In the latest issue of the SlideCoaching newsletter I share with subscribers the 9th secret.  This new pointer is an addition to the eight secrets described in my free downloadable pdf.  If you are curious, sign up and after downloading the pdf of the first eight secrets I will send you the ninth.

Photocredit: timothymorgan

According to Joe Pulizzi, a content marketing evangelist, author, blogger and speaker:

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Today customers are more demanding and autonomous in researching for information and solutions to their needs; that’s why the slogans of traditional marketing have lost much of their effectiveness. Organizations that use content marketing, on the other hand, position themselves as an indispensable source of information for their prospects.

I believe that the purpose and many of  the techniques of content marketing are very applicable to all marketing activities in an organization, particularly in the B2B space and in developing effective white papers, eBooks, roadshows and presentations.

According to Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett, “”You cannot hope to implement a successful content marketing strategy without understanding exactly what  outcome you require. Equally important is an in-depth understanding of your targeted prospects.”

This phrase is also true for presentation development. Before you open PowerPoint and create slides, you need to know your objective (are you just trying to inform or do you need to persuade?) and your audience (technical, management, administrative staff…)  A brain-dump is seldom effective. Always put yourself in the shoes of your audience and think of what they would like to hear.

Therefore, if you want to be in sync with new market requirements, I suggest you do an audit – from a content marketing perspective – of all the outbound content you have.

Many presentations are prepared using some sort of personal or company template. Some are better than others for sure, but that’s another topic. In any case, templates usually define a font, font size, color, position and alignment for the slide title (not the title slide).  Unfortunately many users don’t pay attention to the template they are using and move, reformat, resize, recolor, etc. the titles on individual slides.
One title is bigger and moved to the left, another is smaller and centered, another has a different color. The result is a presentation that looks unprofessional. Consistency in slide titles results in more professional slides.

You can check this by loading your presentation, going to presentation mode and quickly moving forward through the entire slide set. Watch the titles closely:  do they move or change?  The only thing that should change is the text and the length, everything else should stay the same.  Try it on some Slideshare presentations too and you will see quite a few that do not handle titles consistently.

What can be done?

Use the slide master and define in advance how you want ALL your titles to appear.  Take the longest title you have and decide the font size and positioning for the title in the master slide. Decide if all titles are going to be on one line only or if you will have double line titles as well.  In the case of both, decide the vertical alignment of the title text box to keep them all consistent and move as little as possible.

Do you need assistance?

If you want a hand to bring consistency to your presentation, I offer many services that can help: presentation checkups, remote consulting, and complete presentation construction. Head over to the Services page and take a look.  Or just send me an e-mail and tell me what your needs are.

The presentation was divided into 3 sections:

• Act 1 – create the story
• Act 2 – deliver the experience
• Act 3 – refine and rehearse

During the first section, Carmine Gallo, the presenter and author of the book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs”, offered a suggestion which is “Stick to the rule of three”, which he obviously did by dividing his presentation this way.

Below you can find  the slide set from SlideRocket which was used during the presentation. Every slide was created entirely with SlideRocket. Unfortunately it has no audio, but maybe soon the full recording will be available on the SlideRocket site.

I had suggested to the event organizers to allow Skype dial-in for the audio portion of the web-conference, and they arranged a toll-free Skype number which worked very well.  When called in, there were already 40 people connected using the Skype audio conference.

Thank you SlideRocket!