By Olivia Orzech, Digital Marketer at Ingage
Nearly all B2B businesses, regardless of industry, have shifted to incorporating an online component. Throughout the sales cycle, businesses simply need to have an internet presence nowadays. Why? Because that’s where the market has moved. Three-quarters of both purchasers and vendors in B2B sales now prefer digital to in-person engagements. Going online offers freer scheduling, with less time and money spent. And buying activity is only shifting to these online marketplaces faster and faster.
The COVID-19 pandemic may have accelerated the trend towards internet sales—over half of B2B enterprises have been done digitally due to COVID-19—but it was already a wave in motion. In the digital age, online sales simply make sense. Online marketplaces not only reach young purchasers but also expand sellers’ reach internationally.
Considering this shift, it only makes sense to make sure your online channels are designed with just as much consideration as your in-person operations, if not more. An eCommerce solution like Zobrist can ensure your online B2B channel is equipped to handle online orders effectively. But how do you get customers in the virtual door? Engaging, dynamic sales presentations (and the software to make it happen) are all the more essential in a digital world where you may not have the luxury of interacting in person with a client.
Powerful, next-level presentation software like Ingage transforms your standard slides into a vibrant personalized journey. Attractive visuals, interactive features, and robust analytics features to help you track engagement are all integral in presentation software to help you succeed in the digital landscape.
Captivate Your Audience With Visual Storytelling
The human brain evolved over millions of years to think visually. The mind handles images tens of thousands of times faster than text, extracting richer content and emotion. Considering this, the visuals you choose to use in your presentation are critical—and choosing a software that can deliver your vision is just as critical. If you want to tap into that powerful processing capacity, tell your story visually.
Mobile and other online media channels only increase the dependency on visuals. For example, Facebook streams over a billion videos per day on its platform. In a world with millions of stimuli coming at us at all times, it’s important to create engaging collateral that catches the eye immediately while delivering a story and your information succinctly. You want a presentation that makes the viewer pause as they’re flipping through their phone. But you need the right presentation software to pull off that tall order.
An engaging presentation can transmit your message and brand to a viewer near-instantaneously. After all, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. With the right image, you can establish an immediate relationship with your prospective customer, earning their trust for the interaction to come. By crafting your presentation to guide your potential customer step-by-step along their personal buyer journey, you can build a strong foundation for lasting B2B engagement. And all this from one well-made presentation!
But again, it only happens if you use software to match your presentation vision’s needs. A stack of static slides with blocks of tiny text isn’t going to pull in anybody. Neither is a generalized presentation that never changes across the thousands of leads you blast it out to.
However, a platform like Ingage can help you assemble dynamic, customized presentations chock-full of interactive features. Play with the linearity of your story, so viewers can make their own way through the information as it interests them rather than moving from one slide to the next. At the same time, Ingage Samples allow you to maintain a level of uniformity to lock in your brand identity with the viewer, no matter how the information on the slides changes. Branded templates allow you to combine brand uniformity with individual personalization and allow you to update every presentation at once, saving you essential hours of work.
Visual content design can reach your audience like no other method can. This aids in propelling your brand to reach the people who can use it. An exceptional design will affect your audience, serving the fundamental goal of developing your B2B business and driving people to your online offerings and eCommerce store.
Use Interactive Presentation Software to Engage and Impress
Interactivity is a critical element of marketing, as it allows customers to build a direct connection with your brand. The more your audience engages with your content, the more likely they are to follow through on a transaction and make a purchase.
Studies find that approximately half of B2B buyers list interactive content as one of their top preferred content types. Interactive content earns far more engagement and in the upcoming few years, nearly all marketers are likely to make at least some of their static content responsive.
But it’s not enough to throw together some slapdash transition animation in PowerPoint. When deciding whether to do business with a vendor, customers generally consider the quality of the vendor’s presentation. While it does cost some time and money to assemble powerful presentations, the return on investment can easily justify the decision.
Cloud-based presentation software like Ingage has the capability to combine interactive elements to create slides that leave a lasting impression. Tap into the Ingage Suite’s wealth of resources, embedding interactive tools like scroll motion, compare pages, and pop-up buttons. You can even embed whole videos or websites in your slides! Breaking down the straightforward traditional structure of a presentation adds both dynamism and allows viewers to access information on their terms while keeping your presentation sleek and streamlined. Make your presentation feel like a video, so the viewer is carried along by the experience, rather than working to digest it.
Ingage’s presentation software is built specifically for the digital age. Embed and sharing features allow you to easily attach your presentation to your eCommerce website, or blast it out in emails to leads. Collaborative and cloud-based features then allow you to adjust in real-time according to consumer feedback so that your presentation is always calibrated to impress.
Personalize Sales Presentations for Maximum Impact
Studies find that the most effective sales efforts address individuals personally. Half of B2B purchasers consider personalization a must when selecting vendors. Customers also spend more when marketing is targeted to them.
Even if it seems like unnecessary work, personalizing your sales presentation is a critical way to gain more customers and strengthen relationships with current ones. If you use the same material for all of your prospects, it’ll repel business as people tune out redundant and irrelevant messages. To achieve better results, you need to learn what each customer wants and target them directly.
An effective sales presentation that resonates with a customer makes a lasting positive mark. When you personalize sales presentations to customers’ drives, you gain and maintain their attention and interest. Attending to their personal wants and problems—attending to customers as people—is the surest way to establish a connection.
Ingage understands this and supports your efforts to personalize sales presentations. Thanks to the cloud-based interface, it’s easy to alter presentations on the fly. Ingage Teams further enables collaborative work with your team, so that you can put together the most targeted presentation collectively.
The pre-built branding sample pages allow you to personalize your information by just plugging in your logo, copy, and images. And with themes, you no longer have to worry about brand uniformity. Just create a theme with your selected color scheme, font, and logo, then apply that theme to your presentations and voila! Every presentation now perfectly represents your brand and you can reproduce personalized presentations in a flash. Just add the content that is directly relevant to your next prospective viewer and watch your sales skyrocket.
The old notion of one presentation for all prospects no longer works. Each account’s differences and preferences matter, and the B2B business that understands and prioritizes this has an edge on the competition. Personalization can range from simple acts like including the prospect’s name and logo in your presentation to incorporating fine-grained details of their goals into your pitch. But the point is, you need to engage your clients as individuals.
Use Software Analytics to Evolve and Improve Your Presentation
If you want to make your sales messages more motivating, then you have to know how you’re doing. That’s where analytic data can help. Tracking the right engagement metrics can supply you with cold, hard feedback data to help make your interactive presentations even better and more relevant.
While many like to think they can go off intuition, analytic data gives you a look under the hood, so to speak. It allows you to see what exactly is driving your sales with an objective eye. With many different systems at play, knowing what produces sales can take time and intelligence. But tracking a few key performance indicators (KPIs) can simplify things.
These metrics can help you assess forecasts and results, sales and revenue patterns, and performance by employee, product, or customer. With this information, you can learn what does and doesn’t work, and measure your performance against your goals. When you can measure the effects of different offers, for example, you can see which pricing models produce superior returns. Through adjustments to your operations, you can then evolve and improve your sales messaging.
Ingage includes powerful analytics tools that can increase your conversions. These show you which presentations receive more interest. Tracking presentation and page views, and the duration spent on them, can give you the knowledge you need to drill down into your presentation. Beef up the parts that attract the most interest, and rework the lagging pages.
If you want to implement smart marketing strategies, you’ll need the help of robust analytics information. Drilling down into the data on your content allows your team to refine its operations. With information about what customers truly want, you can make more compelling interactive presentations and boost your B2B sales.
Presentation Software Can Up Your B2B Sales
Presentations are a key component of any successful sales strategy, and the best presentations use the best software. An effective presentation software transforms your boring stack of slides into a visual feast, stringing together a story for your audience to follow. The modern presentation allows for—and welcomes—viewer engagement, knowing that customers want to be a part of their own buyer journey. Great software also provides the analytic data to crunch the numbers and plan your operations accordingly.
Ingage offers all these features and more. The game-changing cloud-based interface encourages collaboration like never before: between your team members, and also between you and your customers. Build a powerful presentation that draws in your viewers and puts them in the driver’s seat—the driver’s seat that leads right to your website.
Especially in this digital age, it’s important to make sure your business is operating at the forefront of technology. That means utilizing eCommerce platforms like Zobrist’s Smart Merchandiser and MobieCom to optimize your online store offering. But it also implements digital-first marketing strategies, using presentation software like Ingage. It’s a combination of smart presentation strategy and capable eCommerce solutions that will bring your sales to the next level. Stay ahead of the competition with the latest technology and attentive support. Check out Ingage and Zobrist and start optimizing your digital B2B channels today!
