Whether you want to attract new consumers or convince investors to raise capital for your project, you need only one thing: demonstrate what you offer in the simplest and clearest way possible.
In the world of marketing and sales, clarity and simplicity in communication play a crucial role in capturing the attention and interest of a target audience. Simple and direct language facilitates the understanding of messages, allowing the brain to process information more quickly and effectively compared to more complex language.
This is because the human brain is designed to search for patterns and simplify the information it receives, making it easier to understand clear and concise messages.
When faced with simple language, our brain can quickly process the words and the meaning behind them, as it requires less cognitive effort. In contrast, when we encounter complex and difficult-to-understand language, the brain must work harder to break down the meaning and intention behind the words, which can result in slower and less efficient understanding.
This is why it is fundamental to adopt a simple and direct approach when it comes to communication, marketing, and sales strategies, and this is exactly what Airbnb did.
In this blog post, we will discuss the simplicity in Airbnb's pitch deck, highlighting the key elements that make it a classic example not only of best practices for presenting to investors, but also what any business owner can learn from this to promote their offer when it comes to increasing their sales and convincing their consumers to buy.
We will break down the presentation they made to their investors and decode the key elements that you can apply to your business:
1. Be brief: Just like sending a resume to a recruiter who reviews hundreds of them daily, your pitch deck should be concise and to the point. Airbnb's pitch deck has only 14 slides, secured $600k in funding, and catapulted the company to Unicorn status.
This illustrates the importance of being clear in your purpose and conveying your solution quickly and convincingly.
When we refer to conveying your offer in a simple way, we don't mean that it should be vague, but rather direct. The details can be discussed later when you manage to convert that customer or investor, leave that for the next stage, but remember that to take them to the next step, you have very little time and attention from them, so make the most out of it.
In this introduction stage, where you are presenting yourself to the public or potential investors, it is not necessary to spend energy presenting too many details that, although valuable, distract from the main idea.
2. Focus on one thing: A well-structured pitch deck, like a well-organized garden, makes it easy for investors or consumers to navigate through the crucial points.
Airbnb's pitch deck included the following elements on its slides:
Company name + logo (1 slide)
The problem (1 slide)
The solution (1 slide)
Product (1 slide)
The market (2 slides)
Business model (1 slide)
The team (1 slide)
Funding request and purpose (1 slide)
Each slide was designed to be direct, clear, and memorable, making it easy for investors to understand the company's proposal.
Note how the most important slides that explain the problem, solution, and market do not add up to more than 5 slides, in addition to having very brief text, these are the ones that contain the really essential information to influence the decision-making of investors.
The easier it is to understand and remember your offer, the easier it will be to convince your ideal customer of the benefit they can get through you. Nothing else matters in that first encounter with them.
3. Less is more: Although elaborate visuals serve to create certain sensations in viewers, using them in the wrong environment can generate confusion.
Each conversion stage has a purpose, and you don't have to include all the information about what you do and offer at once.
This distracts you from the main objective and causes the user to get lost in all the information to the point were they won't know exactly what you are offering them.
If they don't understand you, it's unlikely they will buy from you.
Airbnb's pitch deck has little text, simple graphics, and some images of its app interface that anyone can easily make (even you).
Save elaborate graphics for a specific campaign, collaboration with other brands, or photographic resources that you can use at a different conversion stage and at key moments.
4. Mention the problem you solve, always: Not your years in the market, not how big your company is, not that you have the best workers, do not present any of that in the first instance.
In Airbnb's case, presenting the problem and the solution proved to be the factor with the greatest weight in the decision-making process, in addition to the benefit and profits that investors could obtain, of course.
This point not only applies to convincing investors, who are at a higher level of risk due to the amount of capital, but also to the regular consumer.
When you manage to express the problem your customers have, the way in which you can solve it with your product or service to improve their lives in addition with the benefit they can obtain, the price is no longer a priority.
Start that first contact by talking about what you can do for them and the enormous benefits they can get. If the price is among those benefits, make sure to mention it in a second contact with them, once you have convinced them that you offer so much value for them to the point of not being able to say no regardless of the price.
This is the key to the whole process: Sales, summed up to their simplest expression, are based on constantly spreading the solution you offer to a real problem.
The next time you want to create content for social media or write a content piece for an email campaign, do the following:
Focus on promoting the benefits of your product or service
Use clear and simple language
Maintain a single focus
Highlight the problem to be solved
Use simple graphics that do not distract the reader from the information that truly matters
Repeat your offer as many times as necessary following these steps
Once you have this base more than clear, you can build successful marketing and communication strategies, where the approach is always the same: problem-solution with simple language.
That's how you convert.