Rains | Birchard Marketing Blog:
Advice for working with a marketing agency
How much is a PowerPoint Presentation Worth?
BY MATTHEW BIRCHARD
PowerPoint is a ubiquitous business mainstay. Everyone has it, and technically, anyone can use it. But before that program gets fired up, ask yourself, how much is your company’s success worth?
Rains | Birchard Marketing spends a great deal of time working with our clients on a wide range of marketing projects. Big important materials like logo designs, trade show booths and collateral, ad campaigns, website designs, SEO, media campaigns, and the list goes on. These sorts of projects are what we consider to be a part of our “out-sourced, in-house” value proposition.
However, we found out that one of our clients was using PowerPoint to pitch big, multi-million dollar sales. All of our efforts to create great marketing materials seemed to be wasted because sales people were producing presentations themselves. Why were they doing this? Because they didn’t consider PowerPoint to be a part of their overall marketing plan. In reality, PowerPoint presentations may be one of the most important elements between making that big million dollar sale or not.
Later we received a copy of an actual presentation that a sales person had used, and describing the design as “utilitarian” would be generous. Marketing is all about perception; when intermingled with sales it’s important to remember that you’re selling the sizzle and the steak. This PowerPoint had no sizzle, and didn’t resemble any of the branding elements that had been established.
The differences between a PowerPoint put together by the person presenting the materials and one put together by a designer working with a marketing team is like night and day. They may have the same content, but how it is visually presented makes all the difference. One of my favorite mantras rings true: “Just because you could, doesn’t mean you should.”
Since then, we’ve created some well designed, versatile and durable (read: hard to screw up) PowerPoint templates for my client’s sales people to use. The reality is the true success of the company hinged in large part on presentations made using PowerPoint. So how much is a PowerPoint presentation actually worth? For this client, potentially millions.
Matt has a holistic view of marketing and is always available to meet with businesses who are looking for guidance and are ready to grow.
