The Evolving Marketing Deck – Why it should read like a story and look like a magazine
We’ve all heard about the narrative arc used in story telling – the sequence of events that make up the whole. This form of writing keeps people interested and wanting to turn the page. Shouldn’t you be adapting the narrative arc to your marketing deck to maintain interest and tell a compelling story?
Pitch decks cover the gamut. They speak to the history of a firm, the strategies in place, the past successes and sometimes shortcomings, the aspirations for future milestones. Typically decks already are organized in a narrative arc – a really choppy and less engaging one. We see the stale language that everyone else uses to describe team cohesiveness and experience; we see the same adjectives that don’t enhance standard sentences about the firm’s approach (think disciplined, consistent, attractive, robust, opportunistic, differentiated etc.); we see the 35+ page decks that are so monotonous in tone and design they’d be much more successful at 20 pages max.
There’s a different way of getting your information across to investors and that’s telling your story with impactful language and a story arc, as well as engaging design and layout. Humans are visual creatures – we respond to negative space, imagery and color. Think of your favorite magazine and a long narrative you’ve recently seen that kept your attention – why couldn’t we apply aspects of that to your pitch deck? In the decks we design, there are a number of tools we use and adapt from beautiful long narratives, ultimately making pitch decks into a piece of art. Visually engaging with unique layouts, these decks cover all the bases of what a pitch deck needs to have but in ways that keep people’s attention and make your firm look professional and cutting edge.
Standard, long-form pitch decks are a thing of the past. We tend to spend more time looking at beautiful things than reading paragraphs of dense content. Our attention spans are shot, and we’ve evolved to using videos and imagery to convey messages. So why not evolve your marketing deck and tell your story both beautifully and alluringly? You don’t have to take my word for it though, we’ll just see you when the rest of the masses catch up.
