The Most Powerful Marketing Tool is...

PowerPoint?

PowerPoint has long been derided in business as the de facto go-to tool for presentations, sitting in a meeting with a long series of meaningless slides read out word for word is a mainstay of anyone's week. To be honest there's better tools for presentations if only Keynote, which just automatically leads to use of images over words and has a far smoother feel to it, regardless of whether you're a whizz at Prezi or other such tools.

Where we move to an always on, integrated marketing world however, PowerPoint has its uses in what I would term multi-format content, generated at high speed and low cost.

One of the interesting aspects of social marketing is that, more often than not, each post is a standalone piece of content. It appears we've lost the art of the narrative but the rise of podcasts such as Serial, telling a story one week at a time into a 12 week narrative, should give marketers pause for thought as to how we use platforms.

Wired magazine has experimented in this way, dumping a series of images with long form narrative on Instagram to tell a story, and I think brands should view their social feeds this way as well. Tell the story of a launch from behind-the-scenes insights to launch to follow up over a few weeks.

Of course, you want multi-format as well but in this sense PowerPoint is pretty adaptable, if you imagine each slide as a page in the story then you have a full presentation, a series of social posts if designed well and then easily converted into a full video with voiceover. Suddenly you have content from live presentations to social storytelling to SlideShare and YouTube content and beyond.

We tend to always use 16:9 format now given modern TVs mostly used for presentations but this also lends well to video format and social posts, allowing for a little bleed if you want to use Instagram (although it does now allow for wider formats rather than just square).

A good designer, a good storyteller and PowerPoint can provide an array of multi-format content, not everything for web quality needs to be high production and a well-thought out story can obviate the need for high quality design - essentially, with a good eye, almost anyone can create all the content they need for their online marketing program.

If you take cost against output then perhaps PowerPoint should be revisited as a pretty powerful tool given the array of content it can generate in a multi-format, narrative-driven marketing world.

*you might ask.. well Keynote does this and better.. but a majority of ordinary users have MS so...