Marketing professionals should be precious about their company’s brand. After all, it’s the thing they’ve spent so much time and effort perfecting.
If you’ve done all you can with your website, marketing materials, and social campaigns, we’re guessing you’d be pretty miffed if a sales person went ahead and ignored it all, right? That’s why we’ve created a video highlighting why Marketing peeps such as yourself should really invest in PowerPoint.
The video takes the form of 5 useful points showing why PowerPoint presentations are a marketing pro’s most helpful tool. Whether you currently use them or not, a PowerPoint presentation has the ability to capture the imagination of your audience. It can also convince a potential client to buy from you. Done right, a marketing presentation can show off your brand, product, or business in the way that you want it to be seen. Yes, you still have control in a sales environment.
Check it out:
The five reasons why any marketing manager or professional worth their salt should care about the quality of their PowerPoint presentations, are…
1, It’s the first touch point your brand has in a face to face setting
PowerPoint presentations might be way down your list of important marketing tools, but it’s time to move them up a few places. Presentations used by your company’s sales team are often the first face to face touch point a potential client will have with your brand. You know, that thing you’ve worked late each night perfecting and obsessing over.
As a marketeer, you need to have some control over that first interaction. That is why a well-designed and properly branded PowerPoint deck, one YOUR team has built, not the salesperson, can show your company off in an impactful and professional manner.
Having the very best possible presentation in any given sales situation means you control how your brand is represented and with what message it is associated. That potential client will see and hear only positive things. Your brand assets will always be consistent, slide to slide. After all, first impressions count.
2, It’s a versatile and flexible way to pitch
PowerPoint needn’t be a linear, slide-by-slide journey that forces your sales team to present every slide, every time. Using well constructed, hyper-linked menus or using the Zoom feature in the latest versions of Office 365, you can ensure your team always has all the info they need at their fingertips.
Bringing menus out into the open in this way also helps make discussions interactive. So your sales rep can say “what do you want to see next?” or “which of these challenges do you have in your business?” This allows their audience to guide the conversation. This is a great way to upsell and cross-sell, delivering incremental revenue that may not otherwise have been on the table.
We’ve heard countless times about a hyper-confident salesperson striding into a meeting with a client. They lay down their best arguments and evidence why they should pick your company. But then getting completely flummoxed when the client asks a question they don’t know the answer to. Traditionally, it would be a case of hitting Escape and trying to find the right info on the PC or elsewhere in the deck.
With a menu system, however, the salesperson will have quick access to everything. And I really do mean everything. With nonlinear functionality built into the presentation file, a salesperson can ‘leap’ from one subject to another, seamlessly. There is no need to flick over dozens of irrelevant slides, as one click on the menu will take them immediately to the right part of the presentation.
3, Your message can be 100% compliant
Let’s be honest, ‘rogue’ salespeople are a marketing professional’s worst nightmare. Sure, your company’s sales team are vital to winning new clients. And of course you have to respect them for their confidence and product knowledge. But, a salesperson who constantly goes off-script and uses incorrectly branded promotional material, will definitely be doing more harm than good.
If the sales force are all given one PowerPoint presentation file, with a consistent look, tone and order, it will keep the rogues in line. Salespeople can still use their natural charm and personality to win over prospects. But thanks to the presentation their message will be kept compliant. It’ll be how you and YOUR marketing department wish your organisation to be perceived, regardless of if the slides have been created in-house or by outsourcing your presentations.
Once the pitch is over, and your prospect is making a decision, they’ll no doubt find their way to your website. They’ll go from seeing the branding consistency of the presentation right there before them on the website. They’ll get a sense that your company is cohesive and that it has a strong brand identity. Which it does. Because you’re awesome.
4, Collaboration
PowerPoint is a great tool for collaboration between marketing and sales. When wanting to collaborate and work together remotely, many people make the move to Google Slides, thinking its a better platform for cloud-based working. It’s not. And unless you know it really well … it can look utterly rubbish.
PowerPoint deals this with today better than it used to. For a start, all PowerPoint users have a OneDrive account, which can be used for a hell of a lot more than just saving pictures of your kids. Through Office 365 all PowerPoint presentation files are automatically backed up to OneDrive. This means they are safe AND you can access them from anywhere with an internet connection – even if you don’t have your own PC and copy of PowerPoint with you. You only need a browser.
Then there is TEAMS, Microsoft’s excellent collaborative and team working service. With TEAMS you can work alongside anyone in your network, regardless of where they are on the planet. That means you can edit and update your PowerPoint presentation, offering notes and advice, while you’re all in different places. You can even be on a video call together while you’re doing it. If you realise a change needs to made, or a piece of information updated, you can do so, altogether, immediately.
TEAMS also allows you to add a person from outside of your organisation as a guest. Quick, tidy up! That allows you to work more closely with clients and potential clients, making it easier to share vital marketing materials. TEAMS will also help you work closely with your outsourced presentation design agency, should you have hired one. Outsourcing PowerPoint design work is a great to get thing down faster and to a higher quality, so using a system like TEAMS will help.
And y’know, the presentation will still look awesome. Unlike a Google Slides presentation.
5, ROI
Put simply, a professionally designed PowerPoint marketing presentation will pay for itself time and time again. With one investment to get the presentation created, it can be distributed throughout your entire company, and not just to the sales teams.
The ability to edit and modify your presentation means it can be adapted and repurposed for any kind of business use. From keeping departments updated in meetings, to cycling automatically on a screen in your company’s foyer or public spaces.
But most importantly it can be used, again and again, to win over new business by showing off your brand in the best possible light. When things change, simply update it with a few clicks. Once client feedback starts rolling in, edit it to cut what doesn’t work and augment what does.
PowerPoint is the ideal marketing tool.
Needless to say, a presentation slide deck done right can be the difference between a successful sale and a wasted journey. Don’t take chances with something so important to the modern marketing pro and invest in PowerPoint. Remember – if your company doesn’t have the time and resources to invest in creating your own presentations, outsource your PowerPoint design to an outside agency. By outsourcing your presentation needs to a professional agency, you’ll be taking on the knowledge and experience to ensure your slide decks are as amazing as they can be. Check out this post detailing why you need to outsource your presentations.
Do need help with your presentation? Get in touch. Our expert design team will work closely with you to create a PowerPoint deck that will smash your audience’s expectations.
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