How To Make An Effective PowerPoint Pitch Deck
Pitch decks can make or break you. A presentation that contains just a few slides can have a significant impact on how your business or organization would fare in a highly competitive market. Therefore, your pitch deck must be strong, powerful, yet brief and impressive as you persuade potential investors, partners, customers, and the general public.
To achieve your goals, you must have an effective PowerPoint pitch deck. This means you have to make the most of the short time and the few slides to make a statement and sell your big idea. There are many tips and tricks to do this, and in this article, we’re giving the lowdown on how to make an effective PowerPoint pitch deck that can persuade and convince your audience to buy your big idea.
Related: Pitch Deck that Made Sucessful Companies
Connect With Your Audience From The Get-Go
If you really want to grab the attention of your audience right away, then you have to connect with them with the very first slide.
Early on in your presentation, make it clear to them that the presentation is about them and what they are about to see and hear will benefit them. In a pitch deck, you have to be quick in getting across that your skills, expertise, ideas, products, or services are there to address their needs. Check out, for example, the Airbnb pitch deck case to understand how successful startup like Airbnb built their pitch deck.
You start the pitch deck with the story about them so that they will really be interested and will be naturally eager to learn more. Have this theme throughout your slides so you won’t veer away from associating your slides to their relevance to your audience’s needs.
Be Clear & Concise Throughout Your Slides
From the first slide down to your last, you have to be clear about your ideas and message. Otherwise, you will lose the interest of your audience along the way and you defeat the purpose of your pitch.
Remember, you only have just a few slides, so you have to come in strong and straightforward. This will also make your presentation lively.
Use Visuals That Make Sense
Use animations that make sense and help your case in your slide, and not just for decorations. Blend aesthetics with function to take out unnecessary frills that can confuse and distract your audience.
This is also where clear, and dynamic visuals are necessary. They are a concise way of presenting your ideas or telling a story instead of using lists and long blocks of text. They also provide a nice visual break from loaded figures and text that you may inevitably use in your slides.
You can use diagrams, charts, graphs, high-quality images, and clear videos that you can seamlessly embed in your PowerPoint slides.
Make Your Presentation Flexible
When you’re creating a pitch, it’s more likely that you will make it for different kinds of audiences. You may present your company to potential investors, friends, partners, employees, and clients.
To help you have a uniform voice and theme as you present to various audience types, it’s best to have a PowerPoint template of your pitch. Templates are helpful, practical, and time-saving tools to help you create a uniform message while still presenting to audience sets with different unique needs.
By creating a pitch template, you make your presentation modular so you can take various slides and transform them into a pitch for a different set of audience. Then, you can take different slides again and modify your presentation to meet another set of people.
Doing this not just saves you time and effort but also ensures you keep your main ideas highlighted in your presentation. This also gives your whole deck a uniform look and theme, ensuring that you don’t stray from your main idea. You have a core deck that are modular and therefore flexible enough to be adapted to various presentation needs.
This way, while you can speak to the different needs of your varied audience groups and tailor your deck to each, you can still achieve the goal that you have set.
Hence, when making a pitch deck make sure you connect with your audience, keep your visuals clear and crisp, make your presentation concise and ensure that your content is not rigid and can attract a diverse set of audience.