You’re only one acronym away from writing a compelling strategy deck.
Hot take: strategic thinking is underrated, especially in marketing.
I could write a thick book about that opinion alone, but there’s a quote from author and public speaker Simon Sinek that sums up any commentary I’d have down into one, elegantly simple idea:
“Stop looking for a course of action and instead become obsessed with understanding the cause of action.”
If I look back on any deck I’ve ever read, I could have judged in advance how relatively successful that plan would have been based on how much the creators seemed to understand this nuance. To put it bluntly, when a strategy completely fails, it’s typically because it’s comprised of solutions searching for problems.
There’s this common misconception both inside and outside the industry that marketing strategists are being paid for having good ideas in a vacuum, but I think the value of strong marketing strategy is found in something much more delicate. It’s the ability to combine two completely different and normally incongruous ways of thinking together in perfect harmony: a dance between highly logical, organized rationale and explosive, out-of-the-box creativity. Creativity can’t be taught, but the rationale can be.
It’s in this spirit with which I’m writing this article. I’m going to share what I’ve learned over the years from working with these master strategists and pass that thinking along to help you streamline the process of creating an airtight and effective strategy deck.
The purpose of a strategy deck
Before I dive into the meat of this, I want to emphasize that it is possible to use a one-size-fits-all method for structuring these decks. This approach is meant to challenge the creator by design to take an outcome-oriented approach to problem solving. Even if you don’t plot out this thinking into a PowerPoint file, it’s a useful way to organize and allocate resources to reach a clearly defined goal.
Depending on the power dynamic between the author and the audience, a strategy deck is a presentation meant either to brief them about a planned course of action or to convince them that the planned course of action is worth pursuing. Nearly all decks will fall on a spectrum between these two limits.
If we zoom out and think of a strategy deck in its most general terms, you’re always going to want to communicate three messages:
- There’s an opportunity to make a change that will yield a positive result (the objective).
- We know what specific actions we would take to accomplish that change (the strategy).
- We’re aware of what’s required to complete those actions and have a plan to address them (the tactics).
The change in question could be something advantageous, like introducing a new product line so a company can capture a 25% increase in market share—or it could be something much simpler, like getting 100,000 more potential customers to visit a company’s website by the end of the year. Regardless of the scope of this change, the deck should always have a clear, goal-oriented purpose that guides the thinking from start to finish.
The challenge of building a strong strategy deck
Of all the challenges standing between you and your final deck, there’s one factor that appears in all of the potential pitfalls: focus.
Whether you’re presenting the deck yourself or sending it to your audience to read independently, the battle is fought between the attention you can win from the audience and the limited amount of time you have to retain it. You have to get them aligned and invested in your thinking as quickly as possible before they eventually and inevitably lose interest.
If a deck is too dense, you’ll lose their interest because the content is too inaccessible and overwhelming to internalize. You could have winning ideas—but if it feels like a chore to learn them, all that value gets lost in the noise.
If it’s disconnected, you’ll lose their interest because you’ve confused them. A compelling deck should be able to stand alone—if it’s only valuable when you’re there to explain the footnotes, it may as well be absolute nonsense.
If it’s unstructured, you’ll lose their interest because you’ve deprived them of context. Context is everything—when you’re unable to show how the tactics and strategy contribute to the overall goal, you open yourself up to the plan falling apart because you haven’t explained why each action matters.
If it’s too long, you’ll lose their interest because you’ve wasted too much of their time. Each member of your audience will have a limited amount of attention to absorb the information you’re sharing with them, so you sabotage yourself when there’s a giant mountain of slides between the most compelling parts of your deck.
Don’t give them everything—just the G.I.S.T.
As promised, here’s that acronym.
The secret to a compelling deck is to create a graphically-led presentation with integrated info, strategically structured in ten slides of content.
Alright, let’s break this down:
By creating a graphically-led presentation, it solves for information density by using diagrams to do the heavy lifting for you. There are so many concepts that can be explained visually in place of multiple paragraphs of text. Nearly every slide you put into a deck (and certainly every content slide) should have a graphic that visualizes the main concept of that slide for your audience.
Graphically-led presentation design works as a great indicator for the strength of the overall structure. If the core of your slide’s concept can’t be explained efficiently using a simple piece of SmartArt, it either means you’re trying to condense too much info on a single slide or the concept itself needs to be strengthened to fit neatly into the overall strategy. Speaking of which, the graphics also work as an indicator of how well you understand the concept you’re trying to present. It’s like that old adage of being able to explain what you’re doing to a five-year-old—if you get what you’re presenting, you should have no issues competently illustrating that to quickly get your audience on board.
Now let’s talk about integrated information. When all the ideas inside of a deck connect together in an easy-to-follow narrative, it solidifies your overall plan and removes room for bottom-up thinking. If you present your ideas from big to small, it tells a story that explains how each idea builds towards the desired result. By thinking in these terms, you introduce a built-in filter to your deck structure that can sift out any ideas that won’t help you get there.
This, of course, is all for nothing if your deck lacks strategic structure. It doesn’t really matter what order you present your ideas in if they share no context. When you’re able to demonstrate this context, however, it makes every step of refining your plan so much easier because it allows your audience to give you actionable feedback. Whatever tactic feels out of place can be pointed out on the mental map you’ve created for your plan, because nothing is wasted and every idea has a role to play.
There may be audience members that still dislike a tactic or want to remove it from your plan, but nobody will treat you like you don’t know what you’re doing because you’ve already put in the legwork to demonstrate that you do. This by proxy also insulates you from strategic collapse, because for every tactic that needs to be removed, there’s still a problem that has to be solved by a replacement.
It advocates for your thinking by shrinking the distance between your audience’s perspective on the problem and yours. This advocacy is critical when it comes time for your audience to buy in. If your skeptics have to think about the consequences of disturbing a tactic’s place in your structure, they’re way more likely to either backtrack or present you with an alternative solution that was hanging out in your blind spot—all without the need for a dreaded follow-up meeting or e-mail thread to resolve.
Finally, you really want to try and get the content of your deck down to ten slides whenever you can. To clarify, I’m not talking about the title slide, agenda, section breaks, or the thank you slide at the end—just the slides where you’re getting down to brass tacks and working through the core info of the deck. There’s a synergy to this rule: you both maximize the amount of interesting or important slides being shown first and do so in the fastest time possible.
So if we’re limited to only ten slides, how can one possibly explain how the tactics themselves are going to work? That’s the trick with this—you put all that detail in the appendix. When you configure it this way, you still have all the slides you need to chase down a tangent with an audience member who wants to see something close-up without having to subject them to literally all of that detail to get to the end of your presentation. Every audience is different, and some will have a higher patience threshold than others to go through all of the content you’ve made—but you empower yourself with the best engagement possible when that audience already knows what the big picture looks like before diving into the nitty-gritty.
Key next steps
Being able to effectively present a compelling strategy is a cheat code to getting anything of substance done in the world of marketing. It’s not just a way to summarize your thinking, but a powerful tool that helps you get ahead of obstacles, get your audience on board with your approach, and get ahead of conflict resolutions before any of the real work begins.
I have many more thoughts about the low-level structuring of these decks, but I’d be an absolute hypocrite if I wrote that all here.
It also gives me an excuse to provide you with an example structure using the deck theme from my work at Contention, which I’ve linked here for review/download.
Happy strategizing!
