How to: Deliver a successful presentation in B2B marketing

Deliver a successful marketing presentation

Spencer Waldron, UK country manager of Prezi, explains how to ace your next presentation

Stories are powerful tools. They change how we think and feel about something. Take books, films, plays: they all use the power of a well-structured story to take us on emotional journeys we’ll remember for years to come.

A good presentation should draw on this power. For those that work in marketing and sales, creating a presentation that conveys key messages, in a memorable way, is critical to getting clients on board. By harnessing the power of business storytelling, marketing professionals can stand out from the crowd and leave a lasting impression with an audience who otherwise wouldn’t have remembered their pitch 10 minutes afterwards.

The most important things in creating a presentation that sticks are: proper planning; preparing the actual content of your speech by structuring your story and deciding on a design; and delivering it in an engaging way. Here are five of my best tips to help you make a huge impact with your next presentation:

1. Planning for your audience

Give the initial planning phase the attention it deserves. Putting together a well-designed presentation takes time and effort, and the way in which you present your information should always be tailored to your audience.

One useful approach is to divide people into three categories: factual, creative or emotional. Factual people want to understand the thinking behind your product, and they need concrete facts and figures. Creative people respond to well-designed presentations; they would rather have a wide overview. Emotionally-minded people can be reached best through excellent delivery and a personal touch.

Keep a balance of these different approaches, but use them to bring out different facets to tailor it to your audience. For example, financial directors tend to be of the ‘factual’ type, so give them lots of detail; whereas a pitch to operations or marketing executives should be more creative, with big-picture ideas. In some ways, your audience determines the mood of your story.

2. Structure

Once you have your information to hand, start assembling it into a story. Start with a blank page – this is your script. Remember your presentation should have a clear beginning, middle and end, as well as an overarching narrative. Are there obstacles and solutions, or a central character? Don’t worry about editing in the beginning, just get down what you think is important.

3. Review

I always take a break before I review what I’ve written. Go back to it with fresh eyes, and cut out anything that seems unclear or non-essential. Focus on why your idea, team or market is a ‘must invest’ opportunity. Your watch words for this process should be clarity, accuracy, and efficiency.

4. Messaging

What do you want your audience to remember? The bottom line is always the most important thing. Now that you’ve developed succinct and engaging content, you need to distil the take-away message to one sentence.

This finished script will be roughly what you want to talk through, but not what goes into your presentation. For that you need to strip out bite-sized chunks of information and headlines, which will form the basis of your visual illustration.

5. Design

Design is essential for making a good first impression. This is important, and you only have limited time: people only take 15 seconds to make an initial judgement. 

First of all, choose your presentation software. The software you choose can help get you noticed. Everyone knows about Microsoft PowerPoint but there are new alternatives out there that you can also use – Google Slides and Prezi are two of the most popular. Base your decision on which software is most suited to illustrate connections within your story.

  • I’ve learnt that these are a handful of critical things to focus on when designing your presentation:
  • Keep text to a minimum – think headlines, not paragraphs! Less is more. You don’t want people to get distracted by a block of text.
  • Highlight the important parts – use bold and font size to emphasis what you want people to focus on and remember.
  • One thought at a time – keep it to one idea per image.
  • Use colour wisely – pick a complementary color palette and use it consistently. Use Adobe’s colour wheel to find a set of colours that go together well.
  • Use great photography – invest a small amount of money (£5 – £30) on buying images from somewhere like istockphoto. Great images make your presentation stand out – but avoid having lots of photos without a purpose.
  • Fonts – use a business style font that sets the right tone. Use a sans-serif font for a factual or tech-based approach, and a serif font to give a more stylish impression.

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