How to Make Pro Marketing Plan PowerPoint Presentations

Marketing is something we all know we need to do in our business, but it can take us out of our comfort zone. How do you start marketing, and what should you be doing to get the name out about your business? In this tutorial, you'll find out.

As freelancers and small business leaders, we all have to play a number of roles. You might not think of yourself as a marketer, but it's a crucial part of what you do to run and grow your business. 

A marketing plan PowerPoint presentation, once accepted, can serve as the guiding document that all marketing decisions are tied to. Being intentional about your marketing strategy is the first step to success. 

In this tutorial, you'll learn to build a marketing PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint is easy-to-use and templates can make it much easier to build a great looking marketing plan PowerPoint in less time than other apps.

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Now, let's dive in to the tutorial.

Essential Elements of Marketing Plans

Successful marketing efforts don't happen by accident. instead, they start with a plan about what you want potential customers to know about your business and outline the steps that it'll take to drive that message.

You build a marketing plan to formalize and capture your plans to reach customers. The very act of going through the process can help you set the plan and put serious thought into your marketing actions.

What does a marketing plan PowerPoint contain? Let's take a look at what you should include when you are formalizing your PowerPoint presentation marketing strategy.

Essential Parts of Marketing Plans

Every marketing plan PowerPoint will differ, but here are the key parts that every marketing plan should contain. These might span multiple sections or pages, but these are the essentials of a well-formed marketing plan PowerPoint:

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  Situation analysis. This is often called a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and aims to assess the current situation that exists.


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  Set the strategy and goal. What are the overall guiding principles for what you want to accomplish, and what do you want people to know about your business?
  
  


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  Define the tactics. What specific steps will you take to help you reach your marketing goals?


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  Set measurables and timelines. Define the way that you'll measure your marketing 

It can help to build a marketing PowerPoint presentation to capture all of these in one place. Thanks to its ease-of-use and shareability, PowerPoint is an ideal choice to create a central document that has your plan.

If you want to learn more about the art of marketing, make sure to read Celine Roque's tutorial that can serve as a complete crash course for marketing.

• 
  Small Business
  
  
  What Is Online Marketing? (Intro Guide for Small Business)
  
  
  Celine Roque

How to Market on a Budget

In this section, I'm going to walk you through building out your own marketing PowerPoint presentation. Whether you're pitching it to someone else for acceptance or simply documenting your plan for yourself, it's an important process to develop your own marketing plan.

If you're managing a marketing plan, Envato Elements is the perfect service to help you. With so many creative assets included in one single subscription, it's hard to match the value that Elements brings to the table.

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  Stock photos. For any print or web publication, you'll occasionally need a stock or filler photo to finish up your website.


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  WordPress and web templates. You don't have to hire a web developer to create a website for your small business. You might be surprised how easy it is to grab a web template from Elements and add your own details.
  
  


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  Graphics. Whether it's an icon or graphic you'll use on social media, a graphic can really help round out a design
  
  

Basically, Envato Elements is an all-you-can-download service that includes all of these for a single flat rate.

All of these items are the type of thing that a marketer would benefit from. Instead of buying these assets and templates one-at-a-time, Elements can be a budget-friendly unlimited marketing package. Even if you don't call yourself a marketer, having unlimited access to use these files is one of the best ways to market on a shoestring.

Building a Marketing Plan PowerPoint Presentation

Besides the file types that I mentioned above, Elements includes professional marketing PowerPoint templates that you can download and use. This tutorial is going to use a template from Envato Elements to build a professional marketing plan PowerPoint. 

In this tutorial, I'm going to use the aptly-named Marketing Plan presentation template. This is tailor-made for building a marketing plan with each of the key slide types that you might need.

1. Establish the Strategy

The business strategy sets the direction for the entire marketing plan. Every company will approach setting this strategy differently, but the important part is that you've got one.

To showcase this in our marketing presentation, I'm going to use slide design six. I preferred this slide design for its simplicity and singular focus. When setting a strategy, I think it's almost always best to focus on a singular idea. Don't dilute the strategy with an overabundance of details; instead, condense your idea into a single sentence that'll resonate.

2. Assess the Situation

The classic way to assess a situation is to use the SWOT approach, short for the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis. This approach helps you understand where your business is positioned in the marketplace and what opportunities might be available to you for growth.

The Marketing Plan PowerPoint presentation has a pre-built SWOT slide that's perfect for this purpose. Use slide design 11 and update it with your own view of your business. It's already tailored for a SWOT analysis with the four key placeholders.

Performing the SWOT analysis forces you to think about your business and where it fits into the marketplace. Documenting it in a slide like this will help you refer back to it while preparing tactics.

3. Set Tactics

In even the largest of companies, professionals often forget the difference between a strategy and a tactic. While a marketing strategy is the guiding principles of what you'll aim for, tactics are the individual efforts you take to implement them. 

For example, running a Facebook ad is a tactic, not a strategy. Building a mailing list or even rolling out the new company website are both tactics that support the marketing strategy, but are not strategies that stand on their own.

Most marketing tactics will force you to consider the channels that you'll market to. Simply put, a marketing channel is a platform or avenue that you'll use to get the word out about your product. 

At this stage, it's a great idea to share the tactics that support the PowerPoint presentation marketing strategy that was established earlier in the slide deck. I like to use a single slide to showcase the tactics that are going to support reaching our marketing goal.

In this case, I'm going to use slide design seven, which has several placeholder boxes. I can use each one of those to list a tactic that I'm going to employ to push my marketing plan. Using this approach will carefully document the tactics that I'll use in my marketing efforts.

4. Set the Targets

How do you know if you're succeeding with your marketing plan? The answer is that you've got to set targets and measure against them.

The old adage that "you can't manage what you don't measure" is true. Basically, that piece of advice means that if you aren't measuring your success rate, you've got no clue if the tactics that you're undertaking are working.

Set targets that are tied to metrics that you can measure. Examples of these metrics could include simple financial measures like sales of your product, visits to the company website, or new subscriptions to the mailing list. 

In this example slide, I used slide design eight with three placeholders to substitute in my own metrics that I'll use in my marketing plan. I'll refer back to this in the future to make sure that my marketing plan is hitting the mark. 

5. Set the Budget

As you're executing the marketing plan, it can be tempting to overspend your budget in the name of reaching your goals. That's why you've got to keep budgetary discipline. If you don't discuss the spend expectations up front, it can be difficult to have budget allocated for your project or track your marketing spend.

I think that slide design 33 is the perfect way to log the budget in an easy-to-use table format. Just add the tactics and budget for each month to log what you plan to spend.

Make this marketing PowerPoint presentation a living document. Revisit it regularly to ensure that you're sticking to your PowerPoint presentation marketing strategy or have good reasons to shift from it. It really helps to have this central document that you can refer to.

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Recap & Keep Learning

This tutorial helped you design and firm up your marketing plan using Microsoft PowerPoint marketing presentations. Whether you're using an Elements template or a GraphicRiver template to establish your own strategy or building one to show your team, it's easy to build out a successful marketing plan.

If you're looking to build up your Microsoft PowerPoint skills, make sure to check out some of the tutorials and round-ups below to improve your skillset:

• 
  Microsoft PowerPoint
  
  
  25+ Free Microsoft PowerPoint Templates to Download Now
  
  
  Laura Spencer


• 
  Microsoft PowerPoint
  
  
  18 Animated PowerPoint Templates With Amazing Interactive Slides
  
  
  Sean Hodge


• 
  Microsoft PowerPoint
  
  
  18 Professional PowerPoint Templates: For Better Business Presentations
  
  
  Sean Hodge


• 
  Presentations
  
  
  15+ Marketing PowerPoint Templates to Present Your Plans
  
  
  Sean Hodge

How do you set the target for your marketing efforts? Have you got any tips to share with other Tuts+ readers to build better marketing slide decks? Let me know in the comments section below this tutorial.