets to chase. The trouble is that it leaves a lot of brands walking into the new year with no real foresight into what they'll launch or where their marketing dollars are going to sit.

By the time October rolls around, most of the industry has already moved on to next year. Trade media titles are finalising next year's editorial calendars and sending out media kits, the podcasts worth being on are booking guests well into the new year, awards programs are setting their entry and judging dates, and event organisers have already sold a good share of their best sponsorship and exhibitor positions to the brands who picked up the phone in winter. If you're planning a March launch and you only start ringing around in February, you'll find yourself taking whatever is left over, usually at full rate card and with very little say over where your story lands or when it runs. Right now is the window when you should be banging on those doors, because the brands that do it this month get to help shape the year rather than fit in around it.

There's a bigger cost to leaving it late, and it shows up in how a brand feels to the people it sells to. When marketing is planned a month at a time, almost everything becomes a response to something, whether that's a competitor's launch or an event invitation that arrived with three weeks' notice. You end up looking busy without building anything, and the salon owners and clinicians you're trying to win over can feel the difference between a brand that turns up with intent and one that's scrambling to fill a gap. Community and industry relationships are built on consistency, and consistency is very hard to fake when you're deciding what to do next quarter in the quarter itself.

The way I work through this with brands is the same every year, and it starts with breaking the year ahead into its four quarters. Across the top line of each quarter, we map what the industry itself is doing, which means the expos and trade events, the awards seasons, the education calendars, and the trade media features that are already scheduled. Underneath that, we build a second line for what's ours to own as a brand, which covers any NPD launches, whether we'll host our own events or education, which industry events we'll turn up and activate at or sponsor, and the campaigns that build the runway into each of those moments. Seeing the two lines side by side changes the conversation almost immediately, because you can see where it makes sense to ride the momentum the industry is already creating and where there's open space your brand could own outright.

Each quarter has its own personality, and it's worth being honest about that when you plan. The first quarter starts slowly in Australia, because January belongs to summer holidays and salons don't really find their rhythm until education and team training kick back in, which makes it the natural home for education-led content and the early hype for anything launching in the second quarter. That second quarter brings Mother's Day and runs straight into the end of the financial year in June, when a lot of brands suddenly discover leftover budget and rush to spend it on whatever happens to be available. The third quarter opens a fresh financial year and carries its share of trade events, and it's also when the fourth quarter is truly decided, because Christmas gifting needs to be sold into salons months before it ever reaches a shelf. Once you see that laid out, it becomes obvious why a brand that waits until October to think about Christmas is already behind, and why a brand that waits until December to think about next year is behind on all four quarters at once.

When the moments are on the map, the next job is to plan the runway up to each one, and this is where most brands underestimate the time they need. Every launch I build follows the same four phases, moving from hype and campaign reveal into product education, then entertainment, and finally the launch itself. Working backwards from a launch or event date through those phases usually means the first public activity needs to start weeks or even months earlier than people expect, and the briefs, shoots, samples, and trade media pitches that feed it need to start earlier again. If your NPD is landing in May, the hype phase is something you should be sketching out now, while there's still room to book the people and placements you'll need.

All of this flows into where the money goes, and this is the part I'd ask every brand to take seriously before the end-of-year shutdown. Marketing dollars move easily across months, so moving spend from February into March rarely causes anyone a headache. Money doesn't travel nearly as easily across quarters, and it barely moves at all across financial years, because once the books close at the end of June, unspent budget tends to disappear or get poured into something rushed just so it isn't lost. That's why I want brands allocating the bulk of next year's marketing budget now, quarter by quarter, against the activities they've mapped, while holding back a small reactive reserve for the opportunities that will always pop up, like a last-minute stand or a collaboration nobody saw coming. That reserve is healthy, but it should be the exception in your plan, with the majority of your spend committed to moments you chose deliberately.

So if you're reading this in the middle of the Christmas chaos, my suggestion is to carve out a few hours before the year wraps up. Request next year's media kits from the trade titles you'd like to be in, reach out to the podcast producers whose audiences match yours, decide which events you'll host and which you'll turn up to as an exhibitor or sponsor, and lock in your NPD dates so the runway can be built backwards from them. Then take a quarter-by-quarter budget to whoever signs it off, so you start January with a plan you're already working rather than one you're still writing. The brands that feel calm and confident in March are almost always the ones who did the slightly uncomfortable thinking in October, and if you'd like a hand mapping out your own year, you can book a strategic consulting session with me and we'll sit down and build it together.