3 Essential Tips for Creating Investor Decks That Impress

Read Time: 3 minutes

An effective investor deck can play a critical role in the success of your startup. Even if you have a strong idea for a business and the drive to grow it, your business can’t reach its full potential without funding.

Just remember that you’ll likely be pitching your business idea to investors who have seen many such presentations. Your investor deck needs to engage them while thoroughly yet concisely explaining why investing in your startup is a wise decision.

The following tips will help you achieve this goal. To design an investor pitch deck that yields results, you should:

Strongly Consider Incorporating Video

You don’t need to limit yourself by exclusively relying on a slideshow to present your business idea to potential investors. Again, they’ve seen these types of presentations time and time again.

You could therefore easily capture their attention by using video in place of a slideshow. Or, at the very least, you could incorporate videos into your slides.

Video is naturally more dynamic than slides that consist merely of still images, graphs, and text. With a video, you can demonstrate a product or service in a clear visual manner. You can also add music or other audio elements to give your presentation a more emotional or branded tone.

A video-centric investor deck also allows you to maintain a degree of consistency when presenting your startup to different groups of investors. For example, without video, there may be times during a presentation when you will be speaking to explain the content of a slide. Depending on various factors, from how you’re feeling that day to your level of confidence, you may sometimes slip up or forget to mention an important point.

That’s not something you need to worry about when you incorporate video. You could easily record narration for the video, reducing your chances of making the wrong impression when commenting on slides. Although you’ll still want to interact directly with your audience to some degree, a video’s narration can ensure you consistently share certain critical pieces of information in an effective and confident way.

Keep it Simple

Because an investor deck is an important tool an entrepreneur can use to promote their business’ growth, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and intimidated when creating one. You want to be sure your deck is strong enough to attract investments, after all.

However, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in worrying about whether you’ve perfected your investor deck that you may forget a key truth: the most impressive pitch decks often adhere to a very simple format.

Your investor deck needs to achieve certain basic goals. It needs to define the nature of the problem your business can solve, and it needs to define how your product or service will go about solving that problem. You also need to identify your target audience and explain why the current solutions on the market aren’t serving their needs as well as your business would.

That’s not to say you don’t need to include other details to highlight the concrete benefits of investing in your startup. For instance, you also need to perform market research to illustrate how there is genuine potential for your business to make money. Just remember that you have a better chance of clearly explaining the strengths of your business idea if you do so by telling a story in a simple and proven format.

Include Testimonials

This is an idea worth keeping in mind if you’ve had the opportunity to let customers test early versions of your product or service. Including testimonials from those who’ve already tried out your services is a smart way to show that there is a genuine demand for what your startup can offer.

This is another reason to use video strategically. A video of someone singing the praises of your business is much more powerful than mere text because it allows their enthusiasm to be more apparent.

Because genuine enthusiasm is difficult to fake, this enhances the power of a testimonial. If you simply displayed testimonials in the form of text quotations on slides, potential investors could assume the individuals providing these testimonials are merely doing you a favor by claiming to love your products, when in reality their enthusiasm might be fairly minimal.

Finally, remember that an investor deck can be adjusted if it’s not delivering the intended results. Although applying the advice here should help you create a pitch deck that works, you can always make changes or create a new deck if you have to.

Strengthen an Investor Deck With Video Easily

Don’t worry if you think you lack the funds or resources necessary to create videos for your investor deck. Powtoon’s video templates make creating videos affordable and easy, even if you lack experience. Get started today for free!

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Hanna Abitbul

Hanna is Powtoon's Content Marketing Strategist. She joined Powtoon as a copywriter in 2019, after graduating from university with a specialized degree in marketing and business. She continues to inspire people to create incredible video content with blog posts, videos, guides, and more. Hanna's passions include reading, singing, and caring for animals (#proudvegan). Nothing makes her happier than waking up to her two black kitties who, contrary to popular belief, are good luck!