How a Presentation Toolkit Can Boost Your Brand

How many hours have you spent reformatting a presentation that someone else built from scratch? If you’ve ever opened a deck and cringed at Comic Sans, pixelated clipart or a rainbow of off-brand colors, you’re not alone. Presentations are a cornerstone of modern business – whether you’re pitching to a client, outlining a project or leading a training session. And yet, many teams still start from zero every time.

That’s where a presentation toolkit comes in. A well-designed toolkit gives everyone – from marketers to engineers – a consistent, brand-aligned starting point. It saves time, reduces errors and ensures every deck reflects your company’s identity.

WHY YOU NEED A TOOLKIT

As a Creative Director, I’ve reviewed hundreds of decks created by non-designers. And I’ve seen the same issues pop up again and again: mismatched fonts, outdated logos, awkward layouts and visuals that just don’t fit the brand. It’s not that people don’t care – it’s that they don’t have the right tools.

Without clear guardrails, people will fill in the gaps however they can. That’s where a toolkit becomes essential. It provides foundational components like layouts, visuals and formatting guidance so people can focus on content, not design. It also helps prevent brand mishaps and keeps your presentations looking polished and professional.

WHAT’S IN A PRESENTATION TOOLKIT?

You can build your toolkit in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva or any other platform your team uses. The key is to have a flexible set of templates and brand assets that cover wide-ranging presentation needs.

A typical toolkit includes:

1. General Slide Templates
   • Cover slide
   • Agenda slide
   • Content slides (with various text/image combinations)
   • Divider slides
   • Bio slides
2. Company Slides
   • Product or service descriptions
   • Company awards
   • Stats and facts
   • Mission, vision and values
3. Brand Design Elements
   • Chart and graph styles
   • Iconography
   • On-brand visuals and photography

It’s also helpful to clearly mark which slides are for internal use only, especially when they contain sensitive data or internal strategy.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT THE TOOLKIT

Creating the toolkit is just the first step. You’ll want to support it with a toolkit guide and training resources to make it truly effective.

Toolkit Guide

This guide acts as an addendum to your brand guidelines. It should include:

• Snapshots of available slides
• Dos and don’ts for formatting
• Instructions for accessing and using the toolkit

Make sure it’s easy to find. Host it on your company’s intranet alongside the deck itself.

Training & Onboarding

Offer a live or recorded training session to walk users through:

• What’s in the toolkit
• How to use company slides
• Common formatting mistakes to avoid

This training can also be part of your new hire onboarding process, ensuring everyone starts off on the right foot.

Quick-Start Checklist

Here’s a simple checklist to help you roll out your new toolkit:

• Build core slide templates
• Draft the usage guide
• Host a live training session
• Record and share this training
• Upload the toolkit and guide to your company’s intranet

Empower Users and Maintain Compliance

The final step of deploying the toolkit is to empower users to seamlessly use it in their daily workflows while maintaining enterprise-wide brand adherence. Template management tools on the market today, such as Templafy, officeatwork and UpSlide, enable brand teams to disseminate documents and toolkits across organizations so that users can create brand-compliant materials with minimal friction. Using these tools, brand teams can push updates enterprise-wide and keep a tight hold on the materials floating around the organization without requiring action from users. And users benefit from easy access within their apps to on-brand versions of documents.

The more users a company has for its toolkit, the more crucial it is that they leverage these tools to help users cut down on manual work and create brand-compliant materials seamlessly.

ENSURE CONSISTENCY AND QUALITY

Presentation decks are a representation of your brand, often part of the first impression you make to prospects. So, ensuring quality and consistency in presentation decks should be a top priority for marketers across industries. A well-crafted toolkit that’s distributed and maintained via a user-friendly tech platform enables your team to efficiently and consistently create decks that are eye-catching, engaging and on-brand.