Petition to start your 2027 marketing now.
We know, we know. It’s October. Which means you’ve probably just finished your annual whinge about the Christmas decorations being ALREADY in Myer and Kmart, only to remember that the day after Christmas they’ll have the hot cross buns out. But consider this your annual reminder that October is actually a very good time to start thinking about 2027.
So, on behalf of every business owner who has ever said “we’ll figure out our marketing in January”, we would like to formally submit our petition: please start your 2027 marketing now. We promise we’re not trying to ruin Christmas. If anything, we’re giving you back your summer holidays to you know, enjoy them.
If your business plan means thinking about 2027 on December 30th, you’re already playing catch-up. Marketing needs a bit of runway. You need time to work out what you’re actually trying to achieve, look at your goals, dig into your data, speak to your community, plan campaigns, organise content, book photographers, brief designers, order the bloody signage and account for the fact that half of Australia is on holiday in December.
We’re not saying you don’t need to have every Instagram post planned until August. Please. We have lives. We’re talking about the big stuff first: what are you selling? Are your current offerings still making sense? Are you expanding anything? When are you selling it? What campaigns, launches or events are coming? What does your customer need from you throughout the year? And what needs to happen before you can actually market any of it?
Then there’s the calendar. 2027 is already full of things your customers will be doing, buying, thinking about and generally having opinions about.
January brings back-to-school and the annual population of people promising themselves they’re going to become a completely different person this year.
February has Valentine’s Day.
March has International Women’s Day and Easter.
April has ANZAC Day.
May has Mother’s Day.
June has EOFY.
August has the Ekka if you’re in Brisbane.
September has Father’s Day.
October has Halloween.
Then November turns up with Black Friday and Cyber Monday before Christmas barrels through December like it has somewhere better to be.
And those are just the obvious ones. Your industry has its own dates, your customers have their own buying cycles, and you have launches, events, quiet periods, busy periods and probably a few things you haven’t even thought of yet. Looking at the year now means you can actually decide what matters instead of discovering every opportunity three weeks before it happens, or worse, an emergency post the day of.
And please, for the love of God, ask your community what they want. It is wildly underutilised. We know you think you know your audience. You’ve worked with them for years. You know what they buy, what they ask about and what gets a reaction. Excellent. Ask them anyway. A five-minute survey might tell you they want something you hadn’t considered, that they’re confused about an offer you thought was perfectly clear, or that the thing you were about to spend six months building is something they have absolutely no interest in. A mildly devastating discovery, but considerably cheaper than finding out after you’ve built the thing.
You’ve also already got plenty of data to work with. You don’t need to wait until December 31 to decide whether 2026 was successful. By now, you can see what people responded to, what they bought, what they ignored, what content actually did something and where you completely missed the mark. Then look back at 2025 too. One year might be a fluke. Two or three years can show you a pattern. You might notice every August since you opened has been painfully quiet. Great. Now you’ve got time to figure out how to make August your problem child no more, and ideally into your most profitable month yet.
We personally like to follow this rough outline:
September–November is for looking back, finding the patterns, working out what’s coming and asking your community what they want from you.
November–December is for building the strategy and mapping the big campaigns. A campaign can easily be a 2–3 month process, so if you want something happening in August, you might be planning and producing for it in May or June.
January is for refining, creating and getting the bloody thing moving.
So, consider this our formal petition: please stop waiting until January to think about your marketing. Your future self has enough problems.
And if you’re staring at this thinking, fuck, we haven’t even thought about 2027 yet — congratulations. You’re thinking about it now. If you want to talk through what the hell your 2027 marketing should actually look like, come have a chat with us. We can work through what’s happening in the business, what your customers are telling you, what the data is saying and where the opportunities are.
You don’t need another year of randomly posting things and hoping for the best.
Let’s give 2027 a bit of bloody thought.