Summer in Marketing? An Opportunity to Prepare for a Busy Q4

3 rzeczy do sprawdzenia przy prezentacji

Summer in the office can be a pretty lazy time. There are fewer urgent projects running, it’s a low season for sales, fairs, or conferences. Half of the staff are on holiday anyway. However, for the marketing department, this is an ideal time to prepare for the busy last quarter.

My advice is to take an advantage of this period without interruptions, whether you are a marketer in a corporation, a smaller company, or are self-entrepreneur. Now is an excellent time to tidy up marketing resources, and renew marketing and sales materials.

I present several practical ToDo lists what you can do to prepare for last quarter of the year.

Presentation Materials Checklist

If your company is using presentations of various kind, for webinars, sales pitches or marketing one-pagers, consider refreshing these resources. You can not only refresh their look but overal organization of materials, so they are easy to find.

Here’s a To Do checklist you can use:

  1. Gather all presentations that managers and salespeople use in our company.
  2. Review the slides. Check for those areas:
    • Is slide content up to date? Maybe you have new products to add, your team has changed, or you have new office location.
    • Are they using company standards properly? People tend to add their own graphics that may not fit your visual identity. Note down what it is, consider providing these graphics in your style.
    • Aren’t there duplicate slides, that present almost the same thing? The less core slides you will have, the easier it will be to use it.
  3. Ask your colleagues for their current needs, about challenges they expect in the Q4:
    1. What presentation content do they use?
    2. What presentation format they need? For presenting live? Or online presenting? For printing? This will help you adjust presentation content for all needed situations. For example, if people want to print slides, you should avoid dark graphics.
    3. What presentation elements are they missing? A specific product description? Process illustration? Research materials? Icons?
    4. What new materials they will need for the autumn sales period?
  4. Collect all those expectations and respond appropriately – update presentation slides, if they use outdated style and content. Here is a list of possible extensions of your presentation library:
    • Write a presentation template use instructions and record guide videos, for your team to show how to use it effectively.
    • Add Do’s and Don’ts of using company PowerPoint templates and your visual identity guides. The topics that companies usually include in their branding guidelines are:
      1. Good and bad logo use
      2. Proper use of company colors
      3. Recommended fonts to use
      4. Guidelines for choosing pictures (from internal or external libraries)
      5. Instructions on use of Generative-AI tools in marketing materials, whether it’s AI generated images or text.
  5. Refresh your company presentation template, if needed. Now it’s the best time. You can do
    • only a technical update of PowerPoint template (check preset text styles and slide layouts),
    • do a light facelifting of the presentation background graphics, while keeping the main style,
    • revitalize the whole look & feel of your PowerPoint template.
  6. Prepare a practical slide deck of frequently used slides. Such a repository of slides allows people to reuse slides in busy times.
  7. Share the updated presentation materials: Store the files in the shared folder and let people know.

Below I propose several questions to ask in a survey addressed to people in your organization using presentation marketing materials:

Survey Questions for “5-minute Presentation Survey” for your team:

  • What slide topics do you frequently use in your presentations?
    (this will give you a hint about what to put in the company slide deck)
  • What causes you the biggest challenge when preparing your presentation (e.g. structure, data charts or tables, images … Rank the items, if you select more.)
  • Do you use a company presentation template? How often? Do you know where to get it? Is it easy to find material you need?
  • What would help you to make better presentation slides this autumn? What would save you most of the preparation time?

Topic areas for extending your slide deck

When you will see that you want to extend presentation resources a marketing department provides to your company, those are potential topics to include:

Resources you can use

Depending on what resources you already have in your company (you may have an internal set of icons and pictures already), those are the sites I use for getting new graphics:

I know getting it all together in this lazy period can be a challenge. However, it’s worth the effort. Your sales colleagues will appreciate such help when busy September will come, and they will rush from one conference to another sales meeting. And your marketing peers will be glad to have templates ready for autumn campaigns.

How’s your experience with the summer period in the marketing office?

Should you have questions or need help with this presentation review process, let me know. I will gladly help. Best to reach me via my LinkedIn page or our contact page.

Have a wonderful summer.

Peter,
Chief Presentation Designer & co-founder of Prezentio