Stop Treating Q5 Like A Hangover
💪 Run capture mode while everyone coasts, How to win AI Search and monetize every visit, and more!
Welcome to a space where every edition delivers insights, strategies, and inspiration to fuel your advertising brilliance. 🤯
🫠 Stop Treating Q5 Like A Hangover
Most brands treat December 26 like the season is over. They scale down, pause testing, and let the account coast. That is exactly why Q5 becomes one of the cheapest acquisition windows of the year.
Not because demand disappears. Because competition does.
When competitors blink, the auction gets soft. CPMs drop, attention gets cheaper, and high intent buyers are still scrolling with money left to spend. If you keep showing up while others vanish, you do not compete harder, you inherit the market.
Why Q5 is structurally mispriced
Post holiday buyers are not shopping for someone else’s taste. They are shopping for their own needs, upgrades, routines, and resets. At the same time, advertisers pull back for predictable reasons, teams are tired, reporting cycles end, budgets get protected, and everyone assumes efficiency will fall off a cliff after Christmas.
So you get a rare overlap. Intent stays high while auction pressure drops. That overlap is the window.
The Q5 capture playbook
- Switch from peak competition to silent capture
Do not run Q5 like Black Friday. Simplify offers, simplify landing pages, and make your product the obvious choice in a quieter feed.
- Bid for volume, not perfection
In Q5, the cost to learn is lower. Prioritize stable spend and cleaner signal over forcing every ad to hit the same CPA as your mature Q4 winners.
- Refresh creative for self benefit psychology
Gifting language dies overnight. Run angles that feel like self permission and self upgrade, routine fit, results speed, and “finally doing this for me.”
- Exploit creative variety as an auction advantage
When CPMs drop, you can test more without overpaying. Build modular creative, multiple hooks, multiple proof moments, and multiple creator faces so the auction can find a match faster.
- Rebuild your audience map for post holiday behavior
Separate holiday traffic retargeting from fresh Q5 clickers. Treat gift card and store credit buyers as their own high intent segment. Keep broad active, because cheaper auctions often make broad your best scale lever.
If you need a clean way to scale creator variety for Q5 without turning production into chaos, Insense can help teams source creators and generate modular variations fast. You can book a free strategy call by December 19th to get $200 towards your first collab!
Most brands lose Q5 because they stop. Q5 rewards the brands that stay awake. When competitors blink, you do not need a bigger budget, you need a plan to capture the quiet.
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⚡ The 2026 SEO Shift
The play is to stop chasing shrinking informational clicks and start building content that AI systems can cite, recommend, and convert. That means answer-first structure, original data, topic clusters, and embedded commerce. You are not writing for rankings anymore, you are writing to be referenced.
Why it works: AI results pull clean, self-contained answers with strong structure, specific stats, and first party proof, so your pages become citeable assets. Inline commerce, mid-article captures, and comparisons monetize intent without forcing extra navigation. Topic clusters and psychographic segmentation build authority and match conversational queries, while seasonal publishing creates momentum before demand spikes.
Where it needs balance: Over-optimizing for AI citations can create robotic content if you forget human readability and brand voice. Embedding commerce too aggressively can hurt trust, especially if recommendations feel forced or salesy. Original research takes time and costs money, and topic clusters require consistency, otherwise you end up with half-built hubs that never earn authority.
🚀 Reel of the Day
What Works:
1. It’s a parenting “hack,” not a cereal ad - The on-screen promise is “How I get my toddler to try anything,” which is a universal pain point with high search intent. That framing earns attention before the product even appears. People share and save hacks because they feel useful, not because they feel entertained.
2. The toddler is the proof engine - A toddler’s reactions read as unfiltered truth, so every facial expression becomes “evidence.” The moment the kid says things like “Eat” or reacts to “pink cereal,” it functions like a testimonial without sounding like one. Viewers trust the child’s signal more than the adult’s claim.
3. Play behavior beats persuasion - “Pretend it’s my snack” and “make it fun and silly” triggers mimicry, it invites the viewer to copy the behavior at home. The mom physically performs the bit, leaning in, making faces, turning it into a mini game, which is intrinsically watchable.
This Reel performs because it packages the brand inside a repeatable parenting script, delivers believable proof through the toddler, and uses step-based structure to drive saves, rewatches, and shares
Thanks for reading this edition! Keep pushing boundaries, testing ideas, and staying inspired. See you in the next edition with more ways to ignite your marketing success. 🥰