Designing Powerful Presentations

You can find quite a bit of advice about creating content for presentations, selling more effectively, asking qualifying/closing questions and more, but I wanted to share with you some perspective on the design of PowerPoint documents and give you a few ideas to make your presentations more visually compelling.

Research

Of course, you should learn everything you can about the person you are meeting with and his or her organization to ensure you include applicable content. But you should also visit the website to make sure you are using the current logo (some companies even publish their branding standards online).

Get a sense of the look and feel of the website: is it clean with a lot of white space, jammed with links and information, or mostly images and very few words? The website is a good guideline on how you should structure your presentation.

Something else to look for is any visuals you can adopt for your content. For example, if your prospect has a graphic outlining their quality assurance process, you can adapt the format and add your own points.

Getting Your Voice Right in Content Marketing

Writing marketing content isn’t as simple as putting your thoughts on paper. Even after you’ve figured out what your audience wants and what you should talk about, you need to figure out what your voice should be like.

Plus, you want a different tone of voice for say, a press release versus a tweet, even if it’s the same person writing both or the same team working collaboratively on the press release and taking turns at the Twitter account. How do you ensure you come across as the voice of the brand as opposed to the person you are?

Step one: what’s your blogging persona?

The first step is to lay out what your brand sounds like (even if it’s just your own personal brand), and if it sounds different in a press release versus in a tweet (if it doesn’t that’s okay—just make sure that’s right for your audience and you’re still playing to the strengths of both media. For my money, I’d prefer to see a press release that looks like a bunch of tweets than a tweet that looks like a line off a press release.)

Put together the “author persona” of each type of content. Basically, ask yourself what kind of person they presumably are:

Designing Business Cards For Your Brand

With Mel Fernandez

“If you don’t get noticed, you don’t have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks.”

–Leo Burnett

Despite the growing prevalence of smart phones and tablets, business cards are still important tools for sharing contact information and building relationships. You don’t have to use special apps or worry about compatibility, and they are cheap. They are also a branding opportunity to build credibility and share your company’s personality.

First and foremost, business cards have to provide the contact details that are appropriate for your industry, including at least two of these: an email address, phone number or website URL. The design should help you communicate this more effectively rather than distract or make information difficult to read.

Aside from the details, the starting point for designing a business card is the logo, as it will guide your choices for colors and fonts. Here are some other considerations:

Designs of the Quarter: Image Editing

The third category for the Designs of the Quarter contest was image editing. Our image editors work on pictures and make them more clear, or more complete, or remove backgrounds, or change colors, or make other modifications that the client wants.

This design won first prize, and you can see why. Something that starts as muddy-looking and shadowy becomes a clear image that conveys speed and power.

Mother’s Day in Advertising

Because Mother’s Day occurs in spring, ads for this holiday often feature pastels and tend to be heavy on the pinks and purples. The fonts tend to look like script or fancy calligraphy and flowers are commonly used.

I didn’t know until I started doing some research, but Mother’s Day is one of the top sales opportunities for salons and spas–we all want to pamper mom because she takes care of everyone else the rest of the year. So it wasn’t surprising when I asked our team for ads designed for this holiday that this one turned up. It gets your attention with the bright, feminine colors and uses the same light blue in the logo to highlight the sale price effectively.

Designs of the Quarter: Videos

Video has emerged as such an important marketing vehicle it’s no surprise that our team is busy creating showcase, montage, pre-roll and post-roll videos and editing them for our clients. Our multi-media clients provide the service to their small- to medium-sized business clients. Typically, video would be too expensive for these advertisers. But the types of products we produce are affordable and take the SMB’s promotional efforts to a new level.

Here are our top picks from our video production work last quarter.

The first winning video ad uses a variety of effects to bring in all the different elements, separated by the curtains—a perfect device for a theater. The use of the fonts is appropriate to convey information that complements the moving elements.

Designs of the Quarter: Print Ads

In our first Designs of the Quarter contest this year, we had a slightly different format. We awarded three designs in each of three categories, instead of three designs overall. The categories this time were: print ads, video and image editing.

Today, I’ll share the winning print ads with you.

This first ad is really striking in its layout and the use of fonts and colors. The ad design lives up to the slogan: “Makes other bourbons feel underdressed” by complementing elegant imagery with classic fonts and understated colors so the product is dominant. This bourbon suggests it is in a different class of spirits and the design reinforces that point!

The Art of Marketing: Social Media and Word of Mouth

Continued from here.

Seth Godin on “Leadership and Creativity”

Advertising is about interrupting as often as possible average people with our average product. As long as we make more than we spent on production, media, etc., the cycle continues: ads  —–> distribution —–> profit   (and back around again). If you are going to interrupt everybody, then you better sell something everybody wants.

Now there are 30K products in a supermarket and 17K new ones introduced each year. Previously, there were four television channels. Now there is satellite radio, Comcast, Facebook (where everybody is their own channel), etc.

In the past, ads didn’t have to be good. You just needed to buy a lot of them.

Remarkable means worth making a remark about. Creating something that somebody wants to talk about it the toughest adjustment for people to make.

Rather than mass-market, you have to make something for a specific sub-segment. Permission is the only asset that you can build now. You won’t get opt-ins for an average product.

Anticipated, personal, relevant. Somebody has to pick you.