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With one year ending and another starting soon, Q4 is an exciting time for your management team. By now, you’ll know whether you have any leftover cash in your budget.

Known across most industries as the “use it or lose it” months, the last quarter of the year is a perfect opportunity to invest this surplus cash into products and services you may have overlooked earlier in the year.

That’s a lot of pressure on your spending decisions, especially if your seasonal rush coincides with the end of the year. If you aren’t sure how to make wise investments, here are three ways to wrap up your Q4 successfully.

1. Update Old Hardware

Does your team still work on legacy systems or siloed desktops? While they may get the job done, outdated hardware can waste thousands of work hours as your team waits on glitchy and slow technology.

If your tech unexpectedly fails or crashes, wasted hours take a sledgehammer to your budget. According to the technology research and consulting firm Gartner, IT downtime costs the average company $5,600. That’s $336,000 an hour, totalling more than $2 million in a single, eight-hour workday.

Besides the very real monetary consequences of downtime, technology siloes can make it harder for your teams to share information. This can cause frustration amongst your staff as they struggle to do their jobs properly. Silos also increase the chances of creating duplicated or inaccurate records when moving data between programs.

The latest hardware can tear down these isolating siloes, as they have the processing powers necessary to run sophisticated end-to-end tech. New hardware will also run faster with less downtime, so your team can be more productive.

2. Design New Custom PowerPoint Templates

PowerPoint presentations are ubiquitous in the corporate landscape. Marketing teams rely on punchy slide decks to generate buzz for their brand. Tech and science teams use PowerPoint to bring complicated or dry data to life. Even if you don’t host conferences or roundtables, you likely use slides for internal meetings and training purposes.

With so much riding on these presentations, it’s important you make sure your PowerPoint looks its best in Q4 and beyond. If you aren’t sure how to upgrade your decks, talk with a presentation company about creating a corporate presentation template that speaks to your brand’s exact voice and needs.

The best business PowerPoint presentation templates marry functionality and design perfectly. In other words, they’re easy for your team to use, and they are also beautiful to look at for your audience.

More importantly, these templates make it easy to drop-in data and other important information from one presentation to the next, so you can have on-brand slides for every occasion.

Depending on your choice of presentation design company, you may also receive the following assistance with your custom PowerPoint templates:

• Content consulting, storyboarding, and copywriting to make sure your presentation flows well.
• Data visualization with custom illustrations and dynamic graphics to create captivating decks.
• Presentation training, so your team feels more comfortable creating new decks and navigating their presentations in front of an audience.

3. Give Your Online Presence a Boost

There’s no excuse to let your Q4 funds go to waste, even if you’ve already upgraded your hardware and business PowerPoint presentation templates this year. If you have some leftover cash at the end of the year, consider doubling down on your online presence.

Like many businesses today, you probably already have a team and budget responsible for social media and SEO. Both your social media presence and SEO campaign benefit from a long-term strategy that ensures you consistently produce optimized content. However, you can give these existing teams a significant boost with a blitz in Q4.

Ad spending always surges at the end of the year. After all, Black Friday and Christmas are the two biggest spending days of the year. Most brands try to capitalize on these big days by investing more money into their social media marketing campaigns.

While traditional ads on Instagram and Facebook are still popular, many companies are branching out to try influencer marketing. These paid endorsements clinch a higher Return on Investment (ROI) than the typical banner ads, making them an affordable way to drive more engagement with your brand at year’s end.

When it comes to your SEO campaign, a blitz might include a tune-up of your website to ensure you have a good amount of landing pages enhanced with targeted keywords, metadata, and interlinking. Alternatively, you can choose to publish more content online to boost the number of backlinks you have for the year.

Bottom Line: Spend Wisely

A surplus in Q4 isn’t guaranteed to happen every year, so take advantage of these excess dollars when you get the chance. If you’re lucky enough to have leftover cash in 2022, consider using it on one of these options — or all three! Tear down IT silos with new hardware, speak with a presentation design company, and invest in your online presence before the new year.