How can you improve your pitch with visuals and design?

Through engaging with founders and crafting 1500+ pitch decks, a crucial lesson stands out: tailoring each pitch to audience specifics is vital. Understanding your audience unlocks a successful pitch. Their pain points, aspirations, and motivations are pivotal. It's more than your idea; it's solving their unique challenges. Yet, I occasionally differ on the one-size-fits-all approach. Not all audiences match. Repurposing a pitch for investors to consumers underlines this. The core may stay, but emphasis and language shift. For diverse priorities, tailored pitches are key. Acknowledging varied perspectives is crucial. Reflecting on my journey, adapting each pitch resonates. Every presentation is unique, aligning with its audience.

This is the essence of the pitch. Various roles and positions seek distinct information, hints, and victories in your pitch. The messaging is the key to engaging your audience. Simple, digestible data is often overlooked. Impress with the initial pitch, then reveal your expertise and plan.

This is possibly the crux of the pitch. Different roles and positions could be looking for different pieces of information, clues, wins in your pitch. The messaging used here is crucial as it holds the key for your audience. Often times one forgets to digest the information into the most basic form and easiest to digest. I believe there is a place to impress with the pitch (early on in the presentation) and then a place to create the impression that you know what you’re doing or at least have a plan.

I have a different opinion on this. If your pitching for your startup, a deck or slides are pretty standard and they work. You do not need to make a fancy video or a complicated demo to grab customers. If you’ve done the work and built something your customers need, or identified a market opportunity and team to build a great company, customers or investors do not need a fancy pitch for you to convince them.

I have an alternative perspective on this. When pitching for a startup, a standard deck or slides suffice; they're effective. No need for elaborate videos or intricate demos to attract customers. If you've done the groundwork, created something necessary, or spotted a market gap with a strong team, customers and investors don't require a lavish pitch to be convinced.

Embrace simplicity in design. Avoid overwhelming your audience with excess colors, fonts, images, or animations. Opt for a clean and consistent design approach. Create a polished and unified appearance for your pitch. Utilize a color palette aligned with your brand identity, employ an easily readable font consistent with your tone, and select relevant, high-quality images. Through simple and consistent design, elevate your visuals and enhance the memorability and effectiveness of your pitch.

This is essantiually a question of signal vs noise. Your key message is the signal you want to sent to the audience and any distraction is the noise that makes it harder to receive the intended signal.

I see way too many startups use clip art or bad internet photos for their pitch decks. Keep in mind this is not a high school project… In addition to it being copyright infringement when you just grab photos off the internet for your deck, it also looks bad. Use a couple well chosen images from royalty free image sites, and make the deck well designed by someone on your team who doesn’t need paragraphs to make it look good ?? If you don’t have someone like that on your team, just pay for someone to help you! It’s worth it in the long run.

One thing i’ve found helpful is to find the balance between emotion evoking imagery/design and being overbearing. Sometimes less is more.

Discovering the equilibrium between evocative imagery/design and being overpowering has proven beneficial. At times, subtlety holds greater impact.

Know why are pitching e.g. what is your goal for the pitch. Most times it is to open a discussion or secure another meeting to continue the process. These purposes should typically NOT be explicilty visible in the materials. A pitch is (said to) be a presentetion with an ask. Surprinsingly often the explicit ask and impcilit purpose of the pitch are different. E.g. often it is wise to ask for advice in order to receive funding.