Creative Agency Pitch Deck – What Is It & How To Make One

Are you a part of a creative agency and looking to find the best practices for making an impressive, client-winning pitch deck? Today, we will go through the topic and provide super valuable tips you should know about making a successful pitch deck.

We will answer questions like what a creative agency is and what a creative agency pitch deck is. We’ll explain all kinds of information you must include in there, and why every bit of it is essential in order to turn your prospects into real clients. Wanna begin? Let’s do it!

What is a creative agency and what is its role?

Want to learn more about the organizational structure of a creative agency?

Running a creative agency suggests your team and you have one super important quality – creativity. Well, the pitch deck is the first place where your creativity can shine.

What is a creative agency pitch deck?

Is a pitch deck really worth the effort?

Taking into consideration that you will have to invest time, resources, and efforts into making a creative agency pitch deck, is the investment really worth it? You can find out the answer to this question on your own by giving an answer to the following question.

Highly doubtful. So, how do you achieve a successful and persuasive pitch deck? The key is personalization.

Personalize your creative agency pitch deck according to what your prospects want to hear/read/see. Just like you are going to personalize your marketing initiatives and strategies later on based on your client’s target audience’s interests, preferences, triggers, and pains.

In fact, think of the pitch deck as the first strategic marketing campaign you are making for this particular client.

And if all of this already sounds quite complicated and overwhelming, relax. It’s actually pretty achievable. What we are going to do now is break it into points (types of content) your potential client really wants to see in your pitch deck.

How to make a successful creative agency pitch deck?

While you need to keep the pitch deck short and concise (about 10-15 slides long), it’s pretty important to include only the essential information inside that can help convert your potential client into an actual one. Your purpose is to impress, not bore your future partner.

But until you get to the part where you can put all content together, you have even more important work to do. Let’s examine how the process goes.

1. Get to know your client

We’ve already mentioned that personalization is a key factor in winning your potential client’s attention and trust. Your first task would be to understand your prospect’s specific needs, as well as identify their problems, weaknesses, and strengths.

In order to do this, you will have to arrange a meeting with your potential client where to ask questions and analyze the answers. This is a very important process called “a discovery session”.

The key to being successful with your pitch deck depends on what you learn during this discovery session. It will give you insight into what their struggles and goals are, so you can, later on, offer creative and adequate solutions, strategies, and approaches that address their particular problems and goals.

Ok. So, what to ask?

Who are they?

Simple enough. Ask your potential client to tell you the story of their brand. For how long have they been in the business? What did inspire them to launch their company in the first place? What is their mission? How many people is their team? Who makes the important decisions? What are their company values? The goal is to understand who these people really are and think about what they might want to hear from you.

What services or products do they provide?

And even more. Learn what problems their services/products solve. This information is key for understanding and building the profile of their own target audiences. Since you will be potentially making campaigns and initiatives targeted toward these audiences in the future, you will want to know every little detail possible. This will help you put on a pitch deck that demonstrates your understanding and proves your capabilities to appeal to these audiences effectively.

What are their challenges in the business?

The challenges any business faces can tell you a lot about its weaknesses and strengths. Identifying their weaknesses and strengths is essential for running successful marketing campaigns for them later on. All your future initiatives should be focused on the particular brand’s strong sides.

A major help in identifying these factors is examining their current and past campaigns, along with understanding the struggles and preferences of their target audiences and identifying the key selling point of the products or services they provide.

Beyond that, ask practical questions about their past and current marketing activities, efforts, results, and expenses. What has worked and what hasn’t? What do they want to achieve and how have they tried to achieve it so far? This will give you an idea of what you can suggest as an improvement that resonates with their brand philosophy and will lead to more satisfying results.

What is their budget?

Learning about your client’s budget capabilities for marketing activities will help you get an idea if you can come up with a strategic growth plan for this company that fits within this budget. Even more, when presenting your pitch deck, you will have to provide estimates of how much each service will cost – one-time payments or monthly payments. So, the budget is definitely an important subject to discuss.

Of course, all expenses depend on the scope and complexity of the services that your prospect needs. They may want you to take over all their marketing activities across all mediums and channels for a long period of time. Or, just perform a one-time campaign with a certain deadline to generate specific results.

It will be pretty useful if they share how much time and money they spend on their current campaigns, so you can suggest a more effective and result-yielding plan. Understand if there will be related costs. Such would be having to create a landing page that corresponds to a certain campaign, banners and social media assets that will be necessary for advertisements, website updates on design and functionality, and any third-party expenses (e.g. hiring a photographer, hiring a web developer), and more.

When would they like you to start? Will this be a long-term commitment?

Learning your potential client’s intentions will help you plan your time, resources, and priorities more efficiently. Is this going to be a long-term commitment that will be worth returning a bigger investment? Is it going to be a one-time task that won’t require so much time and effort on your side?

Either way, the answers to all of these questions will help you determine how your agency will fit in the picture. And if you really want to win this client over, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and think about what kind of information (visual and written) to put together, so you can persuade this prospect to choose your creative agency over the competitors.

2. Tailor your pitch deck to the specific needs of your potential client

Remember telling you that your creative agency pitch deck would be the first place where your creativity really shines? Well, this is it! At this step here, you can put in all the creativity you have mixed with the exact key information your client subconsciously wants to read in order to seal the deal. The idea is to show what you are capable of but tailored to your specific client needs, requirements, and preferences.

You can adjust both the visual and written parts in such ways that they look most appealing to your particular prospect. For example, use a tone of voice that is the closest to your client’s. Use colors and visual elements that are the closest to your prospect’s style. For example, clean and formal for a corporate prospect or easy-going and colorful, with a friendly tone for fun-and-leisure businesses. You should have already “grasped” the style of communicating with the particular client during the first discovery stage.

Tailoring also refers to suggesting the most suitable advertising mediums and channels for their business. And also – optimizing costs according to their budget. When you give a tailored costs-and-results prognosis, you set the correct expectations from the very beginning. For sure, nobody expects from you exact numbers. Presenting each expense within a small price range will look credible and professional enough.

To sum it up here, your creative agency pitch deck should tell about your own agency’s capabilities while it is written and designed through the prism of your client’s needs. It should tell them a story of how they achieve their goals with you being the hero that leads them all the way through.

3. Make it personal – introduce your agency and your team

Given objective reasons for rejecting an offer aside, it’s harder to say “No” to an actual face that you like. This is 100% valid for doing business, too. The highly subjective human factor can sometimes play the deciding role, especially if you are competing with an agency that presents a similar offer to yours.

So, one of the purposes to tell your agency’s story and introduce your agency’s team is for them to simply like you! Another plus for your potential client is that they will have the opportunity to learn the exact expertise of your team members. This will definitely win you points for credibility and trustworthiness among other agencies that are pitching for the same client.

4. Present your actual strategies and solutions

No matter how charming your team is, your potential client is going through your pitch deck for this information here. The actual strategies and approaches you are going to present. Your prospect will want to see actual numbers, as well as your commitment, a real understanding of their struggles and needs, and a working solution that looks plausible. We won’t be teaching you how to do your own business here. Just make sure to show that you know your stuff.

And be as specific and straight to the point as possible. Your potential client wants to see real work here – a plan and solution that are genuinely prepared according to their needs and requirements. Provide cost breakdowns to convey transparency. Provide expected results and estimated ROI. Show actual numbers in order to look credible and trustworthy. Your client needs to get the feeling that their money and business are in good hands once they choose you to lead their campaigns.

One more important note here. Ask yourself: If your client is to receive several other similar offers to yours, why would they choose you over the competitors? What makes your proposition better? What is the selling point you will highlight?

5. Provide proof of work quality and results

Giving realistic numbers of results and ROI looks professional and reliable. But your prospects want to see actual proof of your ability to deliver such numbers for them.

Here, it’s the perfect time to show past accomplishments — previous work that is the closest in nature to what you are presenting right now. It may even be enough to show one case study, as long as it is relevant to your prospect’s situation, industry, or struggles that have later been solved.

There is one more benefit of presenting real case studies of clients that can be independently found and researched. The prospect learns that you can be trusted with sensitive information like access to their accounts. Even more, they learn that your proposition is backed up with actual skills that you have applied in the past.

6. Make the pitch deck visually appealing

We live in the digital era where visual content is king. Love it or not, the visual part of your creative agency pitch deck plays a huge role in whether your proposition will be considered or not.

No matter if you choose Keynote, PowerPoint or another similar app, a professionally designed pitch deck will make you look like a reliable future partner. More images, charts, and conceptual illustrations will make your content pleasant to browse and easily digestible.

And while you shouldn’t go crazy with your presentation’s length (about 10-15 slides is the optimal size), the same applies to using text within the slides. Use key information and short sentences that will help your prospect grasp the essential stuff. This can help them make an informed decision without being overwhelmed with unnecessary details. Leave the chit-chat for later on.

The actual design style of your pitch deck should also be created according to who you are presenting to. Use color palettes and visual elements that are harmonious with your prospect’s brand tone and culture.

7. Finish with a call to action

There is one more reason to put just key points in your presentation and not full-width explanations. This leaves an open door for your prospect to contact you in order to discuss details.

Make sure the closing slide of your pitch deck feels like an invitation for your prospect to get in touch. Make sure you look approachable and easy to find. Leave several contact details across the most popular communication channels like a phone, an e-mail, a website, and social media profiles. And yep, make them clickable.

It’s a usual practice for agencies to close their pitch deck with a “Thank you”. While being thankful is a sign of respect for the time the other’s person has taken in order to read your presentation until the end, it does feels a little “too” closing. Your purpose is to start a partnership here.

After thanking, use a simple question to prompt a conversation. This could be: “Are you ready to discuss the plan for your success in detail?” or “We’d love to hear what you’re thinking of this offer. Ready to drop us a line with the questions that have popped into your head?”.

To summarize,

A creative agency pitch deck is not just a presentation. It is a powerful marketing tool that can win you real clients and help you increase your own profits. When you set aside enough time to personalize each pitch deck with the right information and visual content tailored to each specific prospect, your own ROI will have the potential to double if not triple. At the end of the day, if you have the skills and capacity to help other people achieve their goals, but don’t have the skill to sell yourself, you will hardly succeed in the business for long.

We hope this guide helped you with useful ideas on how to improve your pitch deck and gave you insights into where your weak points may be. For sure, making a five-star pitch deck won’t happen in a day. And while it takes practice, every failure or rejection requires careful analysis of what might have gone wrong, so you can stray from these same mistakes in the future.

Feeling motivated and inspired to roll up your sleeves? Awesome. In case you need a web development partner for your current and future projects, here at htmlBurger, we are more than glad to discuss your needs. Wanna talk?

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