The holiday season is now well underway, a critical period when many businesses generate up to 80% of their annual sales. That’s why Q4 planning is maybe the most important thing we do all year, but have you ever heard of Q5?

According to a recent report published by TikTok, this made up time of year might be the greatest opportunity that most of us are ignoring.

They define Q5 as the period that starts right after the holidays, and extends into mid-January. During that period, they found the following:

What’s different about Q5 is that people are spending on themselves and their families.

As with so many other innovations, this idea originally came from the people at Snapchat, but didn’t go fully mainstream until the other platforms picked it up.

Snapchat coined the term Q5 in 2022 when they discovered the following:

Influencers weren’t specifically called out in either report, but I’ll go out on a limb to say that their inboxes will likely dry up as well, leaving opportunities for brands to work with content creators who, at other times of year, may have been out of their budget range.

It’s easy to imagine the motivation for platforms like TikTok and Snapchat to be pushing this idea of Q5: They are trying to increase their own ad sales during a period that is otherwise slow for them, but our incentives are actually aligned in that way. Slow periods for ad platforms are opportunities for advertisers.

What can we do right now?

The #1 recommendation that jumps out of all of these reports is to leverage remarketing, which makes perfect sense. We all see an increase of attention, engagement, and traffic around the holidays, but we’re not going to convert all of those people.

Instead of wasting that momentum, we can use the next 6 weeks to build audiences that we can retarget in the Q5 shopping period.

That could mean making sure that your Meta and Google pixels are set up to be gathering audience information, or it could be more organic, like building email lists over the holidays.

Of course, the most important thing we can do to capitalize on the post-holiday period is develop a creative, compelling story. So, if your holiday campaign was planned months ago, and you have a bit of extra space this time of year, the best thing you can do right now is plan the story that your brand will tell when all of the rest of your competitors are winding down their campaigns.