I believe one of the best ways to learn is through example.  And so, I am starting a new series on my blog, which I will be calling “Slide from Scratch.”  For each of these posts, I will walk through a real example of a slide I had to create, going from initial conceptualization of just ideas to creation of the final slide.

This will be the first post of the series.  I will walk through creating a slide for a 3-prong marketing strategy.

The Premise

You need to create a slide illustrating your company’s marketing strategy for 2010.  The strategy focuses on 3 areas, and, for the sake of this example, let’s say they are the following:

• Expansion to China
• Strengthening your company’s online presence
• Create a brand image for your company as the “value player”

The success of your marketing efforts is measured on the number of leads generated, which let’s say is X leads for 2010.  The marketing team has identified a whole portfolio of marketing initiatives, which fall under the encompassing marketing strategy.  Lastly, the suite of marketing initiatives must be prioritized and balanced against the annual marketing budget of $X MM.

Alright, so how do we begin?

The Thought Process

Looking at the information we’ve been presented with, it’s important to identify some logical flow or story through it all.  The flow that I see starts with your high-level marketing strategy.   Within the strategy, there are 3 core pillars, which can be further broken down into specific initiatives.  The marketing strategic and corresponding initiatives will drive X leads.  Visually, the slide in my mind should be structured top-down.  At the top, we have the marketing strategy broken into its 3 parts.  At the bottom, we have the end goal of generating X sales leads.

Let’s transfer this image onto PowerPoint and see how it looks.

Slide Design

Note that, in the diagram above, I placed the Marketing Strategy into a downward pointing chevron shape.  This is to show the top-down nature of the process, where the overarching Marketing Strategy drives everything else on the slide.  Also, I placed the 3 marketing focus areas inside the Marketing Strategy chevron shape to illustrate that they are components of the overall strategy.  Finally, see how I numbered the 3 areas.  Numbering items helps your audience retain that information.  Also, it is advised to keep your lists to 3.  (Read the McKinsey Way for more on magic number 3.)

Our next step is to fit in the rest of the information.  We know we have a full portfolio of marketing initiatives that fall under the Marketing Strategy.  This can be organized by the 3 pillars.  However, to add more structure, we should also organize them functionally.  A great way to organize initiatives or any list of items under 2 dimensions is through a matrix.

For the functional marketing buckets, we can rely on a basic marketing framework, the 4 Ps of marketing.   Additionally, we need to capture the concept of the marketing budget.  This can also be incorporate into the matrix, using the bottom rows.

Let’s take a look at the second iteration of our slide.

Notice at the bottom of the table, I’ve added 2 lines related to the budget.  The first are the marketing expenses.  The second is a status box to check whether the vertical stream of initiatives is on budget or exceeds budget.  I have color coded this status box, so the audience can very easily identify the status.

Depending on what you want your core message to be on the slide, you may want to emphasize the marketing budget portion of the slide.  If you have a stream exceeding the budget, you can further highlight it on your slide using a call-out box and different colors.  Here’s an example.

The slide shown above can be downloaded here.

Bonus Tip – Diagrams as Trackers

To maintain consistency and flow through your presentation from slide to slide, I like to use Trackers.  Trackers are small diagrams (usually placed on the top-right of a slide) that help your audience ‘track’ where you are in your discussion relative to an earlier slide.  For instance, if you’ve introduced the concept of a 6-phase approach, your Tracker is used to signify what phase in the approach your current slide pertains to.

I always try to create diagrams that can easily be leveraged as Trackers.  In the slide we just created, the Marketing Strategy chevron can be made into a tracker.  Take a look below.

Again, the slides created for this tutorial can be downloaded here.

Questions, thoughts, concerns?  Go to my site (learnppt.com) and shoot me an email.

For pre-made PowerPoint diagrams used in business presentations, browse our library here: learnppt.com/powerpoint/.  These diagrams were professionally designed by management consultants. Give your presentations the look and feel of a final product made by McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Booz Allen, Deloitte, or any of the top consulting firms.