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The PowerPoint Presentation Conundrum
As a marketing professional, you’ve no doubt labored over a laptop trying to create the perfect presentation. Or, at the very least, you’ve tried to fix one. It’s never an easy task. Why are presentations so challenging—and what does it take to create a great PowerPoint?

PowerPoint presentations are difficult to create for several reasons:

• One size does not fit all. Marketing and communications plans often call for general sales presentations. But presenters typically have their own unique styles and approaches—making it difficult to meet everyone’s needs.
• Personalized content degrades brand consistency. Of course, even when a general presentation has been created, many presenters “tweak” the content to their liking. The result is often a collection of mismatched documents being presented to your customers. (And let’s not forget the two words that strike fear into the heart of any brand or communications manager: clip art!)
• Multimedia features create complexity and room for error. Voice and video clips can add pizzazz to PowerPoint presentations. But, such multimedia files can also make file sizes unmanageable while increasing the chance of technical glitches. 

Given those challenges, how can you create powerful, usable presentations for your executives, sales professionals, and product marketing experts? While there’s no magic formula, consider these four steps the next time you develop a presentation.

Step 1. Know the audience
The first thing you need to do is define the audience. Will the audience be primarily business executives? If so, consider framing your presentation around business challenges and solutions. Or, if the audience will be more technical, be sure to include “meatier” content that will appeal to them. The important thing is to create material that is directly relevant to the audience, in a way that the viewers can easily understand. 

If possible, avoid creating presentations for a wide range of people. The challenges facing an IT director are very different from those of a CEO. The presenter will struggle capturing the interest of either group. So, identify the audience and know their key challenges—the issues they face on a daily basis. Moving forward, you’ll want to frame the presentation so that it addresses these challenges.

Step 2. Define the goal
What do you want the audience to walk away with? Break down the goal into the steps needed to achieve it. For example, if you are creating a sales training presentation on a particular product, consider all the facets of the product and sales process that must be covered. Arrange them in a logical order and begin filling out the type of information needed for each section.

As you build the presentation, keep in mind that people will customize it to map to their own individual styles and presentation needs. You should aim to provide a solid foundation on which others can easily build and expand.

Step 3. Translate bullets into graphics
Once you have an outline in place, go through each main point and think of it in graphical terms. Visuals are much more interesting than bullet points and can make a more powerful statement. Plus, if you’re developing presentations that may be used globally, clear, compelling graphics and images can be used across multiple geographies.

Step 4. Add real results and statistics
Presentations are a great way to deliver both qualitative and quantitative information. Anecdotes, such as customer success stories, help the viewer conceptualize key points. Presentations are also a great forum for presenting facts and figures. Be sure to select the most impressive statistics available. For example, if you’re trying to demonstrate the benefits of a particular software package, you could say, “Package XYZ reduces maintenance costs.” However, for more impact, leverage data from existing case studies to create more hard-hitting statements, such as “Package XYZ reduces maintenance costs up to 60 percent.” Hard numbers always have a stronger impact.

Creating high-impact, meaningful presentations may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Be sure to schedule time at the onset to understand your audience, determine what you want the audience to take away from the presentation, make it visually appealing, and pepper it with powerful data to support your claims.

Don’t have enough time? Contact Launch at 215-230-4340 or send us an email at info@launchintl.com. We have helped organizations create presentations for a wide range of audiences—from CEOs to industry analysts.