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This document will give you the key concepts and guidelines presented by Ken
Molay in his web seminar on tips for creating powerful and effective marketing
presentations.
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Why do you need to concentrate on skills and techniques for building good
presentation content? Because quite frankly, nobody else in your organization cares
about the quality of the content. That may sound ridiculous at first. You probably
have all kinds of people contributing “helpful” comments when you create a
presentation.
“Make sure to talk about this feature.”
“Tell them about the upcoming user conference.”
“Get them to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.”
“Don’t forget our company overview slides.”
While well-meaning, these disjointed suggestions create a “kitchen sink”
presentation. Muddled and superfluous messages that do not lead an attendee to a
specific action or conclusion.
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What you really need to provide are results. And that can lead to some murky
thinking as well. Far too many managers are concerned only with the number of
leads you capture on your marketing webinar. And they make the mistake of
counting registrants as leads. A registrant is a contact… not a lead. If all you are
concerned with is the number of people who register, your content is not important
at all.
Others believe that the success of a marketing webinar is measured in the number
f di t l d lt f tt d If t i t d i l iof direct sales made as a result of attendance. If you are trying to drive sales in your
webinar, you are no longer talking about a marketing webinar… You are talking
about a sales webinar. And that’s a different subject than I am covering here.
So that leaves us with the question of just what an “effective” webinar presentation
should accomplish? The answer is that it should prompt viewers to enter your sales
process. Entering the process may mean requesting a sales call. It may mean being
willing to talk to an inside sales or telemarketing representative when they call Itwilling to talk to an inside sales or telemarketing representative when they call. It
may mean filling out a form asking for more detailed information about your
products and services.
Your content needs to produce a change in your viewers’ attitudes and/or behaviors.
And there are specific things you can do to achieve that goal.
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Let’s fill in the blanks with the types of content that can be useful in marketing
presentations:
• You may want to demonstrate your company’s expertise in your topic area by
showcasing an employee or representative who can give listeners useful
information.
• You may want to demonstrate thought leadership in your field by participating in or
hosting a panel discussion or debate on a crucial topic.
• You may want to be seen as a trusted resource by making outside experts
available to share their knowledge and expertise.
• You may want to build awareness of your products and services with introductory
overviews of your offerings or more detailed updates on recent enhancements.
• You may want to showcase specific functionality and competitive differentiation
with demonstrations of your offerings (although I prefer to save these for saleswith demonstrations of your offerings (although I prefer to save these for sales
presentations in most cases).
And there are plenty of other possibilities as well.
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No matter which of the content types you decide to use from the preceding list,
there are fundamental approaches that will help to make it work for you. We will
now dive into the top five tips that you should incorporate in any presentation.
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First, and most importantly, we need to recognise that successful presentations
build audience interest, involvement, and retention. That means we have to think
about their viewpoint at all times.
You have a goal as a company. There is a reason for spending the time, money,
and effort to put on a marketing presentation. But your audience doesn’t care about
that goal. You need to turn your perspective on your content 180 degrees and view
it from their eyes.
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You have an advantage with your audience right from the start. They have chosen
to attend your presentation and they are hoping it turns out to be valuable and
engaging.
But “valuable and engaging” may not be what you think. There is a difference
between being interested in a subject and caring about a subject. One of the things
you have to do as a presenter is to change the audience’s attitude from being
interested to truly caring. And you do that by appealing to the one universal passion
that all humans share…
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Your audience cares about themselves, their needs, their benefits. You need to play
to this. Assume that as human beings, we are all inherently selfish. That’s not a bad
thing or a negative statement. It’s just a way to get you to swap your viewpoint from
“What do I want to say” over to “What do they want to hear about?”
When Al Gore put together his talk about the need to take action against global
warming, his challenge was to make the impacts personal rather than academic.
You need to do the same thing.
The single most effective thing you can do in your planning and delivery is to
consciously work at incorporating the words “YOU” and “YOUR” into your
presentation as much as possible. Keep emphasising value to the individual
listening to you. Your delivery to a group of 200 attendees should be exactly theg y y g p y
same as if there were one person sitting in front of you.
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Gillette spends millions of dollars on product development, research, and
manufacturing processes to make their razors as high tech and effective as they
can. You can find all those product details if you look for them. But the primary way
to reach their target consumer market is through advertising that goes straight to the
heart of satisfying the private “selfish” needs/benefits of the male. “Use our razor
and you’ll end up wealthy, daring, and irresistible to hot women.” No male wants to
admit that they think like this, but the imagery and messaging gets them to pay
attention Once they have an emotional connection to the outcome they’ll listen toattention. Once they have an emotional connection to the outcome, they ll listen to
the facts about why your way is the best way to achieve it.
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Your content must match very closely to the promotional materials that got people to
attend your presentation. You can have strong and effective marketing materials,
but if it is not information that the audience was prepared to hear, you create
frustration and anger at a “bait and switch” campaign.
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Because promotional materials have to go out well in advance of an event, you or
your designated presenters will probably be working on content long after the
promotional work is done. It is vital that you “check in” with the event description to
make sure you are delivering what was promised.
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You are looking for key phrases in your event description. Words like “find out”,
“learn how”, and “see examples of” indicate promises to your audience. People
register because they want the specific value points the promotional materials have
offered. If you deliver on those items, they will be satisfied. Ignore them, and they
have a legitimate right to complain and to view your company as untrustworthy.
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You want to move as quickly as possible to delivering actual value for the audience
to meet their expectations for what was promised. In this presentation, by slide two
we were discussing benefits and by slide four we were looking at the tips and
guidelines that had been promised. You didn’t have to wait long to know that you
were getting something real, and not just an advertisement and sales pitch.
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Back in 1971, The Who sang “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The typical modern
audience is experienced and cynical. They have been burned by bad presentations,
unfulfilled promises, and thinly disguised sales pitches masquerading as
informational topics. They keep signing up hoping to receive value, but are quick to
abandon you if you don’t meet their expectations.
Some audience members get into the habit of joining webinars late, just to avoid the
long run-up to the information they want, which they know from experience comes
10 15 i t i t th t lk10-15 minutes into the talk.
Poll: Have you ever abandoned a free webinar?
YesYes
No
This is my first
Poll: Have you ever purposely joined a webinar late?
YesYes
No
This is my first
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I promised to tell you the commonly used presentation technique that works against
you in a webinar. Here it is. The easiest, most conventional, and most common way
to launch into a marketing presentation is through a linear storyline that starts with a
wide ranging background and introductory materials, moves into a far-too-long
description of problems, and closes with a discussion of products or services that
solve the presented issues.
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Remember that your audience has attended based on promises of specific valueRemember that your audience has attended based on promises of specific value
points they will benefit from. They are going to form an impression very quickly on
whether you are trustworthy in delivering on your promises. If you start your
presentation with standard corporate marketing slides about the size and location of
your company’s offices, you are failing on several counts. Instead of the intended
goal of helping your audience understand who you are and why they can trust the
information you will be presenting and the value of the solutions you offer, you show
th t id l d i iti i t t th th di ’that you consider your goals and priorities more important than the audience’s.
Corporate information is usually a checklist item for decision makers to review
before finalising a purchase decision. Here you are offering sales closing
information at the start of your relationship. It’s not what they showed up to hear
about.
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The second stage of most business presentations is a long setup showing that you
“get it” as a provider. You list all the problems and pain points faced by your
audience.
This is necessary for infomercials and TV ads for consumer goods. They have to
grab an unsuspecting audience and build the perception of a need or problem to
capture attention.
But you are not selling to an impartial and uninterested mass audience. You are
addressing specific individuals with a vested interest in your topic. In the B2B world,
you are typically presenting to professionals who are intimately familiar with the
problem scenario. They don’t want a refresher course on why their job is difficult.
They want solutions.
Spending a long time showing that you “get it” is one of the surest ways of showing
that you are not a peer member of your target audience. They don’t have to talk
b t th bl Th li th !about the problems… They live them!
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Well designed promotional materials and event reminder messages should take
much of the burden off your content for setting up the problem scenario. Your
audience gets the problem and agrees that it is relevant to them before they ever
show up, based on the event description. You don’t need to reestablish the same
pain points your audience has already identified with.
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Newspaper reporters are taught to write using the “inverted pyramid” approach. The
key facts go in the first two paragraphs. The explanatory material, background, and
interpretation go later. That is the way to structure your presentation as well.
You want your audience members to get the important facts about your solutions
and offerings quickly. If they get called away by a phone call or conversation, they
have still received the most critical information you needed to share.
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Sure, you have plenty of facts to deliver. But if you want your audience to remember
and internalise those facts, you have to make them palatable. Instead of page after
page of bullet points, weave the concepts into a story. Think about taking history
classes in school. If your teacher simply recited dates and places at you, you hated
them and had to force yourself to pay attention and memorise them for the test. But
if the teacher told a story -- “Paul Revere rode through the streets shouting ‘The
British are coming!’” it pulls you in and helps you care about the details. You need to
give your audience “a hook” to help them care about your subjectgive your audience a hook to help them care about your subject.
As you move along your story line, remind your audience every so often of where
you are on the overall path. I’m using the clipboard motif in these tips to help place
each concept in context of the overall flow and remind you of where we are in the
story of making effective marketing presentations.
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In setting up a story, your main task is to create a clear and compelling scenario that
gives your audience their reason to care about everything coming next. My friend
and colleague Darcy Sullivan uses this James Bond analogy, which he very kindly
let me steal.
Very early in a Bond movie, we get the scenario set up… There is a villain. He has a
weapon. If James doesn’t stop him, the results will be catastrophic. Now that the
baseline is established, we care how the weapon works, where James has to go,
h th J h ld d t t dwhether James can hold up under torture, and so on.
Remember, we are appealing to basic personal self interest. I started this
presentation with a scenario based on your own business responsibilities and linked
the content to achieving personal success.
Try to make your pitch more about helping the individual listener than the corporate
entity. How will better business performance reflect well on them personally for
doing a better job or finding the right solution?
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Stories don’t have to be about the entire presentation. They can also help make
individual concepts more understandable and compelling. Here we see a complex
type of presentation slide. It uses reference material copied in as a graph with
explanatory text, additional bullet items, and a summary point.
The copied graph carries superfluous information that does not add value for the
audience in the context of the presentation. The text is hard to read. And the key
financial information summary is blue on blue, making it fade in rather than jump out
i t t i tas an important point.
Let’s look at a redesign that carries the audience through a story line about the
concept the graph is illustrating.
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I split the slide into two pieces. The first is a reconstruction of the graph, adding
information in pieces to build comprehension and tell a story. All non-essential data
has been eliminated. You can always provide a reference document for later review
if it is important that your audience have the underlying numbers.
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The second half of the slide now adds a visual “hook” and uses large, well-spaced
text that is easy to read. We have also invited Socratic participation before revealing
the text bullets. This involves the audience and improves information
comprehension and retention.
Finally, I used a high contrast for the “grabber” at the end to drive home my point.
Building a story is incredibly effective when teaching informing or persuadingBuilding a story is incredibly effective when teaching, informing, or persuading.
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One of the most frustrating experiences for audiences (proven in study after study)
are PowerPoint slides that tell the entire presentation word for word. Your audience
doesn’t need you to stand and read slides out loud to them. They can read faster
than you can talk.
There are many reasons we tend to write overly wordy slides.
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When you write complete sentences and every detail on your slides, you feel
comfortable because you know you won’t forget anything you wanted to say during
your presentation. But slides should not be used as a personal teleprompter for your
talk. Notice that politicians don’t display their speech in text for the audience to read
while they are delivering it. TV personalities don’t show their script to the audience
as they present stories.
With fewer words on your slides, you have to rehearse and practice more to make
sure you know what you will say while the slide is showing. It’s one of the
unavoidable commitments you must make in order to stand out as a presenter.
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You have seen an overabundance of photos in this presentation. I have the
advantage of a large library of purchased photos I can draw from and possibly more
time available to search for images than you will have. Nobody expects you to
create an entirely graphical presentation. But if you can find a few photos to spice
things up and break the monotony of repeated bullet point slides, your presentation
will be more memorable and engaging for your audience.
Two of my favorite sources are ISTOCKPHOTO.COM and DREAMSTIME.COM.
You can download images for approximately $3 each and use them legally in your
commercial presentations. You should not copy images off the web at random. You
could end up violating copyrights.
You can also save money by using free sources such as Flickr, but these usuallyy y g y
require an attribution sentence in your content. I prefer keeping my slides clean and
spending the extra money. It’s a matter of choice.
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Can we create an overall guideline for you to follow when building your PowerPoint
presentation? I’m not a fan of absolute templates, as you will want to use your own
unique approach to telling your story based on many different factors. But let’s take
a shot at summarising the highlights.
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You can read these bullet points on your own as a reference item. But when I
present them in my webinar, I call attention to the high level groupings provided by
the brackets. Now I have something to say ABOUT the text, instead of simply
reciting the words on the screen.
The three groupings indicate a variation on the presentation approach you may
have been taught when writing a school paper or preparing a debate speech. That
classic maxim was: “Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell it to them. Tell
th h t t ld th ”them what you told them.”
In a marketing presentation, the triad changes to: “Introduce the value they will get
by listening to you. Provide the value. Summarise the value and encourage them to
gain more value by taking the next step.”
You will note that a key missing item in here is an official “Agenda” slide. I’m not ay g g
big fan of those. Instead, I try to keep my audience grounded in where they are
along the path of my overall story. I sometimes start with a list of items to cover and
then show them where they are in the list as we get to the detail for each topic point.
The clipboard motif I used was an example of this approach.
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Be explicit about what you expect or want the audience to do. You don’t need to be
demanding, but you should clearly state the steps they can take to add value for
themselves.
If you have other webinars planned, make sure the next one has already been
scheduled in your web conferencing system and that you can direct your audience
to the registration page for it. Give them useful URLs in an easy to use format.
Reduce long URLs by registering a short domain name and using a redirect or by
using a URL shortening service like tinyurl.com or bit.ly
If you want them to respond to a follow-up contact from your company, tell them
when, why, and how you will be contacting them. Emphasise the value they will be
able to receive by being receptive.y g p
If you want them to be proactive with a request for information, let them know why
they should take that step.
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Let’s talk briefly about the worst moment in any creative endeavor… Staring at a
blank screen and wondering how to begin.
Different tricks work for different people. I’m not going to tell you one right way to
get going and insist that you follow it. Instead, I’ll give you a number of methods you
can try. I often combine different methods in different areas of my presentation to
try and stimulate different thought patterns about my content.
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One method is to open up Microsoft Word and start expanding your story line
simple path into a more detailed outline. You can list the key deliverables with lower-
level entries detailing specific pieces of evidence, anecdotes, case studies, or
analogies that you will use to get your point across.
Another way of going about this process is to open PowerPoint and start writing
slide titles. Each title acts like an outline entry. You can use the “slide sorter” view to
move things around easily and see if the story line is flowing smoothly. Don’t worry
about filling in the content of the slides yet. Just concentrate on separating your
content into discrete “chunks.”
Some people think visually and like to sketch ideas for how they will convey their
points. You can do this on paper, or if you have a data tablet entry device, you canp p p y y y
sketch directly into PowerPoint. These can be quite crudely drawn, since nobody
will see them but you. It’s a way to open up your creativity in a graphical context.
Some people “know what they want to say” and are comfortable thinking in verbal
terms. You can start by writing out a script for your presentation without worrying
about titles or slide content. You can write in the notes section of PowerPoint or justj
keep it in Word.
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Let’s wrap back to the value point we started with. I can be more explicit about my
technique here than you would normally be in a presentation. You are already
thinking about methodologies and how I am using the tips I showed you, so it
doesn’t do me a lot of good to be subtle.
We are trying to use presentation content to move people into the sales cycle. If we
are effective, we get all the finger pointers and casual contributors in our
organization off our backs, because we are turning audience interest into
ti d tireceptiveness and action.
Your most important single key in making your marketing more effective is to think
from the audience’s point of view. Understand what they want, understand what
motivates them, understand what they already know, and understand how they are
coming into your presentation. Meet their expectations, deliver value quickly and
explicitly, and help them understand how their next step can bring even more value
to themto them.
If you can get to the point where you stop asking yourself “What do I want to
demonstrate?” and instead ask “What does my audience want to see?” you are well
on your way to achieving marketing success.
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I welcome any comments or questions you might have. Please feel free to email me
or use the contact form on the Webinar Success web site.
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