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If a salesperson walked into an important client meeting dressed in ripped jeans and a tank top, that person would be fired immediately. How you present yourself in a business setting matters, so why is it that so many B2B marketers fail to put the same kind of effort into their Keynote and PowerPoint presentations?
The general perception of B2B marketing is that it is more “boring” than consumer marketing. Many B2B marketers internalize that misconception, which manifests in the way marketing assets, including presentations, are designed. A presentation that is too stodgy can be just as damaging to your presentation as a pair of ripped jeans.
What can B2B marketers learn from their consumer counterparts without sacrificing the complexity and substance of their products and services? Here are a few things to consider:
B2B Marketing Should Be Dynamic
Because the perception is that B2B marketing is more serious and buttoned-up, B2B marketers tend to rely disproportionately on substance instead of flash. But the reality is that flash can help sell substance. Consumer marketing tends to emphasize flash, sometimes to the detriment of the underlying substance. For that reason, B2B marketers often associate flash with a lack of substance, but that is not necessarily the case.
Flash is just as important for B2B marketers. The B2B sales cycle is long and circuitous, and B2B products and services are more complex. It takes more to engage someone with something more challenging. There’s also more of an opportunity to stand out in a culture that typically deemphasizes flash.
The Power Of Presentation
Well-designed presentations can make a big difference, especially in a B2B environment, as stated above. An eye-catching presentation can help you close a deal. A presentation overloaded with text and conspicuously bereft of images, graphics and other design elements can be arduous to sit through. In such a scenario, an otherwise interested party might become fatigued by too much text or data and not enough sugar to help the medicine go down, so to speak.
Good design can help you reel in prospects and close business. If you’re utilizing webinars as a thought leadership vehicle to draw in prospects, how it’s designed can determine how engaged your viewers are as much as the content itself. If you have too much text, for example, it encourages viewers to tune out, since they no longer need to pay attention to the presenter. It’s all there on the page.
Stylize your presentation to project a certain mood that you want to convey. Some colors and fonts, for example, can make you come across as more approachable, while others may make you seem more buttoned-up. It’s important to be conscious of these associations so that you’re deliberate, not inadvertent, with the image you’re attempting to convey. Use graphics to punctuate important points that you really want to land with your viewers. Design can also be used to make psychological impacts that influence buying decisions. For example, I came across a company website recently that organized its website’s homepage navigation menu vertically instead of horizontally, which jibed with their positioning as an innovative company that thinks differently.
Design Beyond Decks
Design will improve your PowerPoint/Keynote presentations, and it can also make your marketing content, in general, more compelling.
Websites are often a vetting tool companies use when inviting organizations to an RFP. A well-designed website can be the difference between inclusion and being passed over. Well-designed means a couple of things: one, that you’re conveying the image that you want to convey, as mentioned in the previous section, and two, that you’ve organized your website logically according to the hierarchy or actions you want your visitors to take (e.g., downloading your research or watching a webinar).
Well-designed content on social can be the difference between engagement and no engagement. If you’re tweeting links to a research report, you’re not giving that piece of content a chance to thrive. Instead, create a campaign of infographics or other visualizations that represent statistics or insights from that research report. In other words, think of the information you have and how you can represent it in a way that’s going to pull readers and viewers into the larger piece of content you want them to engage with.
Good design is not just flash. It’s presenting information with your prospect in mind. It’s logic. It’s the overriding factor that determines whether or not your substance will have the opportunity to see the light of day.
