I was told I was going to present the marketing campaign for the YouTube series we created.
Creating a presentation is not a linear process, at least for me it’s not.
While you are developing the project, you really don’t work in a linear way. You come up with the idea for the project, then bounce it off some colleagues, then make changes. Also, you don’t stop and document while you work on the project. That’s why creating a clear presentation can take time.
Luckily, I’m pretty versed with presentation, so here’s how I did it (took about three hours).
1. No outline, and thinking of an angle.
I know every writing tutorial starts with an outline. Fact it, I find it impossible to force my brain to come up with the entire scope of a presentation. I usually build the outline while reading, researching and writing the actual paragraphs.
Again, it’s messy, but the result is satisfactory usually.
Here’s what I mean by thinking of an angle. It’s kind of like building a story around the project. I am not making things up, but rather I am presenting the project and highlighting some features of the project in a way that makes it more interesting and captivating. I am recalling and looking back, thinking about the struggles that happened while trying to bring this campaign into ftruition.
In this case, it was a pilot of a video series. The BIG IDEA for the presentation would be to prove the statement: “Our BEST choice was to make a YouTube series.”
That was my angle, my big idea. If I could prove the aspirational statement, I knew my audience (+boss and CEO) would appreciate what I created.
2. Building a business case
The next step was to build a business case. Meaning, treat my company employees as if they were clients, and I had to pitch them this YouTube idea.
To build a business case, it’s a pretty straightforward task:
- Goal and challenge / problem – You show the goal of the company, and the challenge reaching that goal. In this case, the goal was organic traffic, and the challenge was the high competition on Google. I also had another idea of talking about the age of our users, which were in large part Gen Z. I am still deliberating whether it’s better to put the generation age in this challenge part, or later under opportunity. During this stage, I also do some research, while I’m in the weeds of the idea. So I collected some screenshots and articles that talked about the competition for Google ranking.
- Opportunity – Then I continued to present the opportunity. This again required me to get some stats about YouTube search volume, and how Gen Z prefer YouTube.
- Differentiation – Instead of showing the solution, which would fit a business meeting, it’s better to show differentiation of your campaign. Why is it different? The audience doesn’t really want you to present the project. They are not going to pay you. They want a show. For my YouTube series, I plan to show how we are going to differentiate it by using high end production, and by thinking of content that young people can relate to and actually use.
3. Results
When presenting a campaign, this is where you would often show the results it brought. However, since we still haven’t launched the series, I will share screenshots from the shoot, maybe a short video. I will also mention how we plan to evaluate if the campaign was a success. Success and failure metrics are important to prove you indeed asses the success of the project objectively, or aspiring to at least.
