Imagine if each person in your audience received a customized presentation just for them based on their needs and interests.
That’s right: a custom presentation. Just for them. If you can’t imagine it, that’s because it sounds impossible—but not by using DataPoint’s PowerPoint mail merge feature.
How Customized Presentations are Created
Creating customized presentations is easier than you think!
First, you need to connect your data to the text boxes, images, charts, infographics, etc in PowerPoint. You can do that with DataPoint Enterprise Edition by connecting to any of the thousands of data sources we support.
Then use our Snapshot Save-as command to create 100s or thousands of customized presentations in PowerPoint, slide show, pdf, or video format. You’ll love the versatility of this feature!
Use Cases for Customized Presentations
So now that we have shown you that customized presentations are possible, what are the use cases? What powerful things can these presentations do for your organization that traditional static presentations can’t?
Here are a few examples.
#1: Create a Connection – Use Their Name
Dale Carnegie once said, “A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.”
And it’s true—studies have shown that parts of our brain light up when we hear our own name. It gives us a sense of familiarity and connection, and it’s something we can’t help but respond to positively.
That’s why we think it’s so important to use your customers’ names in your messaging! It might feel weird at first, but it will make them feel heard and appreciated, especially when you couple their name with a presentation created just for them.
#2: Customized Pitch Decks
A pitch deck is usually a presentation that’s created to convince someone to invest in your company’s product or service. It can be used to help you attract investors (like VC firms).
The more closely your pitch deck presentation matches the types of startups the venture capital firm is looking for, the better your chances of achieving your funding.
You can collect data on venture capital firms, then create a base presentation that can be automatically customized based on the preferences of the venture capital firms. You can do this by identifying topics that are important to their investment strategy and then adding them to your base presentation.
For example, if one VC firm likes investing in companies that emphasize diversity, your presentation could highlight the diversity of your founders and team members. Other areas of customization might include how well you connect with industries the VC firm has had success with, or similarities between your company and companies the VC firm has funded in the past.
#3: Customized Presentations by Target Audience
I was invited to speak, along with some other professionals, at a conference hosted by a tourism organization that brought in a wide range of businesses related to tourism such as hotels, kayaking tours, whale watching tours, restaurants, etc.
The tourism organization brought together a number of speakers on topics relating to running a tourism business. The topics included human resources, cross-promotion, marketing, and Internet marketing – the topic I spoke on.
While I wasn’t there for the whole conference, I did hear a couple of the other speakers and they seemed interesting and professional.
At the end of the conference, the organizer came up to me and said that they really appreciated that my topic “Internet Marketing for Tourism” was a customized presentation specifically for tourism. Apparently, all the other speakers used “canned” generic presentations that were not tourism-specific whereas all my examples were specifically tourism ones.
This surprised me as I have always adapted my presentations for the audience I would be speaking to.
Using DataPoint Enterprise, you can start with a generic presentation and easily add examples and ideas for each different industry, then create a customized presentation for each audience based on their industry.
#4: Customized Resumes
Your resume is one of the most important documents in your career. It’s how you get an interview, and it’s how you can win over an employer’s heart and get a job.
But sometimes it can be hard to know what to put on that resume and how to make it stand out.
One way to make sure your resume is truly unique to you is by creating a customized PowerPoint presentation for it! With PowerPoint can submit your resume in so many formats such as an animated slideshow, video, or pdf. But each employer is looking for something different. So you can customize your resume/presentation based on industries, job titles, etc.
Instead of a standard, boring employment-history resume, you can submit a skills-focused resume that highlights the exact skills and experience that the employer is looking for.
#5: Customized Proposals
When you’re looking to close a deal, it helps to have a proposal that is customized for your client.
You can start with a standard template of what is included in most projects, then customize the proposal by adding such modules as:
- customer logo
- company name and contact name
- highlighting their personalized needs
- pricing options
- quoting in their own country’s currency
- showing only the products that fit their needs
- customized pricing
When you make proposals specific to your clients, they feel like you truly understand their situation. This makes them more likely to accept your offer and work with you.
#6: Certificate/Award Generation
You know how important it is to get an award ceremony just right. You want your graduates to feel special and appreciated, and you want to make sure everyone who’s in attendance has a keepsake from the night that they can hang on their wall or put in their scrapbooks.
At DataPoint, we’ve helped thousands of people make this happen. We’ve helped them create certificates for graduations, award ceremonies, and more. And our favorite way to do this is with our PowerPoint mail merge feature.
The feature lets you create hundreds of certificates—or awards—in just a few minutes by using a template and using mail merge to enter information like names and dates into each certificate before creating individual certificates for all of your guests.
These awards or certificates can be printed or shown on digital signage screens during your awards ceremony.
#7: Country/Language/Currency
If you’ve been trying to reach your customers online and you’re only speaking English, then you’re missing out on 74.1% of them!
That’s because English is the most common language online, but still only represents 25.9% of Internet users.
If you want to make sure you’re reaching as many people as possible, then we’ve got a solution for you: You can now customize your presentations for any language or country! And you can even adapt your messaging to local culture so that what you say is something that people really want to hear.
And remember: people appreciate proposals priced in their local currency so they don’t have to convert all the time—so if they see a price tag in euros or pesos or rupees, they’ll better understand the pricing and feel like they’re getting a better deal than if they see a price tag in US dollars.
#8: Performance Reviews
Performance reviews are critical to providing feedback to employees, identifying training needs, and supporting their career development.
Here is an example we put together to create personalized 360° employee performance reviews. This process helps us provide individualized feedback based on each employee’s strengths and areas for improvement.
Here’s how it works: First, we conduct an anonymous online survey with peers who work closely with the employee in question. We ask them about their professional skills and behaviors—things like leadership ability, ability to take initiative, or willingness to help others. Then we compile all of this information into a video that shows how each employee does in these areas compared to their peers’ ratings.
We use videos because it’s easier than reading through a long document full of feedback from peers! Plus, it makes it easy for employees who don’t have time for a lengthy review session during work hours (or who just aren’t comfortable talking about themselves) because they can watch at home at their own pace.
It also makes it easy for managers who want an easy way to distribute these videos across teams so everyone knows what’s expected in terms of behavior and skills from everyone.
Our partner, Design Agility, has also created some incredible PowerPoint infographics using mail merge that show employees’ technology and training needs in a way that’s both visually appealing and easy to understand.
#9: Political Campaigns
Whether you are running for political office at the municipal, state/provincial, or federal level, telling your story to voters and addressing their needs is critical.
When it comes to running for office, you need to do more than just knock on doors and make phone calls. You need to connect with voters, and that’s where mail merge comes in.
Mail merge is an easy way to send personalized messages with campaign material to every voter who you have contact information for. This could be an email, a video, a slideshow, or even a pdf file, depending on what your message is.
The first step would be to conduct a poll among voters to determine their key issues. You can then use that data to create messages for each issue, outlining your platform and explaining why you’re the best candidate for the job.
With mail merge technology at your disposal, you can send a customized video, pdf, or slideshow file to EVERY voter in your district in no time at all. That will help get them excited about voting for YOU!
For a more detailed “how-to” for this feature, view our Voter Turnout video/article.
Questions About Customized Presentations?
If you have questions about customized presentations and how they could help your organizations, reach out and our support team would be happy to help.
