Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. And welcome back to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. Today we're talking about marketing presentations. What are they and why do most of them feel? But first, here's a quick message from our sponsor.
Melanie
Get ready to be a social media superstar with Feedalpha. Their friendly AI and super simple tools make it a breeze to see what your followers are into. That means you can post the cool stuff they love right when they're most likely to see it. Check out feedalpha.com to find out more and take your social media to the next level. Marketing presentations, I don't know about you, but I personally hate doing them at times because they can become so customised so detailed, and it really, as we said countless times before, depends on why you're creating that presentation. Is it to use as a slider on your stand? Is it to put up as slide deck for a talk that you're doing? Obviously, you have slightly different data and information in that respect. Are you sending a presentation to introduce your brand or your business as a pitch? Or are you using a presentation to do a quote So you've gone beyond the pitch and you're now presenting your quote. So there's lots of different ways that you can use a marketing presentation. And obviously, lots of different methods and tools that you can use as well. So it's not just PowerPoint these days.
Esther
No, definitely not just PowerPoint these days. The world has evolved, and especially in recent years, AI has come aboard and is playing a large part in making them not boring and also in making them faster to make, which is obviously... Because like you were saying, you can make marketing presentations for a number of different reasons, but you would have to at least change things up in it when you're sending it to each and every company, because otherwise it just will definitely flop because they'd come across with somebody else's brand or name or something on it or the statistics and all the market research that you have to put into a presentation to begin with is so time consuming. So how do we create an effective marketing presentation? What's included in a good one?
Melanie
Okay, well, just doing a bit of research here. What we've included in the past, I don't know if it's always necessary, but sometimes you may want to put in a situational awareness. And just in case you're not sure what a situational awareness is, this is referred to as the process of collecting Evaluating and organising information regarding an organization's internal and external environment. It's basically a swot. It's just a really busy way of saying SWOT. Then on top of that, you've got the key findings about your market, your competition, and your audience. So that's right at the very, very beginning.
Esther
Yeah. You'd have to, well, right at the very beginning would be the introduction as to who you are and why they should listen to your presentation in the first place. But yeah, definitely having market research in there and competitor analysis, performance analysis of what's happening, what's working, what's not working, etc, that they're already doing. And that can just be pivotal to them choosing you or not, because if you don't do your research, then you're not going to know all the hurdles, like you said, the opportunities, the threats, the weaknesses or the strengths. So knowing all of those before you even pitch the presentation, it might turn you off as well before you even get to the pitching part. So you don't want to be putting yourself out there for a job that you'll end up hitting or that would be far more work than what you originally thought of on the budget that they have.
Melanie
And obviously, you got to have smart goals as well. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound marketing objectives.
Esther
Yeah. So that's what goes into it. And to create it, you need a strategy. You to have a process that you follow when you're doing these. So there's no point in just ad hoc going about it and picking numbers out of the air and just, going about it half-heartedly either. Have a strategy, have a plan in place as to how you do this. Do you go to the same places every time for the analytics that you're looking for to with that business? Do you do your market research in the same environments as well? Or do you go out onto the street and ask people on the street, what do you do to build up the plan as it is?
Melanie
And bringing all that together, it's probably a good idea to have a look and see what your competitors are doing or maybe your client's competitors are doing, just so that you can compete on an evened feel and you can address with the knowledge how you can actually match or even improve what your competitor is doing as well. So it's definitely worth having a look at the competitor analysis as well.
Esther
Yeah, but when you're presenting it, we definitely don't want death by PowerPoint, whether you're not using PowerPoint itself. Death by PowerPoint would just be horrendous, especially if you're going, you've got all this information that you want to present to them, but that doesn't mean that they need to get all of the information. So you don't need to bombard them with a lot of text or even a lot of figures if they're not fully relevant to what you are pitching for. You don't need to be even sending them a 30, 40-page document on all of the findings that you have, because think about it, if they don't go with your proposal, if you're with your presentation, then they've got all of this for free. So you need to hold some of it back. You need to be thinking, what can I keep up my sleeve so that if they come to me and say, oh, but you forgot about whatever. Yeah, that's all part of what I'm implementing. They don't need to get your whole strategy from the ground to launch.
Melanie
Do you know that is the hard part, isn't it? Because you want to dazzle your potential customer with your knowledge and, obviously not overwhelm them. But you also don't want to give too much away. And in the past, I've used presentations, especially when I'm training. If I put all the data on the slides themselves, I know people stop listening to me and just read the slides, but that's in person. But then there are other times where it's important that I put all the text, especially if I'm doing custom training, either one-to-one or small groups, I know that I've only got a small amount of time, maybe a day or two, to train these people, and then they have to take away that information with them afterwards. But what makes it relevant is the storytelling that I do around the slides.
Esther
Yeah.
Melanie
It's trying to find a happy medium, isn't it?
Esther
It is. And if you're doing it in person, I would be of the opinion of less text, more images, so that you can tell the stories. But it's not always possible to do it in person or even on a video call. Sometimes they ask for these presentations to be sent to them with no other input from you other than what is on the presentation itself. So this where you need to have something that makes you stand out. So whether that's moving images, whether it's a short video, whether it's you on the screen and having recorded it on your screen and send it to them with you talking, because you have to know your audience and know who you're pitching to to be able to know how they prefer to receive their information. I'm pretty sure in this day and age, there are very, very few that would appreciate a 40-page document with just text.
Melanie
Not many no.
Esther
No. I think those days are behind us. But if you could even put it onto your website with a password protected, it's there and it's somewhere that you can send people to, especially if it is more easily, what's the word I'm looking for? Generic. If it could be generic and you're pitching the same idea to lots of different business services, then having it there somewhere that you can keep safe and then you can send it out that way. That's one option.
Melanie
In the past, I've sent people instead of to my website, but to my YouTube channel. You can make the videos linkable by a copy of a link, or you can actually add people that you can share it to, or you can do Dropboxes as well. But those suggestions you did there, Esther, it just made me smile as you were listening to them. I was listening to them because I've done all of those in a 10-page pitch before. I've embedded a video into my presentation where I just talked for a minute or two. Then I've done a ScreenPal or what used to be known as Screencast O Matic, where I've shown how I would do something and then embedded that as well. Then you can do stories and and YouTube videos and all sorts of other bits and pieces just to keep it interesting. And it makes you stand out as well. Otherwise, it's just page after page of beautifully crafted graphics.
Esther
Yeah. And like we were saying earlier, PowerPoint is wonderful. It's been used for many, many years. It still works. If that's what you're comfortable using, then that's fine. There's also one that's similar called Prezzi, P-R-E-Z-Z-I. Which is more movement involved in it. But like I was saying, too, there's AI has come on board. And before I get to the AI, there's Google Slides. So if you want to send it via Google Docs or your Drive, then Google Slides is a good option, which is just basically PowerPoint, but on the cloud. But yeah, AI has come a long way, and there are many options that can help you and reduce the amount of time that you spend looking at information and collecting the information or making the information pretty, because, well, obviously, AI can only go so far.
Melanie
Have you ever used Gamma?
Esther
That's the one that we use.
Melanie
Yeah, because I've been using Gamma for a while now. Not for everything, But sometimes I use some of the Gamma slides to slot into my PowerPoint presentations because they just do them in such a different way. I know it drives my husband mad. I think you've commented about it before. I do not stick to a theme. I do not stick to a theme in my presentations because I find it a bit dull and a bit boring. So one minute it's bright pink, another time it's orange and then it goes white, and then it's black and white. I think what people about my presentations enjoy is I just don't know what's going to pop up next. Is it going to be a picture? Is it going to be copies? Is it going to be a short video? And so if you find it dull and boring, there's every chance that you're The end consumer is going to find it dull and boring as well. And that's now become my brand, I suppose. It becomes how I establish my brand with my presentations. I have used SlideShare before. So when I create a, especially a public presentation, less so a customer one, I then share it onto SlideShare, which is connected to LinkedIn And then that's available for people to download or view if they don't want to download it as well.
Esther
Yeah. Like I was saying, there's so many out there. But do your research first have the information available before you use an AI, especially, because otherwise the information that it pulls in could be something completely different. But always review it before you share it with anybody else. And that goes for even if you type it up yourself, always get it reviewed because we can all make mistakes. We're only human and the bots have been made by humans. So everything can go awry. But yeah, Take a look. There's lots of different options out there. We've had Fiona Walsh on talking about PowerPoint using PowerPoint in a previous episode. So take a listen back to that one as well and make your presentation It's more interesting, whether you're doing it in a conference, whether you're doing it in private for pitching for a job or whatever, whether you're using it to send your details at the end of each month of their progress, etc. Whatever you're using it for, make them interesting because death by PowerPoint is not fun.
Melanie
No.
Esther
And on that note, we'll be back next week for another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. Have a good one, guys. Play around with AI and your presentations. Bye-bye.
Melanie
Bye.
