What Is The Marketing Strategy In A Pitch Deck?

What Is The Marketing Strategy In A Pitch Deck?

What is the place of marketing strategy in your pitch deck when raising money for your startup?

Pitch decks can make or break your startup, and the ability to get the funds you need to launch and grow. Some of the funds you may need so desperately may be to execute your marketing strategy.

So, what role does this factor play in your deck? What are some smart practices to use, and terrible blunders to avoid?

The Importance Of the Advertising Strategy In A Pitch Deck

Your whole pitch deck and pitch presentation is a marketing exercise. Perhaps one of the most important marketing efforts and sales pitches you will deliver in the life of your startup. Without a good one, you may have no marketing capital at all. You may find it very hard to recruit great talent and advisors in addition to investors.

You’ve got to do great here, and demonstrate how you are going to get customers and sales so that you can deliver for your investors. If you can’t, how can they believe you’ll do good in business?

The Problem

The marketing strategy in a pitch deck really starts with your cover slide and tagline. It becomes even more important on your problem slide. You have to show that you really understand the problem, and have chosen a good one.

In your verbal pitch, you’ll be telling a story around this problem. One that will personally resonate with your audience. One that lets them feel the pain associated with it.

Sales and marketing are all about the problem versus the solution. The pain versus the pleasure you can bring. If you can’t nail the problem, the foundation of everything else is flawed.

The Solution

The solution slide in your pitch deck is where you start selling your product. If you can’t sell it to your investors, then how can you expect to sell it to anyone else? However, if you can sell it to cynical investors who are looking for reasons to poke holes in your idea and pitch, then selling regular customers may be much easier.

Here you need to demonstrate that you can keep it simple. Focus on the problem and the one solution you excel at providing. In additional slides you may note a couple of key features, differentiating factors, and show off prototypes or demos. Or at least screenshots of them.

Keep in mind that in fundraising storytelling is everything. In this regard for a winning pitch deck to help you here, take a look at the template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

Market Size

How big is the market for this product? Is it big enough to warrant going after, creating a business around, and investing capital in? What data do you have on the size of the customer pool? Is it growing or shrinking?

In your competition slide, you’ll show your competitive advantages over others in this space and how you think you can win market share. This is a critical facet of the marketing strategy in a pitch deck.

Target Market & Target Customers

Who are your target customers exactly? You can’t market well, effectively, and profitably unless you really deeply know and understand your customers. What is your customer avatar?

What are some of the use cases for your product? You may even demonstrate this with pictures. How many of these customers with this profile have you spoken to already?

Traction

In your traction slide, you are showing what you’ve achieved so far. This includes how many customers you’ve acquired and the sales you’ve made. This will show that your marketing strategy is working, and you just need to scale it up. Or if it isn’t and you’ve hit a wall.

The Team

For investors, the ability to execute is even more important than your idea and product. Specifically, do you have the best possible team in this industry to execute a good marketing strategy?

How much epic marketing experience do they have? What results have they have achieved What are their qualifications?

If you are weak here, then how will you give your investors confidence that you can not just pull this off, but are the best company in this space for them to bet on?

What amazing advisers or CMO and marketing experts are you bringing on board to champion this all-important part of the puzzle?

Business Model

The foundation of your business model is how you will acquire customers. That’s an essential part of the marketing strategy in a pitch deck. What marketing channels and tactics have you tried already?

How does your sales funnel work? How much is it costing to acquire new customers and sales? What are the returns on this marketing?

Is The Marketing Strategy In A Pitch Deck A Part Of Your Fundraising Ask?

Will at least some of the funds you are raising for being used for marketing? If you have no experience or tests, what will you try first, and why? Will you be investing in developing a real, custom marketing strategy? Be careful here.

What marketing does your business rely on? Is it all reliant on Google search or paid ads on Facebook or using TikTok? Or is it enterprise sales with a very long sales cycle?

In which case do you have the salespeople with connections and financial runway to afford this? Are you planning a heavy upfront investment in marketing, like a physical store or inventory?

Take a step back and look at this marketing strategy in the pitch deck from your investors’ perspective. Is it sustainable? Does it offer good unit economics? Does it give you a moat around your business from competitors?

How will you control your marketing effectiveness and costs in the months and years ahead? What can you do that is unique and has a high marketing ROI? Is there an online advertising template you can use?

You may find interesting as well our free library of business templates. There you will find every single template you will need when building and scaling your business completely for free. See it here.

If you want to go into this deeper you may want to watch the video below titled what is the marketing strategy in a pitch deck.

* * *

FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS VIDEO:

Hello, everyone. This is Alejandro Cremades, and today we’re going to be talking about what is the marketing strategy in a pitch deck? Before we get started, make sure that you hit that subscribe button and this way, you will never miss out on any of the videos that we roll out every week.

In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking down for you the marketing strategy in a pitch deck because ultimately, it’s a make it or break it. Anyone, even a monkey, can raise money to dump it on ads here and there. So you need to be very thoughtful and very detail-oriented. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking it down for you and give you all those insights, so let’s get into it.

The importance of the advertising strategy in your pitch deck is actually more important than what you think because what you’re doing is giving the idea to the investor that you have a clear understanding of your customer. If you know your customer inside and out, you’re going to know where they hang, how you’re putting the ad in front of them, and what the platform is that you’re using – maybe it’s Instagram Stories, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Google, or whatever that it. 

What you want to do is give the investor a sense that you’ve done your homework, that you’ve done enough analysis, and that you’ve crunched enough data to really understand how you get in front of those people and in a very effective way to close them as customers. That’s ultimately going to impact the budget and how much it’s costing you to acquire a customer that is coming to buy your product or your service.

The problem is very important here, and it’s critical to position this in a way in which you’re combining it with the solution, and the storytelling side of it is coming across very powerfully. That’s why you’re not just focusing on the marketing strategy for just one single slide. You’re literally baking that problem with a combination of the solution all the way starting from the cover slide. 

On the cover slide, to a certain degree, you’re already jumping into action; you’re showcasing a powerful visual where you’re giving an idea of what you’re resolving, what you’re tackling. It’s not about one single slide when it comes to that marketing approach. It’s really combining the marketing, the sales, also in parallel with the problem and solution, and that’s part of the flow and the structure that you’re baking in your own presentation.

The solution is just like we just talked about in the problem. The thing is that the marketing and the strategy can also be baked into the product itself. There are some products that have the viral effects going on or the network effects going on, the flywheel approach, where one person comes in. That person that comes in refers a few more that are coming in too. The marketing strategy is also baked into the product, which is ultimately the solution. 

At the end of the day, if you have a great solution, a great product, or a great service, the word of mouth is going to help to grow even faster because if someone likes what you’re doing, guess what? They’re going to tell their friends; they’re going to tell their family. That product, that solution is also part of having that organic essence, that organic distribution that your product is going to help to push to get others to come in.

The market size is also going to be an interesting slide where you’re baking that marketing strategy in because you need to understand: who are you targeting? How big is that pool of people that you’re targeting? Where are they? How much money – how much, in the billions, is this market, and how you’re planning on targeting that slowly? This is also going to be part of how you’re tackling the marketing strategy, which is, as we said, not just focusing the marketing strategy in one single slide but slowly baking it into the whole flow and structure. 

That’s why you’re going to be putting it on the cover slide; that’s why you’re going to be putting it on the market size. The market size is going to allow the investor to understand how big in returns they may be able to get on their money. That’s why you’re never going to go after markets that are under $1 billion because then, it’s not going to justify the risk that the investor is taking for placing an investment in your business.

The target customers are super important when it comes to the marketing strategy because you want to break it down for the investor. Who are these people? What are their ages? Where do they hang out? What are their interests? What are their hobbies? These are some of the things that are going to help you understand how you can use ads and be even more targeted to get in front of your potential customers. 

From numerous occasions, I have case studies and examples of entrepreneurs that have gone into an office of an investor. They sat down. They were doing the presentation. The investor was probably on their phone, with their feet up on the table, whatever that was. And then, all of a sudden, they started talking about the customer. They started breaking down what was the profit of that customer. Then, you can see how the investor slowly get more into it. They put down the phone. They get into the presentation. They ask questions. That’s why knowing and being able to break down your customers inside and out is going to not only help you in captivating the interest from the investor but then also for you to get clear as to how you’re getting out there and making it happen in a very effective and fast way.

The traction slide is going to validate your marketing strategy efforts. Here, you’re going to be throwing some numbers. It could be about the revenue; it could be about the number of customers that you’re onboarding; it could be about the retention of those customers that are coming in, and retention is absolutely everything, let me tell you. So the traction slide is really going to validate and confirm the essence of that marketing strategy.

Part of the marketing strategy also means the team. On the team slide, you want to put that you may have like a CMO, a Chief Marketing Officer, or that you or team members have been in your space for some time, that they understand it, that they understand the customers, that they understand some of the channels where you’re going to be marketing to get in front of the right people. And maybe that you have access to relationships that can open up doors to distribution, for business development deals, for partnerships. It’s all about business, not about what you know. It’s about who you know. So having those networks are going to give that sense to the investor that you are going to be in a position to activate the marketing strategy in a more powerful way.

It’s important not to forget about the business model because, just as we’ve said that on the product, the marketing strategy is going to be baked in. The business model needs to make sense. I remember, for example, how PayPal was giving $10 per person for opening an account, back then when they were starting. That was a great marketing strategy, but that made sense on the amount of money that they were able to recoup or to make from every customer that they would give those $10 at the beginning. So you want to understand what is essentially the money that you’re going to be putting out, and what is the money that you’re going to be getting in from those efforts as a return on such investment?

Then, part of the ask is going to be the money that you’re going to be raising for marketing. Perhaps you already have the product; you already have the team. Now it’s time to scale and expand. You want to talk about advertising, marketing, a team for sales, and whatever that is, that it’s going to get and combine those marketing strategy efforts – you want to put them on the ask, the user processes, how much are you raising, and where are you going to be allocating that money? 

We would love to hear what you think on the comment section below and what you’re up to in terms of marketing strategy. Hit a Like on the video, and subscribe to the channel so that you don’t miss out on all the videos that we’re rolling out every week. Then, also, if you’re raising money, feel free to shoot me a note at [email protected]. We’d love to help out. Thank you so much for watching.