Summer in Marketing? Opportunity to Prepare for Busy Autumn

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

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

Presentation Materials Checklist

Here are a few ideas how a good marketer can prepare the company for busy autumn and winter:

  1. Gather all presentations that managers and sales people use in our company.
  2. Review the slides – are they up to date? Are they using company standards properly?
  3. Ask your colleagues
    1. What presentation content they use?
    2. What are they missing?
    3. 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 Collect all those expectations and respond appropriately – Update presentation slides, if they use outdated style and content (see this Trends in Presentation Slide Design presentation). Write template usage intsructions, record guide videos, for your team. Add Do’s and Don’ts of using company PowerPoint templates and visual identification. The topics you can consider
    1. Good and bad logo use
    2. Proper use of company colors
    3. Recommended fonts to use
  5. Refresh your company presentation template, if needed. Now it’s the best time.
  6. Prepare 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 some practical things you can use for this process.

“5-minute Presentation Survey” questions:

  • What slides topics do you frequently use in your presentations?
  • (this will give you hint 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 company presentation template? Do you know where to get it?
  • What would help you to make better presentations slides in this autumn? What would save you most of the preparation time?

Topic areas for extending your slide deck can include:

  • Company overview slides (key facts, operations and office locations, contact slide)
  • your products portfolio lists
  • highlighting graphical elements (arrows, markers, icons …)
  • country maps where your company is active
  • frequently used photographs related to your products and services
  • project and history timeline slides

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 sites I use for getting new graphics:

  • Pictures:
    • Fotolia.com
    • iStock.com
  • Books
    • Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
    • Blah Blah Blah, by Dan Roam
  • Presentation Trends
    • Slideshare.net
    • TED.com
  • PowerPoint icons and 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 meetings. And your marketing peers will be glad to have templates ready for autumn campaigns.

How’s your experience with 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 Twitter or our contact page.

Have a wonderful summer.

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