5 Tips for Unlocking Your Q4 Superpowers

As your team dives headlong into the end-of-year sprint, these resources will give you a much-needed boost.

Leaves are turning. Holiday decorations are coming out. Fall is officially here. For business leaders and digital marketers, that can only mean one thing — we’re entering Q4, traditionally the busiest quarter of the year. With so many objectives to complete and so many spinning plates to keep track of, organizations are eager for any opportunity to streamline their business and fulfill customer needs on a quicker timeline.

For us at Masters of Scale, that means tapping into the wisdom of some of our favorite past guests and utilizing free behavioral analytics tools like Microsoft Clarity. So, if you’re feeling the pressure to super-serve your online clients before the New Year, make sure you’re working smarter not harder with these essential tips.

1. Discover what your customers really want —?When Honest Company founder Jessica Alba appeared on Masters of Scale, she told host Reid Hoffman about the power of understanding the real-life needs and experiences of different customer cohorts. “I’m thinking of the exhausted, sleep-deprived parent. How can I give ease, peace of mind to that person? The soon-to-be parent has a different thing,” Alba said, noting that these customers have more time for research and can handle more information. “And then you have the person who’s just woke.” Each customer subset needs something different, but how do you determine what that something is? Customer surveys are a great way to get the feedback you’re looking for, but they can be time-consuming and costly. At Masters of Scale, we use Microsoft Clarity’s heat mapping and session recording features to observe simulations of customer behavior as they navigate our company’s website. That way, we can see where they click most, where they get stalled out, and what products and services are earning their attention. Once we know what our customers are looking for IRL, it’s easy to adjust our design and layout to meet their needs.
2. Get your web and mobile sites in sync — As customers rush from store to store or hurry off to the airport for some holiday travel, they’re likely connecting with your company on a phone rather than a desktop. Very few people are bringing their home computers to wait in line on Black Friday. Nobody knows the power of a strong mobile strategy like former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, who oversaw Facebook’s transition to a mobile-first company in 2012. “We realized the mobile transition was happening; it was happening way faster than we thought. It kept outstripping our predictions,” Sandberg said in her Masters of Scale appearance. “A couple of meetings in, Mark [Zuckerberg] just said, ‘You know what? No more meetings, unless your mobile screenshot is first.’ Just by making that shift, he made the shift in the company — and we really had to force it.” Facebook ’s hard turn into mobile paid off in a big way. And these days, a mobile-first strategy is easier to adopt. Just be sure that whatever tools your company wants to use are available across all platforms and interfaces.
3. Skip the training with the right software — One of the hardest things about integrating a new tool into your company’s workflow is that your entire team has to stop what they’re doing for an obligatory training session. It’s even harder to justify this exhausted time during the year-end crunch of Q4. That’s why it’s so important to find analytic tools that are easy to use and produce results that are easy to understand. When we started using Microsoft Clarity, we immediately recognized how straightforward the dashboard was. Anyone —?even those employees with no tech or data management experience — could get the hang of it within minutes. Whether you’re a professional digital marketer or a mom-and-pop business owner establishing your online brand for the first time, make sure the tools you’re using help you analyze and understand your customers with ease from day one.
4. Embrace the help of your AI companion — Few people’s opinions about the future of tech are more respected than Inflection AI co-founder and current CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman. So, when he sat down with longtime colleague Reid Hoffman for an interview, we sat up and listened. “I think that everybody over the next decade is going to have access to a personal intelligence,” Suleyman said on Masters of Scale, using his favored term for a unique AI agent that could represent a brand, a government, or an individual. “And what you want as a consumer is an AI that is really on your side that can represent you.” We’re not quite in that future yet, but we still have the opportunity to get help from AI assistants when needed. Sometimes that means asking your favorite LLM for some rewriting tips or using an AI-powered data summary tool like Co-Pilot in Microsoft Clarity. Co-Pilot is able to observe hours of simulations based on real-life user behavior, summarize where common problem areas are cropping up on your web platform, and even offer suggestions on how to improve them. At Masters of Scale, we’ve found that using AI tools like this are a massive time saver, which is a big help during the busy months of Q4. While we all wait for the future to get here, our existing AI marketing companions can serve as essential team members.
5. Save your budget, use free tools — Organizations across the globe are looking to get their books in order during Q4, double-checking every expenditure to calculate their budgets for next year. Absolutely no one wants the headache of accounting for a new enterprise subscription fee or one-time purchase of expensive software. That’s why we recommend companies take advantage of their existing suite of enterprise tools during Q4 and seek out free tools that provide a no-cost boost to their productivity. For example, our CFO was thrilled when we told them that Microsoft Clarity was 100% free, with no traffic limits and no hidden upgrade to a premium model further down the road. Save your budget for what matters, and save yourself the headache of calculating cost when your energy is needed elsewhere.

Be sure to subscribe to the Masters of Scale podcast for more tips on how to not only survive but thrive in Q4 and at all other times of the year.?

This article was written in collaboration with our partner, Microsoft Clarity. Visit clarity.microsoft.com to start delivering experiences that convert every time.