How to Talk About Your Company in One Slide — an Example From BMW
BMW: future plans
This slide is taken from a presentation that the BMW Group shows to potential investors. It, alone, is worth more than many of the tediously monotonous presentations that similar companies are producing.
This slide talks about the company's plans for electric cars. One could write 10 pages of text about how innovative BMW are, what achievements they have made in the field of electric and hybrid cars, and the electrifying plans they have for the future.
Just one slide explains all those things and more. The right side of the slide, which depicts the company's plans for creating electric vehicles, is particularly impressive. The future models are shown, but only their silhouettes- adding mystery and intrigue to the presentation. At the same time investors are given the confidence that there is more to come from BMW.
Something to note is that all of the silhouettes are different, meaning a designer has worked to create these 3D models for only one presentation slide. Attention to detail matters.
How can I achieve the same impressive slides for my company presentation?
Creating a presentation that will cause a wow-effect with concision and a catchy visual style is similar to baking a delicious cake. When baking, it"s important to follow a recipe. Afterwards, like a victoria sponge with sumptuous buttercream and tangy jam, a well-baked slide leaves a memorable taste in the mouth of everybody who sees it.
You, too, can achieve the same results by paying extra attention to the entire presentation. At Top Lead, we have been perfecting our presentation and infographic recipe for years.
- Define the target audience. Everyone you are going to feed your cake to has different tastes. Therefore, it is important to understand for whom exactly you are creating a presentation. You must know who will read it and understand what conclusions they might draw from it.
- Identify the needs of the audience. Only show what is important to the reader. Investors need to talk about plans, production, and profits. For potential buyers, the only things that are truly of interest are the problems that your product or service solves.
- Develop a presentation structure. All information must be clearly structured and divided into presentation sections. Like putting the ingredients in the right order, you must think through how you can logically present all of your information. Otherwise, instead of a cake, you"re going to have something more like scrambled egg rather than beautifully presented data.
- Design a visual style. If your company has a brand book, focus on it. If not, come up with a simple and recognizable style that you can follow in this, and subsequent, presentations.
- Set visual accents. After the previous four steps, we can begin working directly on the flagship slide. This will be the cherry on the cake of your presentation.
Once again, pay attention to BMW"s presentation. This is one of the few spectacular slides, whereas the rest are much simpler and less extravagant. They contain photos of cars and graphs showing the results of the company; this level of attention is only really visible on this main slide. They have built the rest of the presentation around it.
Writing 1000 words of text is easy. Replacing these 1000 words with outstanding visualization is more difficult. It makes sense if you really want your audience to remember and feel what is written there.