Why Are You Still Using Inferior Tools for Your Marketing Presentations?

Tired of sitting through the same old slide decks trying not to nod off? Well, it stands to reason that your clients are too. Your marketing presentation strategies may actually be hurting your customer outreach attempts, as slow, overly simple and outdated presentations work as a bit of a deterrent. It’s time to ditch the PowerPoints of yesterday and make the jump to a more interactive presentation software—software like Ingage.

Marketing Presentations Can Be Boring—Here’s Why (And How to Fix It)

Presentations remain the best general way to get information to your audience and make it stick—but only if you use the medium effectively. “Info-dumping” a barrage of bullet points on an unsuspecting client is a surefire way to get them to disengage before you’ve get to the good parts. And if you can’t even deliver engaging marketing presentations that hold their attention, how can you expect clients to trust you know what makes them tick?

So what’s bogging down your marketing presentations? A lack of engagement, monotonous content (and layout), limited or even nonexistent interactivity and poor tools can all drive audiences away. Let’s drive deeper into how each of these factors dings your presentation—and what you can do to course correct ASAP.

Using software that meets the modern moment can level up your marketing presentations today
Source: Shutterstock

Lack of Engagement

Presentations can come at all levels of engagement. Consider, for example, the schoolhouse auditorium lecture compared to the lively back-and-forth of a debate or Q&A session. Each serves a certain audience and purpose.

That said, if the disengaging auditorium lecture style barely even works in its intended environment, what makes you think it’s going to work for your clients? After all, your potential customers aren’t students forced into attendance. If you can’t make your marketing presentations worth their time, they’re out. Your clients didn't show up to read an essay, they came to find a solution to their pain points.

Simply put, better engagement leads to better retention—which will usually translate into more prospects coming back knocking at your door (or even signing right at the end of the presentation). Come to the table ready to get to the point and win their trust. Build your presentations around exactly what information your audience needs to know and whenever possible, lean toward dynamic visuals. Be clear about what your product can do for your audience—understand your brand story and how it relates to your audience’s—and lead with that.

But it’s not just about what you say; how you behave matters just as much. Lack of eye contact, poor body language and talking at the screen can lose your audience in an instant. These habits are also often interpreted as a sign of disrespect. Not everyone has to be the next Don Draper from Mad Men, but you need to at least be comfortable delivering a pitch. Speak to your audience as people, keep your marketing presentations limber and visual, and provide strategic moments to pull them back in should eyes begin drifting.

Monotonous Content and Delivery

We’ve touched on this a bit already, but if your delivery is suffering from a lack of dynamism, your audience is probably suffering too. Part of making your presentations more engaging is enlivening your delivery! The bullet point brigade is not your friend here: weighing down your marketing presentations with lists upon lists of statistics is not doing you any favors. Less is more—trim the excessive verbiage so your audience to spend more listening and less time reading a mile a minute.

If your presentation doesn’t have the right structure, you risk losing your audience entirely. The fastest way to lose your audience is to overload slides with too much information in your interactive presentation. Instead, treat your slides as a guide for the more complex you deliver yourself. Using your slides as an outline helps you stay on track, while also keeping your audience from drowning in data.

The last few years have seen a shift in several marketing trends. Short-form videos are in, dominating content marketing in 2022—and they can serve your presentations well too, providing a strategic media shift and burst of dynamism midway through. There’s a reason why TikTok has come to dominate the media landscape so quickly! In fact, one HubSpot study of 2023 social media marketing trends found that most believe short-form video is the way of the future, offering the most ROI. It makes sense: bite-size video formats are the easiest way to deliver a lot of information quickly. (And it helps to use a presentation platform that can integrate them easily and seamlessly—like Ingage!)

Limited Interactivity

By now, you get it—dynamism is key. Remember how we talked about the lively discourse of a debate or Q&A? Ideally, that’s how you want your presentations to run. A lack of this interactivity may leave your audience feeling talked at, rather than talked to or with. You sales pitch is, at heart, an offer of collaboration—structure it with this understanding for the best effects. Build in ways to engage the audience, whether it’s by asking them questions or assigning them tasks throughout the presentation.

Personalization is also key. Build your marketing presentations for your individual audiences (they’ll notice—and appreciate—the difference). It can be as simple as adding customized screenshots and images, instead of stock photos. Let your audience know you’ve been thinking about them and their particular needs from the first step.

Here are some more simple-yet-effective ways to drive engagement via interactivity:  

  • Create a group word cloud or complete a communal icebreaker at the start to bring people together.
  • As you move through the presentation, let the audience vote on the next topic. (It helps to have a presentation tool that lets you shift sequences on a dime, like Ingage, for this!)
  • Instead of asking people to hold their questions until the end, integrate strategic Q&A intervals throughout the presentation. This lets you address concerns in real time, and adapt accordingly.

Tools That Don’t Meet The Moment

We’ve covered a range of ways you yourself can enliven any presentation. But even the best tradesman is nothing without a well-equipped toolkit. In order to really meet the moment with your marketing presentations, you need software that can match your skills. The simple PowerPoints and Google Slide decks of yesteryear, while once cutting-edge, don’t hit the mark anymore. It’s time to give your team the best—and that means a presentation software like Ingage.

To build dynamic presentations, you need presentation software that can step beyond the traditional 1-2-3 flow of simpler software. Your presentations need to be disruptive and dynamic, capable of:

  • Embedding animations, graphics, short- and long-form video with ease
  • Introducing interactive buttons, quizzes and games at strategic moments
  • Shifting the temporal flow in real time to adapt to the winding flow of conversation
  • Syncing up in the cloud, so agents can make adjustments on the fly in response to feedback and customize quickly

Modern presentation tools like Ingage are built with these demands—and more—in mind. Even your star presenter can’t overcome faulty, outdated presentation tools. Give them software worthy of their talents and help them shine (and seal more deals).

Source: Shutterstock

Level Up Your Marketing Presentations ASAP With Ingage

A powerful presentation is critical for sealing any business deal—but it’s also tricky to pull off effectively. From individual tics, to a lack of engagement or interactivity, there are any number of ways for your presentation to go off the rails. These tips can help you build a better presentation today.

But while you’re brushing up your own skills and tightening that delivery, there’s one aspect you can fix ASAP—and it’s a simple switch. It’s time to get a presentation software made for the modern era! Ingage delivers the powerful, next-level functionalities you need to really make your presentations shine. Give your reps the tools they need to deliver the best pitches possible—ditch the static presentation software and make the jump to Ingage today.  

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