Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

According to Buffer, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. And if you need any more evidence to convince you visuals are essential to your content marketing, just consider all these stats.

But honestly ... who's got time for all that? And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly have a degree in graphic design, or the budget to hire someone who does. So, what's a design-impaired marketer to do?

Luckily, over the past couple years, we've been on a mission at HubSpot to make visual content creation much less of an obstacle for the average marketer. How, you ask? Templates, my friends ... templates. And what's great about these templates is they're all built for software you probably already have on your computer: PowerPoint.

I'm going to walk you through all the visual content marketing templates we have available for free to download, and show you how we've used them ourselves to create awesome visuals right in PowerPoint....

Professional PowerPoint templates are a great way to look your best and impress your audience the next time you give a presentation. Here's an excellent set of 16 PowerPoint templates to impress in your next marketing presentation.

Those who are experienced with some of these functions may find them a bit mundane, but I still remember how cool it was to find and use them for the first time. While many may be aware of some of these techniques, I think most readers will find something fun and new here.

Following are 10 pretty cool things you can do with the popular presentation tool. Some are really easy, others will take more time and effort to get familiar with. Just be sure not to go overboard with these – use them sparingly for emphasis and to keep it interesting, not to create a kaleidoscope of visual chaos....

Most 16-year-olds are focused on sports or cars or maybe even the SATs. For Tyler Millis and Arjit Kansal, two teens from Fort Meyers, Florida and New Delhi, India, respectively, their passion is PowerPoint. Yep, you read that right: PowerPoint.

The two 16-year-olds beat out 400,000 candidates from 130 countries to be named Microsoft Office Specialist World Champions— Millis in PowerPoint 2007, and Kansal in PowerPoint 2010. The 13th annual competition, sponsored by Certiport, holds a series of tests and interviews for students to show off their knowledge of Microsoft Office products. Only 123 students made it to the final round, with Millis and Kansal taking home the PowerPoint titles and $5,000 scholarships....