This week, B2B marketing expert Emily Kramer shares why early-stage founders need to ditch the VC-speak — and how to write effective copy for customers.
Don’t Ship Your Pitch Deck to Your Website. Here’s How to Translate Your Story for Customers
Emily Kramer has noticed that founders have a bad habit. As a marketing advisor to dozens of early-stage startups, she’s reviewed too many websites that sound an awful lot like the founders’ pitch deck.
It’s understandable to want to squeeze as much marketing juice out of your pitch deck as possible. It’s one of the first communication assets you craft as a founder. You probably spent north of one hundred hours perfecting it.
But customers don’t care how you got funding. “A great pitch deck makes for an ineffective website. It also makes terrible outbound copy,” says Kramer. “You can’t copy-paste that deck to your homepage because your prospects likely aren’t VCs. And even if they are, VCs look for very different things in software than they do investments.”
On The Review, Kramer unpacks her framework for creating effective early marketing messaging. She then walks through how to adapt your pitch deck into copy for your website — slide by slide. Good news, founders: You can do this yourself, without a marketing hire.
Here’s a preview:
- The problem slide → Your homepage hero: In a pitch deck, you use the problem slide to to convince investors why what you’re building matters and show what you’re building in the medium term. But customers only care about what your product can help them do today.
- Vision & why now slide → “About” page: This slide is designed to inspire belief in a big future and show why this moment is the right time to build. In your marketing messaging, this story is an opportunity to tie your product to a broader movement or emerging shift customers want to be part of. But this messaging shouldn’t be front and center on your homepage.
- Competition slide → Product page: Acknowledging your competitors in a pitch deck shows your awareness of the landscape and how you’re different. On your website, you can highlight your differentiators, but only mention competitors where necessary. Kramer recommends using comparison pages, customer stories on switching products and sales-specific content (like battle cards) to get precise on how you stack up against a single competitor.
“A pitch deck is a great forcing function to think about your story and start compiling assets that will be useful in marketing. But you need to take a few extra steps to make it ready for prospects and customers,” says Kramer.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors