5 Tips for Building Stronger Branded Presentations

We’ve all been there—sitting through a presentation that feels like an eternity, fighting the urge to nod off or squinting at the screen, trying to keep up with the avalanche of text. It's the kind of presentation where the speaker monotonously reads from slide after slide, packed with paragraphs that make you wonder if you should have brought a pillow. 

Presentations are crucial when you’re in front of clients, investors, or even communicating with your team. A good presentation is a powerful tool for conveying an important message, clinching a sale, and leaving a memorable impression. But a bad presentation can quickly derail your efforts, causing your audience to lose interest, miss key points, and ultimately, walk away unimpressed.

You might have the best products or services in the world, but none of that will matter if your presentation leaves the audience ready for a nap and questioning whether your business is up to snuff.

To avoid presentation pitfalls, it’s essential to reinforce your brand throughout every aspect of a presentation. Keep reading to explore Quill Creative’s five practical tips for building stronger branded presentations, and get a sneak peek behind the curtain to see how we build presentations for our clients.

1. Take the Guesswork Out by Investing in Your Brand

Creating an impactful presentation starts long before you design the first slide—it begins with a solid brand strategy and visual identity. By following a structured process to establish your brand identity, you take the guesswork out of creating collateral for your company and maintain consistency across all touchpoints. 

When your brand is already well-established, each presentation becomes an extension of your brand, reinforcing your identity. Knowing your brand inside and out will help you put together a presentation quicker and with more confidence, allowing you to focus on the important elements like content and speaker notes.

2. Keep Your Personal Preferences Out of It

Sure, your brand might reflect some of your personal aesthetic preferences, but ultimately, your brand’s identity should be guided by its story—its mission, differentiators, and position in the market—and not your personal tastes.

Think of it this way: If your favorite color is taupe and your house has floor-to-ceiling minimalist mid century modern decor, but you own a candy store for kids, letting your personal style influence your brand would likely put you on the fast track to an empty candy store.

Separating your personal aesthetic tastes from what makes sense for your brand can often be a challenge for business owners. This is where working with a professional creative branding team can be incredibly helpful. They provide an outside perspective and can tell you when your personal preferences are overshadowing the actual essence that your brand should have. 

3. Use Templates

Creating a cache of well-designed templates will not only save time but also ensure that your presentations are structured, cohesive, and aligned with your brand. This is another area where working with a creative branding team can help set you up for success.

When you work with Quill, our designers help streamline the presentation-making process by learning about the types of presentations you need, wireframing out different slide structures, and developing tailored templates. We also make sure our clients have a variety of different plug-and-play components to use, like infographics, typography hierarchies, charts, bar graphs, color palettes, and illustrated elements.

Our priority is also to make sure to design templates in a way that is accessible to you, not just someone with a graphic design degree. Whether that be in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, or something else, we’ll create templates for whatever platform you’re comfortable using and provide training sessions to empower you to use them effectively. 

4. Tailor Your Presentation to Your Audience

One of the most important steps in creating a strong branded presentation is tailoring it to your specific audience. Understanding who you are speaking to and what you hope to achieve will guide the content, tone, and style of your presentation.

Start by identifying the goal of your presentation. Are you pitching to investors, aiming to secure funding or support for a new project? Or are you presenting to internal stakeholders, sharing updates, and rallying the team around a new initiative? Each audience has different needs and expectations, and your presentation should reflect that. By beginning with a solid foundation for your brand’s identity, you can personalize messaging and adjust speaking points for your audience while still maintaining brand tone and voice. This approach reinforces your brand identity while making your audience feel like you’ve taken the time to personalize your presentation for them.

This is where having several different presentation templates comes in handy. Templates provide a flexible framework that you can customize to fit the specific needs of your audience while still maintaining brand consistency.

5. Bring a Physical Takeaway

Every presentation is ephemeral. Even if you’ve just given the very best, most captivating, and engaging presentation of your life, once it’s not up on the screen anymore, you can’t be sure it’ll linger in the minds of your audience.

To keep your presentation top of mind, provide a physical takeaway to complement it. A well-designed flyer, a detailed sell sheet, a sample of your product, or even branded merchandise will ensure that your audience has a lasting reminder of your presentation. This tangible item not only reinforces your brand identity and key messages but also extends the impact of your presentation beyond the room, making it a memorable experience rather than just a fleeting interaction.

Client Spotlight: Elevating Valley Pop's Presentations

Valley Pop, a leading Midwest popcorn maker, worked with Quill to refresh their identity and strengthen their brand’s market presence. Because part of Valley Pop’s operations involved routinely giving presentations to distributors and wholesalers, they needed flexible presentation collateral that effortlessly and holistically employed their brand while allowing for customization where needed.

The templates our design team created featured Valley Pop’s refreshed fonts, colors, illustrated elements, product photos, and other key elements like market data and testimonials, all in one easily accessible package. By providing Valley Pop with these templates, we were able to save them significant time in presentation creation and elevate their brand’s professional image with brand consistency.

(Plus, nobody can forget a presentation that comes with a sample of perfectly popped popcorn!)

Elevate Your Collateral

If you need help keeping your company’s collateral and marketing consistent with your brand, Quill Creative Studio can help! Let our brand design experts help you create a reserve of assets and collateral that will save you time and ensure your brand identity remains cohesive.

Want to learn more about the ways our creative brand designers can optimize your brand’s potential? Let’s chat!