Creating Content That Connects with Your B2B Customers

Posted by Taylor Ciarallo on Mar 8, 2023 2:25:28 PM

Brand personality, value, and differentiations at the center

Today we are going to talk about the always great, always mysterious topic of content. Let’s add another layer of mystery and make that B2B content for high-tech companies…now we're talking! 

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Topics: Branding, Online Marketing, Brand Development, video, Client Relationships, Social, Outsource Marketing, SEO, Content Development, website design and development, creative marketing, graphic design, Power Point, Presentation, PowerPoint, slide deck, Collaboration, demand generation, Development, Messaging, b2b marketing, customer experience, content, Thought Leadership, Award winning marketing agency, Creative Agency

Cultivating Great Presentations for B2B

Posted by Taylor Ciarallo on Dec 13, 2022 6:53:03 PM

Want to learn what hundreds if not thousands of presentations have taught us? This knowledge you can apply to your presentations today, for all sorts of uses in B2B sales, events, internal communications, executive communications, and others.

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Topics: Branding, Brand Development, Client Relationships, Content Development, creative marketing, Power Point, Presentation, Collaboration, b2b marketing, digital marketing

7 Best Practices for Great PowerPoint Slides

Posted by Scott Danish on Apr 9, 2019 6:08:24 PM

There are more than 500 million PowerPoint users and 30 million PowerPoint presentations created each day around the world. It’s a medium that B2B audiences are familiar and comfortable with, and a well-designed PowerPoint presentation will keep or recapture your audience’s attention.

Just as importantly, it’s a medium that puts presenters at ease: According to one study, 91 percent of people feel that a well-designed slide deck would make them feel more confident when giving a presentation.

The Advantages of PowerPoint

“PowerPoint presentations have a lot of advantages,” says Anne Spencer, a senior designer at BayCreative. “They have a ‘made for me’ feeling about them. Unlike a brochure, a presentation can feel like it’s been prepared for the specific meeting or occasion."

“It’s often the case a B2B executive, marketer or salesperson will find inspiration for something at the 11th hour, and it’s easy to make last-minute changes to slides because of its ‘open’ format that allows for easy edits to copy, imagery or animation," adds Arne Hurty, BayCreative's Chief Creative Officer. "And it’s a very flexible format. In the hands of a skilled designer, a PowerPoint presentation can have quality rivaling any presentation format. Even animation, when handled well, can make people forget they’re looking at a PowerPoint deck.”

The key that keeps coming up, though, is that the PowerPoint deck has to be well-designed. If your deck isn’t, you’re wasting your time.

So here are BayCreative's recommendations for creating compelling B2B PowerPoint presentations that capture and keep the audience’s attention.

Best Practices for B2B PowerPoint Presentations

  • Keep is short: It’s easy, when preparing a deck, to ramble on. This is pretty natural and probably happens because people do their thinking while working on slides, essentially drafting the outline of what they want that slide to be instead of creating the actual slide. It’s important to edit back and be cognizant of the talk track that’s going to happen. You don’t need everything that’s being said to appear on the slide. Sometimes a simple image is the best way to accompany all that’s being said
  • Keep it legible: In keeping with simple, consider how far people might be from the screen and how hard it is to read small type or see small images. Usually people are sitting pretty close to screens when working on slides, and it’s easy to forget how hard it might be to see that same copy from a distance
  • Build around company messaging: PowerPoints should be in lockstep with all your most current messaging, visual ID, and campaign work
  • Play off the speaker: The speaker is the star of the show and the PowerPoint is there to make them look good. The goal is rarely to have the audience staring at presentation slides during most of a presentation. Make slides that compliment what’s being said
  • Consistency: You want to avoid a presentation looking like it was cobbled together from a bunch of other presentations. Have a consistency in design and style throughout a presentation; a theme or graphical continuity that carries through. There are a million ways of doing this, with color, fonts, imagery
  • Thoughtful animation: Watch a movie or a show on TV. Notice the transitions from scene to scene. In almost every case, they are either abrupt changes of scenes or very quick fades. You don’t see scenes flying as a grid or spinning around to reveal themselves. Nor does it make sense to do that in your PowerPoint. Think about what’s going to serve best. A fancy transition is making more of a point about the transition than it is about the slide being transitioned to
  • Keep it current: Update your slide as necessary, but especially when there’s some kind of a trigger—such as new messaging, new products, new executive hired, new competition, new event, or new industries you’re trying to penetrate

Give Power to Your Message—and Get Help If You Have Limited Resources

PowerPoint is tremendously flexible and portable, which makes it an effective marketing tool. It works for everything from small, intimate, sales presentations, to keynotes at large conferences and is a great tool for self-running presentations, either sent to people directly in email (because file sizes are small) or run at a tradeshow.

By following the best practices we've laid out, you can create great B2B PowerPoint presentations that look professional. Or, BayCreative can help you do it (here are some examples of our PowerPoint work).

Executives, marketers and sales reps often have too much on their plates to devote the time and resources necessary to build and maintain truly effective PowerPoint presentations. That’s where outside help like BayCreative can come in handy. If you need help creating outstanding PowerPoint presentations, please let us know.

 All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

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Topics: strategic marketing, marketing agency, Online Marketing, Content Development, inbound marketing, marketing strategies, Presentation, lead generation, Messaging, b2b marketing, digital marketing, content

Clutch Names BayCreative a 2018 Top California B2B Service Provider

Posted by Scott Danish on Oct 2, 2018 7:47:44 PM

It’s not easy to choose the right digital agency. But since 1998, we’ve been making the choice easier by helping B2B marketers out there make better decisions (with better results) for their brand and growth.

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Topics: strategic marketing, Brand Development, Content Development, creative marketing, Presentation, PowerPoint, demand generation, b2b marketing, digital marketing

PowerPoint: Get the Most Out of Your PPT Decks

Posted by Scott Danish on Jun 4, 2018 3:15:00 PM

PowerPoint is one of those handy tools that just won’t go out of style. Marketers lean on it for practically everything they do, and it’s no wonder. PPT files open and present from almost any device and they’re easy to edit. And with support for vector-based graphics and animation, your slide deck can be anything from simple explanation, to a detailed demonstration, to high-quality looping video.

Get the most out of your slides by making sure they are built with the highest quality design and attention to detail. 

At BayCreative we take PowerPoint creativity to the limits. We apply our 20 years of B2B marketing experience producing thousands of slides to get the very best possible. Often, people looking at decks we’ve produced have no idea they’re even made in PowerPoint. And, some of the decks we’ve produced:

  • Keynote presentations at large events
  • Fully integrated with video and audio
  • Interactive, self-navigable decks
  • Looping animated decks for passively viewed screens (lobbies, trade shows)
  • Sales presentation decks with easily customizable slides
  • Refined story flow and messaging 

Regardless of your specific need, let BayCreative take your work to the highest level of quality. And make sure you’re getting everything you can out of your PowerPoint presentations.

To find out more about what BayCreative clients say about our PowerPoint/presentation work and their experience collaborating with our agency, check out the BayCreative presentation examples in our website portfolio: http://www.baycreative.com/work-type/powerpoint/

Please keep us fresh-in-mind.

All the best!
- Team BayCreative -

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Topics: strategic marketing, Brand Development, Content Development, creative marketing, Presentation, PowerPoint, demand generation, b2b marketing, digital marketing

Your Customers Can Say What You Can’t

Posted by Scott Danish on Jan 5, 2018 1:11:18 PM

Every interaction with a prospective customer centers around one key question. 

“How will you help me meet my business goals?”

The BEST person to answer that question is an existing customer. Happy customers are the most valuable asset for sales and marketing efforts. But are you maximizing the value of your current customers?

Prospects don’t want to be sold to all the time. They want to see how you work in the real world, how you'll help them if they become your customer. Success stories do that and more.

Through case studies, video customer profiles, and testimonials, you can help prospective customers understand the value and success they’ll experience by doing business with you. And, they provide valuable content for your website, email, and social media channels.

Showcasing your customer success can be as simple as:

  • Tell a compelling, powerful story your target audience can relate to (similar business pains)
  • Bring a new level of credibility to your marketing with quantifiable results
  • Find the right person to tell the story (ideally a similar persona as your target audience)
  • Let customer quotes lead the story (it’s not about you!)
  • Keep it short, but be as specific as possible
  • Use every opportunity to cross-promote your customer success stories

Over the years, the BayCreative team has produced hundreds of success stories in a variety of formats. Click below for some examples.

See for yourself, and keep us in mind when you need to tell your customers' stories.

All the best!
- Team BayCreative - 


    

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Topics: strategic marketing, Brand Development, Client Relationships, Content Development, creative marketing, Presentation, customer profile, b2b marketing, customer experience, digital marketing

Need Your Presentations to CRUSH IT?

Posted by Scott Danish on Jan 3, 2018 12:20:40 PM

As the new year begins, you or your team might need a killer presentation to show off your 2017 successes, or forecast what's going to happen in 2018.

At BayCreative we create stunning PowerPoint decks, for everything from annual sales meetings and year-in-review summaries to 2018 executive outlooks, company overviews, and more. We’ve done this for 100’s of companies including Salesforce, Cisco, Fujitsu, McKesson, Flextronics and Motorola. The great thing about working with BayCreative is that we're not just a production house. We're a creative consultancy that will help transform your roughest, most abstract, chicken-scratch ideas into beautiful, polished presentations.

See for yourself, and keep us in mind when your next PowerPoint deck needs to CRUSH IT!

All the best!
- Team BayCreative - 

        

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Topics: strategic marketing, Brand Development, Content Development, creative marketing, Presentation, b2b marketing, digital marketing

The explainer video and what’s next?

Posted by Arne Hurty on Jul 31, 2015 3:58:00 PM

The “explainer” video has become quite the thing. It’s a staple for business marketing as sure as a website, an email address, a phone number is. So what makes it an explainer. It’s not a demo video which shows you how something works. It’s not a tutorial which instructs you on how to do something. 

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Topics: video, Presentation, customer experience

You Are Not Your PowerPoint Presentation Enhancement

Posted by BC Team on Nov 26, 2013 3:30:00 PM

PowerPoint can liven up an ordinary presentation with graphics, audio, and animations. It does this so well that you may design the presentation first, put in as many bells and whistles as possible, and then think about what you want to say after. If you're intending to make a stand-alone executable that you send to your customers, then this is one way to proceed.

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Topics: Presentation

Presentation Enhancements: Three Reasons to trust your PowerPoint to the Experts.

Posted by BC Team on Sep 28, 2013 12:44:00 AM

Presentation enhancements, such as a carefully formatted, quality PowerPoint presentation, are an invaluable addition to your presentation. If you're in need of a quality presentation for a sales pitch, company meeting or product announcement (to name just a few applicable times) than consider the following three reasons to consult the experts for your marketing needs.

Could your presentation use a professional touch. Image Credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/5690542503/
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Topics: Presentation

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