10 Food Brand Retail Deck Tips 👍

10 Tips to Make a Compelling Retail Deck for Your Food Brand

We’re here to talk about a subject we’ve written about a few times: your retail pitch deck. If you want to make a compelling case for retail brands to carry your products, you need an excellent brand retail deck. This will often be responsible for not only forming first impressions of your brand – but also persuading retailers to start carrying your product.

So how do you make an effective one?

The Best 🙌 Food Brand Retail Deck Tips

These are some of the best tips for creating a better food brand retail deck:

1. Hire pros. Making a retail deck on your own, with PowerPoint and a few hours of dedicated time, is possible. But it’s much better to hire a team of professionals. For example, graphic designers, copywriters, and marketing strategists have much more experience in their respective fields and can collaborate to make your pitch deck look polished and professional. The end result is going to be a presentation that’s much more impressive and memorable.
2. Tell a story. Effective storytelling is persuasive, as humans are naturally drawn to stories. Accordingly, it would be best to have a narrative running throughout your piece and smaller stories throughout your work to serve as illustrative examples. For example, explaining how your product on store shelves could be rewarding to new shoppers is potentially effective. However, it’s typically much more effective to tell a story about how an individual could be affected by it.
3. Provide an immediate hook. The first few slides are arguably the most critical section of your retail deck. It would be best if you gave your audience a quick hook – or else their attention will dwindle. Grab their attention with a compelling statistic, an unconventional opening, or a shocking statement. Once you have their attention, making your case will be much easier.
4. Know your audience—and play to them. For the most part, you shouldn’t use the same copied pitch deck for every presentation. Instead, you should adjust your presentation to your specific audience. How do these people think? What are their biggest goals? What’s going to be persuasive to them? Even minor adjustments can make your deck more appropriate for your target audience.
5. Display the best photos you have. As a food brand, descriptions of flavor and numerical statistics aren’t nearly as important as the sensory experience of interacting with your product. You can bring samples for your audience to eat and enjoy, but in the context of your pitch deck, you must display the best photos of your food product. Make it look as delicious and appealing as possible throughout your presentation.
6. Organize your work logically. Make sure your deck is organized logically. It would be best to have a solid beginning that captures attention, various middle components that explore many facets of your ideal arrangement, and an ending that summarizes everything.
7. Push the numbers. Numerical information tends to be more persuasive than other types of information – and altering your presentation of those numbers can make them even more convincing. For example, don’t just say that lots of people are putting mustard on their food; the state that 40 million people in the United States prefer mustard to other condiments. Likewise, don’t just say that your product is flying off store shelves; show off your average revenue per store.
8. Prove your value. Beyond the numbers, you need to prove your value to your audience. Why should these people put your item on their shelves? In other words, what’s in it for them? You need to have a clear list of benefits to be persuasive.
9. Make your audience fall in love with your brand. Your brand is at the heart of your retail deck, so you must ensure your audience falls in love with your brand. After all, if you can’t get these people to fall in love with your brand with a full pitch deck, it’s going to be hard to do the same to a retail shopper who might only see your brand at a glance. So instead, show off what makes this brand competitively differentiated and demonstrate its best qualities.
10. Treat this like a partnership. Creating your pitch deck as a straightforward sales piece is tempting, and you’re trying to persuade your audience to buy from you. But you shouldn’t present this as a straightforward sales deal; you should present this as a true partnership. All the content of your retail deck should be aligned with the idea that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement. This is valuable not just for you, but also for your future retail partner. More than that, you will collaborate for the long term.

Preparing for Your Presentation

You’ve got the retail deck in place. Now it’s time to present it.

As you make preparations for your presentation, keep the following in mind:

• Be prepared for tough questions. The bulk of your pitch deck presentation will be one-sided; you will present all the details to your audience, and they will listen. But after that, you’re going to be asked questions. So you need to be prepared for the most challenging questions this audience can come up with; if you’re caught off guard, it could undermine your perceived authority and jeopardize the deal.
• Practice—but don’t become a robot. Practice with your pitch deck, so you know it inside and out. But it’s important not to rehearse so much that you end up sounding robotic. Good pitch deck presentations are fluid and natural.
• Make the presentation as interactive as possible. Nobody likes to sit through a slideshow presentation where the presenter reads off the text of each slide. Strive to make your presentation as interactive as possible, ad-libbing where appropriate and keeping your audience engaged.

Creating a retail deck is challenging. But you don’t have to do it alone. With the help of seasoned food and beverage marketing experts, you can discover what you need to tell a compelling story – and tell it well. 

That’s why NewPoint Marketing is here – to help you achieve all your sales and marketing goals. So contact us for a free consultation today!