Marketing Presentation 101: How to Ace Your First Marketing Presentation

A marketing presentation is a performance. Bore your audience, and you fail. Confuse your audience, and you fail. Fail to deliver one key message that they can repeat by the end of the presentation… and you fail.

We don’t want you to fail, and you don’t have to. So we’ve rounded up the best marketing presentation ideas, tips, and examples so you can crush your next marketing presentation.

Tell a Story

Storytelling in marketing is a major trend right now, and it’s something you must use in every presentation you conduct.

Storytelling can be distilled down to something called “The Dramatic Arc”. It can even be plotted on a graph:

Many of you will recognize this dramatic arc immediately, which suggests the outline of a marketing presentation template. Taking what we see above, you could extrapolate a basic presentation template like this:

1. What will be explained.
2. The key players of this story/of this situation.
3. The problem the characters face.
4. An assessment of how to solve the problem.
5. The actions taken to solve the problem.
6. A few challenges along the way.
7. The resolution of the problem.
8. The results now that the problem is solved.
9. Key takeaways.
10. Ask the audience to think about how this problem and these solutions might apply to them.
11. Ask the audience to reach out to you (also known as the “Call to Action”) if they’d like to discuss how to solve their own version of this problem with you.

Those 11 points would make a good beginning for any marketing presentation. And if you kept your presentation to 18 minutes, the recommended length of a TEDTalk, that would give you a little bit more than a minute and a half for each section.

Interestingly enough, many presentation experts recommend you don’t spend more than 2 minutes showing any one slide. So your very simple marketing presentation template could include those 11 sections, plus a cover slide and a slide with your sources. Those 13 slides could be a very good starting presentation template for any marketing presentation.

But that would only be the first step.

Practice

Practice your presentation at least ten times. That's one the biggest presentation tips one should keep in mind.

No exceptions. No excuses. No whining.

Why? Because knowing your presentation by heart will give you confidence. If you have any anxiety whatsoever about giving a marketing presentation, the single best thing you can do is to be prepared. And being prepared – having practiced your presentation at least ten times – will give you the best boost of confidence possible.

Practicing your marketing presentation will also polish your delivery. Even without a script, as you talk through your presentation over and over, you’ll refine how you describe things. Your timing will improve. How you set up each slide will get smoother. Who knows… you might get so confident that you’ll actually have fun.

Want to take this one step further? Professionals from Throughline Group advise that you should ask someone to watch you as you practice, especially around practice sessions three or four. Your observer should be positive, but also give you honest feedback. You need to know:

• If any of your slides could be clearer.
• If they can articulate the one key point of your presentation.
• If they got confused at any point.
• If they got bored at any point.
• If they wanted additional information at any point.
• If the marketing charts and graphs you use are easy to understand.

If you can’t find someone to watch you practice, record yourself as you practice.

Bonus tip: If at all possible, practice your presentation in the room you will make the formal presentation in. Take note of any furniture or cords that might block your movement, and where your audience will be.

Know Your Audience

This should shape your marketing presentation from beginning to end. In the beginning, use your knowledge about your audience to pick examples they’ll resonate with. Use images and language they’ll understand.

As you practice your presentation, think about how your audience may receive the information. Will they agree with it? Be challenged by it? Agree with the problem you’ve defined, but maybe have opinions on other ways to solve it? Incorporate all this into your talk.

Finally, when you do your formal presentation, ask the audience a few questions along the way. Ask these in a way that doesn’t put anyone on the spot, and that the audience might have a little fun with. If possible, try to come up with a joke or two they’ll like.

Watch Great Marketing Presentations

The TED Talks website is a goldmine of recorded presentations and different presentation styles. You can get hundreds of marketing presentation ideas just by watching a few hours of talks.

If possible, also watch a few marketing presentations that have been recorded from marketing industry conferences, or check out the thousands of marketing presentation examples on the site BrightTALK. These will teach you an enormous amount about how people present themselves and their ideas, and about how audiences react.

To Conclude

So those are our best tips for how to create and deliver a great marketing presentation. We hope these have been helpful. Just remember: Practice, practice, practice. And if you possibly can, have fun. Presenters who have fun allow audiences to have fun.