Top 5 Reasons To Hire A PowerPoint Specialist

Published on
May 21, 2016
You might think you’re pretty computer savvy when it comes to navigating Microsoft’s PowerPoint software.

Sure you can choose a template, insert stock images, even add a few funky custom animations but will that help get your message across to your audience?

The truth is, in order to deliver a stellar PowerPoint presentation you don’t really need to be a design expert. What you need to be is an expert at understanding how to convey your message in a format the audience will easily understand. It doesn’t matter if all your slides are bursting with custom templates and special effects, if you fail to get your message across you’ve defeated the entire purpose of your presentation.

This is exactly why a PowerPoint specialist is important. A PowerPoint specialist is a trained visual story teller. Being an expert presentation designer, a specialist can help merge all your main points together into a compelling visual experience. From telling your story to making sure each slide contains just the right amount of content, a specialist can design your presentation keeping your unique presenting style in mind, making sure you leave the audience with the message you intended a message they’ll remember long after the presenter leaves.

If you’re still not convinced that you need the keen eye of a trained expert, here are top five reasons why you need to hire a PowerPoint specialist:

Engage your audience

A PowerPoint specialist can help engage your audience by creating a unified, visually impactful, unfussy, clean and enlightening presentation that uses just the right amount of content, effects and slides to keep the audience interested from beginning to end. From making boring charts and graphs stand out, to turning complicated statistics into simple visuals, a PowerPoint specialist will create striking visuals bringing otherwise ordinarily mundane information to life, helping you deliver a power-packed presentation that keeps the audience glued to their seats.

Make an impact at important events

Not all presentations you’ll create in your business or career will need to be expertly designed. However there will be certain key presentations that you’ll need to make at important junctions in your professional life, where a PowerPoint designer’s magic touch can make all the difference. If you’re presenting at a conference, an important occasion, a major event or a crucial business meeting, where you really need to wow the audience or clinch a major deal, you need an expert PowerPoint specialist by your side. It’s just not worth compromising and settling for a mediocre presentation that doesn’t do justice to your idea or product pitch and lose the sale.

Establish your brand identity

Employing the services of a PowerPoint specialist can help you create a consistent brand identity for your organization. Let’s say you have twenty sales people going out to deliver presentations to potential clients. If each of these people created their own PowerPoint sales presentations there might be a chance of them using graphics that conflict with your brand, or fail to represent a strong brand identity altogether. Instead of having twenty weak representations, a PowerPoint designer can help you create a branding for all your presentations, which will deliver a powerful message about who you are and what you’re about, in an impactful and consistent manner.

Show off your skills

There’s a saying that goes, how you do anything is how you do everything. What you say at a presentation and how you say it says a lot about you or your company. If you show up in front of potential clients with a bland or disorganized presentation that might reflect directly on your personality and how you operate. For example a typically boring presentation might mean you’re not particularly creative or you’re not a risk-taker. A disorganized presentation could convey that you’re careless, your work quality is poor or you don’t take the time to think things through. No matter what you need to present, how you present it says volumes about you. A PowerPoint specialist can work with you to fashion a presentation that helps you show off your true skills or keep you from giving the wrong first impression.

You might not get another chance

Sometimes all you get is one chance to make the perfect pitch presentation, deliver a training seminar that packs a punch, sell an amazing service or introduce a hot new product. This may be your only chance to impress the audience and get the break of a lifetime. If you know you’ve got a great product or service or a transformative business idea, a PowerPoint specialist can help you convey your passion and energy via your presentation and get an great response from the audience. One of the biggest mistakes most presenters make is only talk about how great their idea is without giving supporting information in the slides. People also make their visual presentation so content heavy that the main message gets diluted. A specialist can help you create a balanced presentation that won’t result in a wasted opportunity.

Hiring a professional PowerPoint specialist might not feel like a necessity to you, but if your presentations are critical to your career path or your business success, employing the services of an expert is something you should definitely consider as a natural cost.

There’s no doubt that the skill set a specialist can bring to the table is indispensable, and there will be occasions where you can’t afford not to hire a designer.

Starting with a thorough understanding of your organization’s business goals, a PowerPoint specialist will provide unique tools to help convey your message to engage and connect with your audience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Working with Stinson: The Presentation Agency

What exactly do presentation agencies do?

We provide all the help you may need to design presentations that achieve your goals. This can include content consulting, presentation slide design, custom icons and illustrations, and presentation handouts—ultimately, our team of PowerPoint designers and consultants develop a comprehensive presentation solution that meets your specific needs.

Why do companies work with presentation agencies?

Consider how much time you (or your team) spend making PowerPoint presentations for meetings. Think about the back and forth over which fonts, colors, icons, and images to use. Is it okay to use bullet points? Did you use the right brand colors? Does the slide look too crowded and busy? Or does it look too plain? How do you create the look and feel that you're picturing? After the design is done, do you have enough time to practice presenting?

As presentation experts, it is our second nature to understand your goals and work with you to create the professional PowerPoint deck that you envisioned. You can learn more about our 3-phase process here.

By leaving the presentation design to an agency like Stinson, you save yourself the time and worry over the look, feel, and progression of your presentation—we make your PowerPoint presentation-ready so that you can focus on the presentation delivery.

Which presentation design service will I need?

As a presentation company, we offer every service you may need to develop your you may need to develop your PowerPoint—however, it's tough to say exactly which services of ours would benefit you the most without having chatted about your company, industry, and presentation uses.

We've generalized the scenarios that we regularly see and help our clients with. If your situation is similar to any of the below, then rest assured that our presentation experts have proven success in developing solutions.

  • You have an upcoming presentation with investors or clients. You feel your slide deck looks outdated or dull, and you don't know how to help it. You're also not sure if the content in your presentation conveys your value. View our case study where our presentation development and content consulting services helped our client achieve their investor funding goals.
  • Your company has regular internal department presentations. Everyone works on their respective slides, which are then combined into one presentation deck. The resulting PowerPoint does not have a cohesive look and somehow, there are five new shades of your corporate colors. We can help you identify your common slide layouts and design easy-to-use custom PowerPoint templates so your team members can create seamless, unified slides.
  • Your company has a great PowerPoint template that strongly reflects your branding, but your team tends to include too much text and irrelevant images on their slides. During the presentation, key messages are lost. We offer presentation training for exactly this—we'll train your team to create better slides more efficiently.

Expectations when working with us

How does partnering with a PowerPoint designer work?

Once you contact us, we'll meet with you and ask for as much context as possible regarding the project: what materials you already have, who is presenting, who is the audience, and so on—this is our Discover phase. From there, we move onto Develop and Design where we start defining the narrative and visual characteristics of your new presentation. For more details, please read our process.

How long do projects take?

Our standard turnaround for presentation development is 2–4 weeks; for custom presentation templates, our typical turnaround is 3–6 weeks. We know this is a wide range, but due to the collaborative nature of our presentation design process (i.e. asking for and incorporating your feedback), our turnaround time also relies on your responsiveness and availability. We do offer a rush service if your timelines are short.

How much does a presentation design cost?

We price on a project-by-project basis, involving a number of key factors outlined in our pricing model. However, we do require a minimum project cost of $1,500.

We often see companies that do not have budget allocations for presentation design and are hesitant to make the initial investment. We understand—at first, it can be difficult to see the value and difference a well-designed, practical presentation can make. For our clients that started in this situation, we worked on a smaller pilot test project; when they saw the positive ROI of the presentation, they were able to secure larger budgets and found more presentations that needed our help.

What are the final files that I will receive?

All of our final PowerPoint (or other presentation software) deliverables are shared with you in its native, editable file format. We are also able to provide a PDF or video version of your presentation if you would like.

Any presentation collateral we design for your project is shared as a ready-to-print PDF, unless if you specify a different preference.

Have you worked with other clients in my industry? Can you share related samples?

Our list of clients spans a wide range of industries, some of which we hadn't known of prior to the client's project. Since our approach involves familiarizing ourselves with the client's business and industry, we've become a team of jacks-of-all-trades for industry knowledge.

We're able to share blinded, industry-specific samples of presentations that our clients have consented to. Contact us if you're interested!

Technology

Aside from PowerPoint, do you work in Google Slides? Keynote? Prezi?

Yes! While we prefer designing PowerPoint presentations due to its robust features that let us create advanced designs, we've created custom presentation designs in Google Slides and Keynote at our clients' request.

We generally do not design presentations in Prezi since it does not support the level of design customization that we need for our clients. Instead, we use PowerPoint to create the same animations and layouts that are characteristic of Prezi presentations—you can view examples in our portfolio.

Will we run into issues if we use Mac and/or Windows PC?

There are some differences in functionality between PowerPoint for Mac and PowerPoint for Windows—but these are not for your concern! We use both Mac and Windows computers at Stinson, so we're able to ensure cross-device compatibility with every PowerPoint presentation we design. During our initial call with you, we'll ask you for these tech specs so that we know to bear them in mind when working on your project.

Does it matter which version of PowerPoint we use?

Yes; the latest versions of PowerPoint have new functions and features that earlier versions of PowerPoint cannot load. We'll take note of your tech setup to ensure that our presentations for you run as intended.

Designing with branding

How are you able to design with our company's brand?

If you have any brand guidelines, we ask you to provide them early on in the process so that we can familiarize ourselves not only with your logos, colors, and fonts, but the overarching brand tone. Our collaborative process includes rounds of revision for you to provide your feedback on the presentation design.

Are you able to design within our very strict corporate brand guidelines?

Absolutely! Many of our clients are companies with well-established brand identities. We do our due diligence to maintain the integrity of their branding when designing their presentations and collateral.

Strict brand guidelines do not necessarily restrict the possibility of creating a sophisticated PowerPoint; our presentation designers thoughtfully use photos, animations, and other visuals to build the story.

We don't have concrete branding yet or we're in the process of updating our brand. Can you work without defined brand elements?

Yes! When we work with clients who are still ironing out the details of their branding, we ask them to provide us any materials they have already and to share their design inspirations. From there, we lay out moodboards of different tones and styles to see which resonates the most with what our client has in mind.

Security

We have highly sensitive information. Will my data remain confidential?

Absolutely—we respect the proprietary nature of businesses, and enforce a strict confidentiality policy company-wide. From the first point of contact with you, we assume a non-disclosure agreement (NDA); we are happy to sign your company's NDA as well.

Where do you store my files and data?

All of our files are stored securely in an industry-leading content server. The server exceeds regulatory standards and encrypts each file using AES 256-bit encryption in diverse locations.

Additionally, the Stinson team works completely in-house, so your files will not cross borders.

How secure is my data?

We take data security seriously. We enforce numerous internal policies and procedures to ensure that Stinson continues to meet compliance and security standards for data protection, including multi-factor authentication for all company accounts and access restrictions.

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