How to apply strategic marketing principals to your pitch deck

Published in

The Startup

9 min readMar 16, 2018

This guide is for any startup founder or team building a pitch deck for their Seed or Series A round who want to captivate investors and get funded faster.

You’re coming up on your fundraising campaign and are working to get everything ready to take your pitch to potential investors. You’re tightening up your demo, double checking your numbers, and continually validating your product. And now you have to create the pitch deck.

What you thought was going to be a straightforward process of putting a few slides together is actually more involved and time consuming than you anticipated. There’s a ton of information you want to include and the story you want to tell isn’t coming through. On top of that your visual style looks nothing like the refined consumer brands you’re going up against or want to be like.

So, what do you do? You can put together a deck that doesn’t convey the message, quality, and effort you’ve put into getting this far, or you can rethink your approach.

After working at advertising agencies on global brands and then with startups, I’ve seen what bringing agency level research, strategy, and design can do for early-stage companies. Specifically, higher response rates and a quicker path to funding.

Taking the experiences from both, here’s a framework for taking a marketing first approach to crafting your pitch.

Purpose of a pitch deck

The 10–15 pages that make up your deck have the potential to be worth millions of dollars for your company.

However, your goal when creating your pitch deck shouldn’t be to get a term sheet. No investor sees a deck and writes a check.

The goal is to get another meeting.

Preferably one that’s in person so you can develop a deeper relationship with your potential investors as most likely your deck is going to be the first interaction they have with your company.

Your pitch deck is your first impression.

This means it has to do a number of things correctly. You have to tell your story, describe a market problem, explain the solution you’re proposing, why you’re the ones to be taking it on, what you need to do it successfully, what’s in it for them and overall convince them to bring you in for a meeting.

To do this you need to create an experience that conveys all of that information in a clear, succinct, and well designed presentation.

Ultimately, your pitch deck is a marketing document.

Know your audience

Often pitch decks are overloaded with information.

Investors are busy people. Their time is at a premium and a study found that on average, investors spend only 3 minutes and 44 seconds reviewing a pitch deck. This means we have to consider their time and how much we can actually include.

Let’s also assume with their schedules, it’s likely they are looking at your deck on their phone in the back of a car or as they walk to another meeting. Probably not the situation you picture when you think of an investor looking at your deck — Saturday morning on the couch with their feet up ready to deep dive into your project.

This means you have to be selective. Focusing on the story and only including the key facts and figures necessary. Remember, you can always share more in the meeting after they invite you to come in.

Presentation matters (a lot)

While you may only be pitching an idea at this point, the design of your deck needs to convey the value of what you’re building.

Perception is reality, and the visual style of your deck says a lot more about you and your company than you think.

When you deliver a well designed deck it shows you care about what you’re doing, you respect your audiences time, and that you’re creating a valuable product.

You can reinforce this value by making it so every interaction someone has with you or your company is part of a consistent design language and brand. Meaning whenever someone sees your pitch deck, letterhead, emails, etc. they’ll know it’s from your company. This may seem trivial to concern yourself with, but when it comes down to it these are the things that show a potential investor you’re taking it seriously.

This is especially true today as brands are being built on their visual identity. You’ll be ahead of your competitors if you’re able to show investors what your brand can look like compared to the rest.

If you don’t have the time or design skills required to do this yourself, it’s a smart decision to bring someone in to take care of this for you. They’ll also be able to give you an invaluable third-party perspective.

Telling your story

Once hooked by your design, you need to make sure your story is readily apparent as soon as someone starts interacting with your deck.

It needs to be engaging and every page should have them saying yes to flipping to the next.

Here too you need to think about how an investor will be looking at the deck. First, quickly, to see if they are initially intrigued and want to see more, and then a second pass to further assess the opportunity.

This means you need to engineer the flow of your deck where you create energy as they get sucked in and then lulls when you want them to slow down and digest the information on the page. Creating this tension in your story amplifies your problem and plays into the fact that someone needs to solve it — in this case, you.

It’s all part of the experience.

Headlines are the backbone of your deck

The first thing we need to do is get potential investors through the first pass and wanting to dig a little deeper. This means you want them to come away with a general understanding of your deck though only the headlines.

Usually slides are given generic names like: The Problem or Market Opportunity. However, those names don’t actually add any value. Instead, your headlines should be short power statements that tell a cohesive story from page to page.

Meaning titles like The Problem could become There’s no single source of information, and Market Opportunity could be We have three unique audience segments. Someone can read those and get a sense of what you’re talking about from the headlines alone.

Then, of course, you can expand on those statements in the body of the slides.

Strategy on how to write your headlines like this below.

The slides investors expect to see

After seeing hundreds if not thousands of decks, investors have expectations for what they are about to see when evaluating an opportunity.

While this isn’t a prescriptive list, it does follow a cadence that carries an investor through the deck in a way that educates, excites, and sets expectations.

Title Page
Problem / Market Observation
Why It Matters / What It Could Mean (Many decks don’t have this, they assume the investor will just ‘get it’. When you articulate why it matters, you make the problem you’re solving appear larger and ultimately, that your solution is desperately needed.)
Solution
Product
Team / Unique Ability / Perspective (The adage that investors invest in people is true. Be clear about why you and your team are perfectly positioned to be taking this project on. What do you know that the rest of the world doesn’t. This section can also go at the end, however it flows best.)
Market Size / Audience
Competitors / Industry Analysis
Business Model
Go To Market Plan
The Ask / Development Timeline
CTA / Thank You (See below why I think this is necessary)

Series A Deck
If you’re going after a Series A you’ll need to include a few more slides. Specifically, you’ll need to prove you’ve validated your product and how additional investment will fuel the growth you anticipate.

For a Series A deck the extra slides to include are:

Traction / Validation
Financial Model / Projections
Key Accomplishments / Milestones
Data / Metrics
How the funding will be utilized

Fit these in wherever they flow best in your narrative.

Writing your headlines

Now, once you have your slides in order you can figure out your headlines.

To do this, take your list of slides and write a headline for each so that it reads as a story. The headlines don’t have to be sentences, just enough to convey a point and progressively link from one to the other.

(Pro Tip: write these out by hand at first).

After you’ve done this you can add supporting info and facts in the body of the slide.

The rest of your deck will practically write itself.

The key facts & figures you need

You’ll also need to include different facts and figures for different rounds of funding.

In a Seed round it’s likely that you’ll have little to no data on your own company, but you should have research and facts about the market opportunity. Including:

Potential audience size
Audience demographics
Financial size of the market

One thing to note here is that while you can identify the entire industry you’re going after, your product won’t be for the whole market, so qualify the number with the audience you’ll initially be targeting.

If you’re pursuing a Series A, investors will want to see numbers that validate market demand. These are the numbers that inform your Financial Model, which are:

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) & Annual Recurring Revenue(ARR)
Cash Flow; Gross & Net Burn, and expected break-even
Custom Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
Churn

As mentioned earlier, you’ll often want to include every data point you have, but really, you only need to include the numbers that support your story. If an investor wants something more they’ll ask you for it and you can always share more in a follow up or during an in-person meeting.

Getting what you want

Finally, don’t end your deck abruptly without giving the investor something to act on.

You should utilize your last slide to subtly set an expectation of next steps.

Remember, you’re not asking for a term sheet. You want another meeting. So a simple phrase like: Look forward to discussing further and your email below it does way more for you than simply writing THANK YOU! or ending on your fundraising ask with no reason to do anything next.

The point is to make it easy for them to continue saying yes to what you’re offering.

Pitch decks in review

There you have it, a marketing first approach for creating your pitch deck that uses strategy and psychology of your audience to help craft your story and design your deck for the audience and outcome you want.