How to Create an Effective Pitch Deck Design

It’s never easy getting a business up and running. Often, budding entrepreneurs will have to face a myriad of challenges early in the game.

Established competitors, facilities, staffing, pricing, logistics, and more, are things to worry about.

But for many start-ups that want to scale up fast, the biggest issue is securing investors. And the best way to get more investors is through an appealing pitch deck design.

Want to create a successful pitch deck but don’t know where to start? With Venngage templates, you can design a pitch deck easily without any experience.

Why is pitch deck design important?

An investor pitch deck needs to effectively present your business model to the audience. Seasoned investors encounter a lot of pitch decks per day.

They will only choose the ones worth their time, such as this pitch deck template from Sequoia Capital.

Your business’ future relies on a slide deck and a great presentation. That makes spending a little extra time creating the best pitch decks worthy of the effort.

There is a reason why pitch deck design is as important as the content. Because people are more stimulated by visuals than text.

Simple presentation slides won’t pique your audience’s interest. That is why you need to choose the right business pitch deck template for your investor presentation.

In this guide, we will show you how to create a winning slide deck design, like the Uber pitch deck that launched the successful car service.

Once you’ve customized the Venngage pitch deck templates for your brand, share them online or download them as a PNG, PDF, or export it for PowerPoint.

But before that, let’s outline what the various parts of a pitch deck design are.

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Essential parts of a pitch deck

What are the various parts of a pitch deck? Here they are!

1. Introduction. This is typically the first slide of a pitch deck and should be able to explain your business idea in the simplest way.

A good tip here is to draw attention to your unique value proposition (UVP), like in this Guy Kawasaki pitch deck example.

2. Problem statement. Every business opportunity arises from issues in the market. Highlight exactly what issue your business aims to solve.

3. Target market. Another important part of creating a pitch deck is defining your target market.

Successful pitch decks are designed with a specific audience in mind. That is why investors will take you seriously.

4. Solution. In the next few slides, share key points describing how your products or services help solve the problem of your target market.

In this marketing pitch deck example, the business has outlined the many ways they can help customers.

This is the part where investors will start determining whether your product has that golden opportunity factor going for it.

5. Traction. If your business is already in operation, you should share your sales and inventory figures in your pitch deck.

This allows you to be transparent with investors on how the business is doing in the marketplace. Include financial projections to prove why your company is worth investing in.

Get inspiration for the traction slides of your business PowerPoint presentation from this pitch deck design.

6. Marketing and sales strategy. How are you going to sell the product? How are you going to advertise it?

In other words, your pitch deck needs to demonstrate how you will reach the sales projections that you promised.

7. Competitors. Unless your business idea is very niche, you will have competitors.

Dedicate one section in your slide deck to highlight your top competitors and what market share they control in the industry.

You can see how this gradient pitch deck template includes two slides for competitive analysis.

8. Team structure. Pitch decks should include one slide for your current team structure, and projections for how it might change as the company scales up.

9. Funding needs. What makes a good pitch deck? Being transparent at every level with how much funding you need.

Look at how this pitch deck design uses a table infographic to list the company’s financials.

This is the best way for your investors to know that investing money in your company is a viable option.

10. Closing. The last slide is where you share the key takeaway of your presentation. Use bullet points to summarize your business pitch and drive the point home that your business is worthy of investment.

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6 steps for impactful pitch deck design

Ready to ace your pitch deck design? Here are our six top tips.

1. Write a great introduction

Without a strong introduction slide, your pitch deck could lose the audience’s attention.

The best pitch decks have a stunning introduction that keeps potential investors hooked. Look at how the Airbnb pitch deck template gets straight to the point.

When you’re trying to raise money for your company, give investors a reason to turn the pages of your pitch decks.

Make the first slide deck page attractive, noticeable, intriguing, and imaginative. Encourage people to go further by making your business plan stand out from the other pitch decks investors receive.

2. Remember color psychology

Color psychology is the general perception and feeling evoked when people see specific colors.

For example, red is said to give people a sense of urgency. Blue evokes feelings of calm and trust. Purple, like in this pitch deck template, is evocative of courage.

There are a dozen more examples of this. Whatever color scheme you choose, use it to your advantage in your pitch deck design.

But don’t go overboard with colors. Make sure your pitch deck templates include your brand identity.

This will lend your slide deck a sense of cohesiveness and structure that will impress seasoned investors.

With a Venngage business account, you can add your branding to all your designs with the click of a button.

Import your branding via the Autobrand feature and easily apply brand colors, logos and fonts to your templates.

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Picking Brand Fonts

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3. Use charts and graphs

Successful pitch decks present insightful data well. This data could be anything from inventory flow, market stats, sales figures, or financial projections.

This minimalist version of the Airbnb pitch deck uses simple data visualizations to share key points.

We know data presentations and numbers can get boring. What you need to do is spice those up with imaginative charts and graphs.

With Venngage, you can easily create charts and graphs to represent your data. Choose from hundreds of templates for line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, and more.

Import your data from Google Sheets or Excel, then customize your charts by adding icons, fonts, and images.

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4. Use crisp and sharp images

A picture really is worth a thousand words. To create the best pitch deck design, avoid using pixelated and blurry images.

If it isn’t possible to invest in a professional photographer, use the thousands of royalty-free stock photos available in the Venngage editor.

This startup pitch deck template uses high-quality visuals. The overall look is modern, professional, and exciting for investors.

Blurry photos will look bad in your pitch deck. They negatively impact your ability to secure venture capital for your company.

Imagine talking up your product as the next big thing, and when you present it in your pitch deck, the image looks awful.

Use crisp, sharp, and flattering images in your investor pitch deck. It will keep audience members engaged.

Related: Creating a Pitch Deck? 5 Ways to Design a Winner

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5. Add icons to pitch decks

Your pitch deck should be insightful, but it also should not be too wordy. You need to share key information more succinctly.

Enter icons. Icons can be used as a way to highlight a big idea in a more appealing manner.

You can see how this pitch deck template expertly uses icons to draw the eye and to highlight each key message.

These graphic elements also make it easier to shorten long sentences into bullet points. Plus, icons are a great tool to make your pitch deck layout look clean.

When you create a pitch deck using Venngage, you can access over 40,000 icons. That’s how we made a pitch deck design like this for our media kit.

Related: 15+ Creative People Infographics and Diverse Person Icons

6. Add legitimate testimonials

What makes a good pitch deck is relaying existing customers’ excitement over your product or service.

While the trajectory of your sales is the most important factor to determine customer satisfaction, adding things like testimonials can be an encouraging element to include in your pitch deck.

Share your business plan and model and dedicate some slides to legitimate testimonials from customers.

You can easily add more slides to this pitch deck template to showcase customer testimonials.

Choose the testimonials that best fit the problem that you presented in your investor pitch deck.

How did your product solve a customer problem? What other surprising ways did they use the product? Why are they recommending your company?

Customer testimonials are a valuable part of a winning pitch deck. They offer insights that even the company and potential investors may not anticipate. This is a great way to secure venture capital for your business.

Perfect your pitch deck design and impress your investors

Creating a pitch deck takes time, money, and skill. Use the tips shared in this guide to create a pitch deck design that will impress investors and partners.

And if you don’t know where to start, use one of the Venngage pitch deck templates we’ve shared here.