In this instructional video, agency owner Joshua Nelson explains why running a strategic marketing planning workshop in Q4 is a critical growth lever for digital marketing agencies. He argues that prospects review the past year and seek leadership for 2026, making the end‑of‑year period the optimal time to position oneself as an expert and generate pipeline without hard selling. Nelson outlines a step‑by‑step framework for the workshop: (1) set the stage with industry trends such as AI, generative search, and algorithm updates; (2) guide clients through concrete goal setting, breaking annual revenue targets into monthly lead requirements; (3) reverse‑engineer key performance indicators by calculating conversion rates and average deal values; (4) visualize and allocate the marketing budget, discussing percentage‑of‑revenue benchmarks, cost‑per‑lead, and channel split between online and offline tactics; (5) present a channel strategy covering organic/SEO, paid search, and database/retention, reinforced with client case examples; (6) embed soft‑sell hooks like free SEO analyses and low‑friction next‑step offers; (7) suggest scaling the workshop via webinars, Facebook ads, and partnerships with industry coaches or mastermind groups. Throughout, Nelson promotes a “Swipe and Deploy” kit containing pre‑built slides, worksheets, email copy, and funnel assets that can be customized for any niche. The video blends practical templates, calculators, and persuasive positioning to help agency owners run a high‑impact workshop that books high‑quality clients into 2026.
Chapters
If you want to book high-quality clients before the year ends, this is one workshop you need to run, and I'll show you exactly how to structure it. Most agency owners think Q4 is the time to take their foot off the gas. They assume everybody's going to holiday mode, their prospects aren't buying, and that it slows down and that things will pick back up in January. But that's exactly why they start the year behind and would be the exact wrong way to approach it. This is where all the action happens in the digital marketing agency space. Your prospects are reviewing the year. They're thinking about what didn't work, what needs to change, and who's going to help them win in 2026. They're looking They're looking for leadership. And if you're not the one showing up with a plan, somebody else will be. This is why running a strategic marketing planning workshop before the end of the year is one of the smartest moves you can make as an agency owner. It positions you as the expert, gives your audience a reason to engage with you, and opens up doors to new pipeline without pitching. And if you want the shortcut for all of this, you can grab the full swipe and deploy version of my 2026 marketing plan workshop, pre-built and modifiable for your niche with slides, worksheets, and copy. All you have to do is click the first link in the the comments to get the details on how to grab that. We've run this exact play in our agency over the last decade, and every year it brings a wave of new prospects, a wave of new positioning in the industry, solidifies relationships with our existing clients, helps us close the current year strong, and positions us for accelerated growth going into the new year. Here's exactly what you want to include in order to create great results with this type of workshop. Part 1 is you want to start with walking them through the industry trends, where things are headed, how things are changing going into the new year. This gives them text. And so you want to spend some time really setting the frame that it's a new year, that things are changing. Obviously this year you're going to want to talk about AI. You're going to want to talk about generative search results. You're going to want to talk about some of the changes in the algorithm to help them not only be aware of what's going on and how things are changing, but also, you know, to kind of position that you're a thought leader and you're paying attention to where things are headed. Part 2 is going to be around goal setting. And you want to spend some time to help them really clarify where they're looking to go over the next year. And you'd be surprised, even large companies kind of struggle with this. The Maybe they set a goal, they set a target. Here's where I want to go in the new year, but they don't break it down. They don't break it down by month. They don't break it down by what that's going to take from a lead generation perspective. What you want to do is workshop with them. What's the revenue goal? How do we divide that out? How does that break down monthly? And then, all right, well, that's where we want to be every single month. How many leads will we need to generate in order to make that a reality? That gives an aha moment. That makes them feel like, wow, this was a great workshop. I've already gotten some great insights. And if you can help them use calculators or spreadsheets to figure this out, they're going to love you for it. From there, you want to, part 3, help them reverse engineer those KPIs, which is if we know that we need this amount of leads per month in order to hit that outcome, and we can do some simple math, right? We can help them figure out what's your average conversion rate from a lead to a sale? What's the average value for a sale once you're in the home or once you're doing business with the client? You can really show them, all right, well, if you want to hit that target, this is what we're going to need to do. The next thing you can do is really start to help them visualize their budget. A lot of businesses, when they think about their goal, they just think about in terms of here's where we want to go, but they never figure out like, okay, well, how much will I have to invest in my marketing? Marketing strategy in order to make that a reality. And you can be the one to come in and say, hey, look, you know, if you want to stay where you're at in your business, you should probably be reinvesting this amount in marketing. If you want to be a little bit more aggressive, you want to kind of, you know, be, you know, in a growth-oriented mode, you probably want to invest this amount in marketing. And if you want to be super aggressive and you want to kind of be the industry leader, here's how much you should spend. And you can give them some frameworks in terms of what percentage of their revenue they should reinvest in marketing. A lot of times that's an eye-opener in itself because they start to see, wow, we probably need to spend more than we were thinking. you can justify it, right? If we want to create the traffic, we want to create the lead flow, then we're going to have to have the gasoline to light the fire. We have some really cool calculators and planners that we've put together. We used to do it with spreadsheets. Now we're doing it with simple apps that we've developed that calculate all of this for them. They enter a couple different variables and magically the information that they want pops out. Again, that's something I can give you is, you know, if you're willing to invest a little bit in our Swipe and Deploy on this. Otherwise, you can kind of get the concepts and run with this. The next thing you want to do on the budget side of the equation conversation is, all right, now you know kind of what you need to be spending. And you can talk a little bit about average cost per lead or average cost to acquire a customer specific to your industry if you've got that data. And you can help them see, like, based on your lead target and the average cost per lead, this is probably how much you're going to need to spend to get those results. What they really love is spending a little bit of time getting clear where— that's my total budget, how should I partition that? How much of that should be going to online marketing? How much should be going to offline marketing? How much should be going to reinvesting to generate more repeatable referral business from my existing customer base? And it, you know, help them get clear. Again, the fact that you don't want to spend it all in one place and help them figure out what percentages should go where. It's just kind of like a budget allocation strategy that they never think through for their marketing. And then whatever that number ends up being for online marketing, you can break that down and say, here's how much we should put on SEO, here's how much we should be putting in paid search, here's how much we should be putting in remarketing. You know, when you start to fill in these gaps with them and you start to reverse engineer and map out the year, you start to map out the budget, you start to, you know, bifurcate where the money's going to go, you're the one coming in with thought leadership and positioning yourself as an expert. Part number 4 is where you can get into the strategy and you can start to say, okay, so we've got this amount, we're going to be investing in marketing, and you can roll through whatever your growth plan is. You know, in our case, we usually are talking about we've got to drive leads, we've got to maximize conversion, then we've got to optimize the ROI. And so I use this simple model, a simple framework where I explain, well, in order to drive leads, there's a couple things we can do, right? We can do organic, we can do paid, and we can do database marketing. We're going to spend some time talking about each of those, and then I share examples of clients that we do in each of those different areas and get their buy-in. There's a worksheet process You probably will walk them through to help them see, all right, is this a strength for me right now or is it an opportunity? And when you do this correctly, they see that you've got a big picture model. They see that you've got a strategy, and then you're also able to seed examples while you go. So while you're talking about SEO, you can talk about, hey, here's one of our clients that comes up really well in organic and generative search. And if you've got the data, you can show like, here's how many leads they get every single month from this channel. Here's their average cost per lead. And overall, this is a return on investment they're getting from their marketing. If you could do that in each one of the core sections of your training, your workshop, that opens their eyes and they're like, okay, these guys have proven results. And that's— you want them to feel like you've got the plan, you got proven results, and then you want to seed next actions. Because some people will go through your workshop and be like, man, I want to hire you. Others, you need to have a couple of little hooks that kind of drop on them. And so, you know, if you're talking about SEO, maybe you say, look, you know, really to understand your SEO strategy, the first thing you want to do is get a list of the most important keywords. And we've done a lot of research on that. I give you the keyword list, but more importantly, you need to want a report that will show you where you're coming up in organic search on Google, on the Google Map, in generative engines, we found it's a little bit hard for you as the client to figure that stuff out. What I'd like to offer is, since you're on this workshop with me, is we'll run a complete analysis of that completely free of charge. We'll run the keyword list for you, we'll run the ranking report for you, and it'll give you great clarity going into '26 what you need to change from an SEO perspective. From the strategy point of view, that's what you want to do. You want to talk about SEO, if that's part of what you do. You want to talk about paid search. You're teaching, but then you're showing examples. And then ideally you're leaving some kind of hook that's like, hey, if you really want help with that component, then here's a little thing we can to do to help you solve for that and move it forward. And then at the end, what you want to do is offer the next execution help. There's always going to be people that are just there to learn, and that's okay. There's going to be people that are there to like see, hey, you know what, maybe this is the company I should align with. And so without doing a hard pitch— and this isn't the place to do a hard pitch in your workshop— you want to make the option to say, hey, look, we've spent this time together, we've helped you map out your plan for 2026. Hopefully you're clear. Hopefully this was helpful and kind of brought clarity in terms of what you need to do to bring that into reality. If you'd like some help, we'd love opportunity to support you. And here's how we can work together going forward. And just make it a very simple offer, right? Like, we'll schedule a one-to-one, we'll review your current strategy, we'll help you map out the budget and the breakdown, we'll do a complete analysis of how you're performing from an SEO, from a paid search, from a website conversion perspective. If it makes sense, we'll talk about how we can implement this for you in 2026. And if it doesn't, that's okay too. This is the framework that I've used for over a decade. Every single time we get great appreciation, great reciprocity. The clients that are ready to do something, they're ready to make a switch, raise their hand, they schedule on our calendar. Many of them will sign up towards the end of the year because they know that it's going to take time to get all of this ramped up. Some of them will, you know, they'll hold off. They'll be like, you know what, let's start right at the beginning of 2026. But either way, it positions you to close the year strong and to hit 2026 or the new year with some great momentum. What's really interesting is once you're comfortable with how you can use this workshop and you're comfortable with like, okay, here's what I would cover, here's how I would cover it, here's like the worksheets that I would use, here's how I would help them kind of do the math on all of this stuff, here's the examples that I can see, you start to see not only can you do this as a web session that you use to promote to your prospect list, you can advertise this on Facebook. The bigger opportunity oftentimes though is to find the coaches, the masterminds, the peer groups that already exist within your industry and say, hey, look, I've got this great workshop that I'd love to run completely free of charge for your group to help them get massive clarity on how they can win with their marketing strategy in 2026. Now you're opening up doors and audiences that you would have never had access to. Hopefully this is helpful. This is how I run this and I've kind of iterated and improved it over the years. Hopefully it gives you enough clarity that you can action this. If you want the full Swipe and Deploy kit, I've got everything for this. I've got the slides, I've got the promotional email copy, I've got the funnel that we use for the registration, the confirmation. We've got some really cool widgets that we've put together and we've created this in a way that you can easily modify it for your needs, customize it for your branding. So it really is unique to you and your organization and just hit the ground running for this. If you'd like to take me up on that and you'd like to Swipe and Deploy this, grab the first link in the comments. I'll be doing a live workshop and giving you everything you need so that you can run this at a best-in-class level in November.
