There’s no denying the power of persuasive visuals, from animated videos to grab-worthy brochures. But today, it’s understood that the rule also extends to graphs and charts and layouts. When you’re presenting data, it needs to look amazing—or you’ll never hold someone’s attention long enough to actually explain the impressive takeaways that your slides reflect.
Therefore, sales and marketing teams are now stepping up their game with gorgeous pitch decks and presentations. So how can you make sure yours measure up—much less stand out—especially if you’re on a limited budget?
Below, we’ll discuss some of the easiest standards to meet that will allow you to step up your game. With a little time and practice, you’ll be up to par with your industry’s best-shared decks.
1. Be brave, but stay simple: People often overdo slides in an effort to make them more interesting. You should actually keep your slides clear and concise, so that your audience knows where to focus their attention and can listen to the presenter at the same time. However, simplicity doesn’t mean you should forget those “surprise and delight” moments, like bright colors, bits of humor, or brave choices—such as hand-drawn cartoons for your images, or even triangles for text callouts instead of boxes. (Note: Those moments should never involve quirky transitions; we left those back in the aughts!) Engage your audience with joy, not complexity.
2. Work from an original template: Templates are important, because they help your company uphold branding guidelines, ensure consistency between presentations, and create flow between slides. But you don’t want to just grab a demo template from the web and go from there. Those designs have often been used a million times, and can cause your audience to lose interest. There’s high value in purchasing a set of entirely unique slides, which your team can use to build out a set of custom templates or an endless variety of decks in the future.
3. Focus on your key takeaways: Presentations often compile a large amount of information into a compact space. Your audience won’t retain all of that information in one sitting. And while your charts and data will be useful for them to go back and reference later, one area to really spend a lot of attention is your key takeaways. What is the message you’re trying to convey? What is your story? What are the three talking points you really want them to grasp when they leave the room? Make sure that those elements are emphasized through your setup and payoff, your talking points and even images. You don’t want people to be so dazzled by your entertaining, beautiful deck that they have no idea what you were attempting to convey.
For a conversation about turning your data into eye-catching assets, or if you’d like our team of graphic designers to prepare materials for your next big pitch, reach out anytime.