For six years in Dubai, I specialised in producing content for the hospitality, travel, lifestyle and F&B sectors. In 2019 alone we produced nearly 1,800 videos, showcasing the best of hotels, places of interest, outlets, destinations and experiences the UAE, Hong Kong, Australia and South Africa had to offer.
It is proclaimed audiences do not want to be sold to these days, and whilst I agree, there is always an element of promotion for gain. We love what we do, and our testimonials speak for ourselves, if you would like to discuss how we can tell your story and generate you an ROI through content and promotion, please do book a meeting with me.
“Don’t spend without investing”
Strong content is key to powerful messaging
It’s all very well having a library of content, but unless (thanks to the algorithms) you have budget, or a tremendously engaged audience, your content won’t get seen.
Consider collaborating in the videos with likeminded, synergetic brands to share each other’s audiences, divide the costs (potentially), and add breadth to your reach – but note the script of your video will need to be equally weighted (if splitting the production spend), so co-write your script to ensure all brand collaborators benefit.
I’m happy to support you with your next campaign, get in touch.
When building a pitch deck you need to ensure you are delivering your business, your values, brand and of course the detail.
You’ll find yourselves having multiple versions of your pitch deck, the three decks I keep in my data room are:
One page summary
Pitch Deck (10-12 slides)
Detailed pitch deck (40-50 slides)
You will also (unfortunately) be told by each investor for an iteration, yet, this is very subjective and can lead you onto a path of investing time where it may not avail tremendous return, so include a structured document as an addendum, with FAQs testimonials, exit strategy and other requests.
If you deliver your story well, and can demonstrate you have the best team to deliver you business to the market, this definitive list will help you structure a pitch deck, which, along with your narrative will explain everything they’ll need to buy into you.
Please note, I don’t recommend sending your pitch deck when asked for it – that’s what the one pager is for. Both parties (if interested) should offer each other their time to learn more.
The title slide
The title slide is critical because it sets the tone for your entire presentation and provides the first impression of your business. The “title” slide is an obvious but impactful template to use for this one because it is clean, looks professional, and allows you to include essential information like your company’s name and contact information.
Example Title Slide – big visuals
The problem/opportunity slide
Every business should solve a problem or improve customers’ lives in some way. Use this slide to clearly state the problem and how your business works to fix it. You can provide statistics with Beautiful.ai’s data slide or employ the numbered list or bulleted list slide to highlight all the issues that your business exists to fix. You could also use the image slide to tell the story of how your business came to be in a visually dynamic way.
There may be a problem your investors weren’t aware of – Get it across!
The value proposition
It is a no-brainer that you should discuss the value of your business, but common startup pitch decks overlook it! Don’t skip it. Ask yourself: What customer pain points do you fix? How do you serve your customers? What makes your business different? Use this slide to tell investors exactly why they should invest. The simplicity of our headline slide gives you the freedom to clearly state your value proposition, without crowding the slide with too much information. Want to make it visual? Add an impactful image or chart to the slide.
Ensure you present your value proposition clearly
The underlying magic / Secret Sauce
The investors know your unique value proposition by now, but what’s the real special sauce? What can only your team bring to life? To really score here, avoid over-relying on text. Instead, use this opportunity to show what you can do. An optional video slide taking the audience through your process works well here, as does a flowchart slide or a prototype, mockup, or demo.
Offer visuals of your product or service
Business model
So, what is your plan? Any investor will want to know. Use a data slide, funnel slide, target slide, or hub and spoke slide to show your audience the different stages of your plan in a visually appealing way. You can also use a table slide or waterfall chart slide to demonstrate projected results and value over time.
Use this example to demonstrate you know your business
Go-to market plan
It is essential to tell investors how you plan to attract new customers, as well as compete in your space. How will you launch your product or offering and start selling it? This shows your investors you know how to make this thing work, so use the right slide to showcase it. You can use the hub and spoke slide or process diagram slide to demonstrate the different elements of your strategy.
A strategy depends on focus – there are many routes, but demonstrate one you are focused on now – it will evolve!
Competitive analysis
Let your audience know that you get what the competition is doing. Use an XY plot, line chart or area chart slide to identify your performance patterns compared to those of your competitors. This is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your achievements by highlighting companies that have had the pleasure of working with you using a logo grid slide. Don’t be afraid of comparing your self to others!
Be respectful to your competition, be thorough with your analysis, underestimating competition will be torn apart by investors, it’ll also show you’ve done your research and the value of the market
Management team
Potential investors want to know about the key players on your team. Use the team slide or about us slide to help them understand your biggest asset: your people.
Your business will change (pivot) considerably from your initial plans, yet your team will (or should) evolve with you. So ensure you demonstrate you have the best, committed team to deliver on your objectives.
Financial projections and key metrics
Be upfront: What would potential investors be getting into if they invested? Hone in on a three-year, bottom-up focused forecast. Use the data comparison slide or area chart slide to demonstrate and discuss your projected growth over the years.
A top line summary will indicate you’ve done your research. A detailed set of financials should be available in your dataroom
Current status, accomplishments, timeline, and use of funds
The future is important, but so is the present. Use this slide to address your current business situation, what the immediate future holds, and your plans for any capital raised right now. The timeline or process slides can help you effectively communicate exciting next steps for your business. This is also a slide where you need to really think about how to condense information into what’s most important.
Keep it clean, demonstrate your focus and be proud of your achievements. If you’ve raised before, showcase what you’ve achieved with the capital
Your investors will be at the tail-end of their 20-minute presentation, and you want to make sure you go out with a bang.
These images are for reference of layout, I’d advise to use a branding expert to ensure consistency (it’s one of the best investments you’ll make), do you align with or below your peers?
I’ve built hundreds of pitch decks over the years, if you’re struggling and need an expert, reach out. What I can do in a few days may take others weeks.
A question we’ve all been asking ourselves over the years. I’m Adam Ridgway, a multi-award-winning entrepreneur with a varied background. From building a successful events company whilst at school, to a Media group and currently an EV scale-up. With nine personal ventures and seven external investments under my belt, I have garnered wisdom and experience throughout my career. Now it’s for me to give back.
During my journey I’ve raised and secured finance in excess of $190million as well as successfully exiting four companies (acquisition).
In addition to my own ventures, I offer advice to other startups so they don’t make costly mistakes. It all started back in high school when I noticed that some students didn’t want to do their homework while others were more than happy to help out for a fee. Ever since then, I’ve been passionate about building deals and relationships – companies built on trust and experiences – not just technology. So if you’re looking for someone who might just be able to help you in your business decision making, get in touch.
As a sustainabilist, a father, speaker and entrepreneur driven by purpose. My journey started in Europe where I was in the media industry for 10 years. After that, I moved to the UAE where I managed a portfolio of start-up companies and built five companies over 17 years.
I’m currently the founder and CEO of ONE MOTO – an award-winning EV ecosystem focused on changing the way we move. I specialise in sustainable product development, tech-driven vehicles and delivering future mobility solutions to everyday commuters and logistics sector.
I’m also a speaker on Future and Smart Mobility, as well as a mentor for aspiring dreamers, doers and innovators looking to make their mark in the world. My aim is to inspire others to bring change, take calculated risks and make inexpensive mistakes.
I believe stories have the power to bring people together and create real change. My goal is to find ways to use stories to share powerful messages that can inspire others and motivate them to take action. That’s why I’m passionate about creating purpose-driven ideas that make a lasting impact.
As you’re here, you must be in a position to want some questions answered?! Well, I’m glad. I’ve created the One Founder To Another platform as a way of giving back to the start up and business community and there’s a wealth of wisdom in my blogs. It isn’t always easy, and surrounding yourself with great people, helps a great deal!
This is an overview of what I spent many years busy with, building an organisation of four businesses supporting multinational clients and hundreds of start ups. Engaging millions and refreshing brands through the psychology of the consumer environment.
You may have seen some of the commercials on TV, web, or shoots in magazines, social or even supermarkets, but may not know how we do it.
The Show.
Your customers have micro-particles of time to understand your message, and for them to decide if they need it. It’s obvious, however, multi-targeting your message and key times will help convert leads.
A similar message can be broadcast several times (depending upon your offer), to engage with the customers at a time they need it.
The Tell.
I am an experienced story teller working with some incredible brands with great stories. It’s not all about marketing these, most of the time highlighting the benefits through PR are far more powerful.
The Game.
Self-proclaimed experts vs. Industry professionals. Customer psychologists vs. Customers.
As an industry professional working with customers to build brands and content worth watching, delivering engagement and brand loyalty. The magic may come from the edit suite, when all the hard work is professionally mastered to offer a compelling visual experience, however, to achieve this, there must be time invested in pre-production. This is where the story is written the shots are decided, the script is born and the message to be communicated is crafted.
New SEO.
It took me several few years to really master SEO, and to fully understand the best methods. My approach is unlike others – I educate our customers as to what it is and how it will help here’s my advice. Videos for your business will help dramatically when customers are reviewing which company to work with, purchase from or buy in to.
Label your content thoroughly, whether it be blogs, video, images you want to be found, creating content without the correct labelling voids it of purpose, if you are having your website designed by a third party supplier, ensure they are correctly labelling your content or even better, invest your time to ensure this is done how you need it. You never want to see ‘image.png’ as a label.
Can I help?
If you’re looking for advice on how to create a great content and brand strategy, get in touch and we can work through it together.
Do it correctly, then it will substantially increase your business across many touch points, especially ROI. However, doing it incorrectly or ‘quick fix’ won’t help at all and has fatally damaged many businesses. I understand SEO and do it well. I build brands and I do that well. This blog isn’t the sole salvation to a business, and I’ll explain a few things that drive businesses. In this article, I aim to quash the uncertainties of what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is, the different forms of SEO, techniques and help you clearly identify what online services you need to generate revenue.
Over the years, my previous company built over 170 brands, produced in excess of 8,000 videos and we design very much for an online world (65% of our business), yet 100% of brands need to have an online presence. So by having a great brand, effective and efficient product or service you need your customers to know about it. This is where our SEO services come in. We were creative psychologists (coined by us circa 2009) and some of the team – proudly including myself – are geeks for ways to improve our customer’s presence, both on and offline. This article will explain clearly what SEO is, how we can help and will not baffle you with tech-terminology.
SEO will help, it takes time and needs commitment
The better optimised your site is for search engines like Google, the more likely your website will be to stand out and rank on the first in SERP (Search Engine Result Page) for keywords and phrases relevant to your business or product/service offering.
If you set up SEO for your site many years ago, saddle up, as this should be an affordable ongoing exercise to keep you pushing forward. Why ongoing? In the past XX years (since your website was built) you’ve had hundreds more competitors reach the market, thousands more ‘up-to-date’ websites, millions more content being added, and billions more search terms. Are yours optimised right now?
What is SEO?
In Search Engine Optimisation, SEO is the process of improving your business’ reach and visibility to increase quality traffic to your website organically (un-paid). A strategy and action of making changes to your website design, content and searchable terms to make your site more attractive to the search engines.
Yet, very few see SEO is their cheapest sales person. The ‘guy’ who will work 24 hours a day, without food or water, no claiming expenses, company car, health benefits – a website is your friend who wants to work for you and deliver ROI day after day. You just need to provide the information to let ‘him’ get on with it.
Plus, like any member of staff you pay them monthly (costing thousands less than the minimum wage).
Types of SEO:
On-page SEO It is referred to activities performed on a page of a website that is to be published to optimise it so it ranks higher on the SERP.
The On-page SEO activities include; placing the relevant keywords in the right quantity, inserting internal links, meta tags and descriptions, building a customised URL structure, inserting the alt attributes and most importantly providing the visitors with high-quality engaging and most importantly relevant content.
Off-page SEO
Refers to activities performed on a page of a website after it goes live.
Off-page SEO activities includes; sharing posts, commenting on posts to build engagement, liking the post throughout social media, giving star ratings to a post and answering questions of your consumers are all a part of the tasks listed under off-page SEO. Hopefully, these two descriptions help define the difference between on and off page SEO.
Label everything! Be thorough.
White Hat SEO
One of the most popular SEO techniques and is one which uses efficient and effective techniques to improve your rankings of a website which do not go against of search engine guidelines (FYI, incorrect techniques applied by amateur – but clever – companies will damage your rankings as the search engines will penalise you. Once this happens there’s no quick fix, we’ll explain this next). If a company tells you they can get you to the first page of Google in “a month” please don’t believe them. It simply isn’t possible.
A few of the methods which White-Hat SEO incorporates high-quality content (videos are 53x more preferred than images or text), link acquisition campaigns supported by high quality content, website HTML optimisation and restructuring and manual labour or outreach – although this service is very much automated, you do need a team of geeks like AdBrand to ensure you are engaging and using the correct strategies continually. When one prefers this method of SEO then one can expect a moderate, fast and longevity growth in your rankings.
TIP OF THE DAY:
BLOGS. One of the best forms of organic SEO (content marketing). Blogs delivering customers the exact answer in detail to what they are looking for. A great example of this “Will SEO help my business” (it’s how you found us right?!). Google loves ‘being a know it all’ and we love Google for that too. You will want to load your articles/blogs with correct keywords, meta tags and advice pieces, which not only show Google you have the answer, but you’ve got an article supporting it.
Black Hat SEO
WARNING!!! Black hat SEO techniques is a type of SEO techniques which misuses the various weaknesses in the algorithms or search engines in order to get high rankings for websites instantly.
This type of a method is not accepted and isn’t legal with the SEO policies set by search engines and especially by Google. The overall quality is incredibly low due to some of the black hat SEO techniques include; link spam, keyword stuffing, hidden text, hidden link, cloaking. If you decide to choose this method then expect instant but short-lasting growth in ranking, with severe consequences. You might want a million customers, but why not get a few thousand now, build loyalty, trust and allow the business to grow organically – solid foundations – and all that jazz.
How does SEO work?
When a user enters their query or search term of engines like Google, the results shown is a series of websites most relevant to the query and have a solid domain authority.
For example when you type and search for ‘best pancake recipe, the top results are the ones that are practicing the best SEO practices in Google’s perception.
How do they do this? Search engines use advanced crawlers gathering information on every website, gathering all available content it can find. Crawler indexes for every website are computed by one of the Google algorithms adapted for best practice.
Benefits of SEO:
1. Generates inbound leads Most people still rely on an ‘antiquated definition of SEO’, assuming ‘Optimising a website’ for search engines. Which is partly correct, however, modern SEO is ensuring an amazing user experience otherwise known as UX.
An organised, clean and structured website encourages longer visitor time, which decreases your bounce rate and increases traffic due to popularity (another Google algorithm). This in turn will generate leads – as long as you accompany your message with a ‘call-to-action’ (CTA) of course.
2. Increases brand awareness If you correctly introduce accurate and relevant keyword optimisation, your potential customers are going to find you. If you answer questions accurately with variable content examples, they will be offered your website and therefore brand by the search engine.
Build brand awareness, customer engagement, audience profiles – then – offer, market, promote, advertise and sell to them.
Many new/start-up companies we speak to dedicate thousands of dollars to a launch campaign without knowing their audiences, which in turn delivers results, but not optimised sales.
3. Builds Brand Credibility With correct ‘SEO practice’ you are able to rank your website/business on top/high-ranking results on search engines equates to ‘an unaware customer’ you are a reputable company. One imagines you don’t have the budgets for a celebrity endorsement? SEO is way cheaper and more effective for longevity for your business.
Simply put: Invest wisely and don’t look for the short cuts.
4. Low Cost, High ROI SEO is one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing. You’ve invested in having your website built, because “everyone needs a website”. Once you have your results, clicks, likes, engagement coming through – you (and your SEO team) need to ensure you’re analysing this information and asking questions like “Why are we getting more website traffic, higher rankings?”, “Where are these conversions coming from?”
This should be worked through with your marketing team as their exercises/initiatives will lead you to answers and highlight their successes and what might need to be amended/tweaked next month.
5. Track Results I need to reiterate this point (but not labour it) You must track who is viewing, clicking, sharing what as you’ve invested in SEO, you’ve found your customers (they’ve found you to be more accurate) having greater insights will allow you the greatest benefit from SEO.
Use Alexa, Google Analytics and other social software like Later, Hootsuite, Sprout Social you can resolve both positive & negative data about your online visitors and use this to your advantage.
Consistently evolve and be where your customers are or need you to be.
In summary: SEO helps businesses compete online. It a necessary ‘hand-in-hand’ investment with your website. Don’t be baffled by ‘tech-terminology’ or geeky lingo designed to confuse the most educated of professionals. Having a dedicated team saves cost, resources and as they look after several clients and act upon this daily, the latest trends will be automatically implemented.
