62 Highly Useful Presentation Tools for Sales and Marketing

Love 'em or hate 'em, the slide-show presentation is one staple of the sales and marketing world that's not going away anytime soon.

That said, it's pretty hard to make a dent in the presentation deluge. Just look at the numbers:

With over 350 PowerPoint presentations given each second across the globe:

The average listener only remembers 50 percent of your presentation a mere 10 minutes after a presentation is given.

The following day, recall drops to 25 percent.

One week later, it drops even farther to 10 percent.

And that's if your presentation is good.

While there are a number of tips and tricks you can use to make your message stick, the road to an effective presentation begins with the tools you use to create and then present your presentations.

Long gone are the days when PowerPoint was the only true option for creating presentations. The Web is full of powerful and easy-to-use options that can help your presentation stand out from the others.

To create a truly memorable presentation, start with this list of 62 highly useful presentation tools for sales and marketing below.

62 Presentation Tools for Sales and Marketing

To help you navigate this long list of options, the presentation tools are broken down into five separate categories:

Establishment: lest you forget, the tools you've used for years are still viable options for creating memorable presentations.

Creation: these presentation tools enable you to create recorded presentations as well as presentations you can use when live.

Presentation: although some of the creation and editing category enable you to present to the world as well, the solutions in this section focus on presentation delivery and management.

Interactive: take your presentation to the next level by adding interactive elements where you can help solve the problems of your potential customers (with your products and services, of course).

Resources: no two things increase the effectiveness of a recorded presentation more than great music and voice acting. This section will help you find affordable options for both.

Presentation Tools for Sales and Marketing: Establishment

This section lists the presentation tools that paved the way for the rest of the tools on this list. Powerful and fully featured, many folks still use them successfully today.

PowerPoint

The granddaddy of them all, PowerPoint continues to dominate the presentation creation scene, especially offline. Despite the much maligned "death by PowerPoint" effect, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more robust, feature-rich presentation tool on the market.

Other Establishment Presentation Tools

Presentation Tools for Sales and Marketing: Creation

Creating an engaging and memorable presentation used to be a job for highly creative and specialized professionals.

Thanks to the tools in this section, that's no longer the case as they enable anyone to create presentations that stand out from the rest.

What's more, the tools in this section can be used to create many different types of presentations including live, recorded and animated to name a few.

To make this section easier to use, it's broken down into four different categories.

Tools for Creating Presentations: Traditional Online Solutions

The tools in this category are built along the same line as the "establishment" tools above however, these are all available as online solutions meaning you can create (alone or by collaborating with others), edit and access your presentations anywhere the Internet is accessible.

Google Slides

In Google's answer to PowerPoint, Google Slides, you'll find a lot of similar functionality and features except this tool is free.

Other Traditional Online Presentation Tools

SlideRocket — One great feature is their "dynamic" functionality that updates your presentation using a variety of external data sources:

Tools for Creating Presentations: Non-Traditional Tools

The hottest trend in creating engaging presentations is to use non-traditional tools to tell your story. The presentation tools in this section tend to use unique approaches to design and often add interactive functionality as well.

Prezi

One of the giants in non-traditional presentation tools, Prezi took the traditional presentation and broke it into pieces, each of which can be zoomed in, zoomed out and rotated any which way. Throw in the ability to embed music, voiceovers, images and links and you've got a presentation tool with power. It even works offline.

It's pretty hard to understand what a Prezi presentation is without seeing one so head on over to their gallery page and take a Prezi test drive or two.

issuu

Why not turn your boring presentation into an interactive magazine that both attracts and engages your prospects? That's exactly what you can do over at issuu. issue turns your presentation into a beautiful magazine with links and videos that can be read online or on the go.

Glogster

An iOS app, Glogster can be used to create interactive "posters" that users can drill-down into to get more detailed information. The image below shows what happens when you click on the image of a video in a Glogster poster — the video window is expanding and will play when fully open (watch this video to see Glogster in action).

You can use Glogster to create all kinds of creative, engaging and interactive presentations and they'll all be optimized for mobile devices.

Projeqt

Pushing the envelop on design, interactivity, dynamic data and depth, Projeqt is one presentation tool you should definitely check out.

One of the most interesting features is the ability to "stack" presentations so that a click on one slide leads to another presentation (or a video) and then helps the viewer get back to where they started. This is powerful stuff that can be used to create all manner of self-guided presentations.

It might take a bit more creativity to figure out how to use Projeqt to create business presentations, but the results are sure to stand out.

Tools for Creating Presentations: Drag and Drop Solutions (with templates!)

If you want to quickly and easily create a beautiful presentation, take a look at the tools in this section. Not only does their drag-and-drop functionality make them easy-to-use, they also offer lots of templates to help kick start the creation of your presentations. Here's a small example of the presentation templates available on Canva, one of the tools in this section:

And here's the list of the tools:

Tools for Creating Presentations: Videos

One of the best ways to create a video presentation is to use a webinar service that enables you to record and reuse the webinar.

That approach aside, there are a ton of useful presentation tools for creating video presentations. The approach, features, and ease-of-use varies widely so be sure to take a look at a good sampling of tools to assure you find the one that fits your needs.

Video Presentation Creation Tools

Video Presentation Creation Tools: Animation

Video Presentation Creation Tools: Offline Tools

Video Presentation Creation Tools: Slide and Video Synch

These two presentation tools will help you create a video within which your slides are synched to a pre-recorded video of you giving the presentation. Pretty slick stuff here.

62 Highly Useful Presentation Tools for Sales and Marketing: Presentation

Once your presentation is created, what's the best way to share it with the world? These tools offer some handy options and some even offer powerful presentation management functionality.

62 Highly Useful Presentation Tools for Sales and Marketing: Interaction

Nothing is more engaging than interactivity. Hold your audience's attention with these interactive presentation tools:

62 Highly Useful Presentation Tools for Sales and Marketing: Resources

Voiceover Resources

Use these sites to find a voiceover actor for your presentation videos:

Music Resources

Use these sites to discover affordable music to use in your presentations:

Conclusion

If you want your presentations to stand out from the rest, start with the presentation tools on the list above.

These 62 highly useful presentation tools for sales and marketing run the gamut from live to recorded, words to images and videos and everything in between.

Take your time with this one — your sales and marketing efforts will benefit from the engaging presentations you can create with one of the tools above.

Projection Screen Illustration via Shutterstock

Source: 62 Highly Useful Presentation Tools for Sales and Marketing