Don’t Ship Your Pitch Deck to Your Website. Here’s How to Translate Your Story for Customers

Your customers don’t want to read your pitch deck. Marketing expert Emily Kramer explains how to turn your investor talking points into your website messaging.

The problem with shipping your pitch deck

A great pitch deck makes for an ineffective website. It also makes terrible outbound copy. You can’t copy-paste that deck to your homepage because your prospects likely aren’t VCs. And even if they are, VCs look for very different things in software than they do investments.

Your deck is a high-level narrative arc. It’s meant to build belief in the market, your team and your timing. It’s meant to sell your vision, so it’s often aspirational and not grounded in what you’ve built today.

Your deck speaks to an audience that cares about a VC-backed outcome, not an audience that is trying to easily solve a "job to be done." Your prospects want a cost-effective, easy-to-implement solution to their immediate problem. Yes, your prospects care that your company will be there tomorrow. But they don’t want you to overpromise what the product can do for them today.

And lastly, your customers care about a broader range of things than VCs do in your pitch. Your marketing can and should tap into those broader topics, from emerging trends in their industry to helping them get better at their jobs. But unlike your pitch deck, your marketing is an opportunity to build credibility and drum up awareness and demand by talking about things your customers care about that aren’t just your product.

What your early B2B marketing story actually needs

Your early marketing is about telling the right slice of the story to the right people — clearly, consistently and repeatedly.

The temptation is to look bigger than you are, just like you do in your pitch deck. To speak to your entire TAM. To sound like a scaled company.

But your early advantage is focus. You can solve a very specific problem for a very specific audience better than anyone else. Lean into that. Don’t work against yourself by trying to appear like you solve everything for everyone.

Here are three ways to focus your marketing messaging:

• Pick a wedge or beachhead. The narrower and more urgent the problem, the easier it is to win.
• Speak directly to your audience. Make people feel like your product was tailor-made for them.
• Don’t copy the messaging of later-stage companies. You’re not Stripe, Airbnb or Figma. No one knows what you do yet. You need to spell it out clearly.

Emily Kramer, B2B startup marketing advisor

Write clear positioning to shape your customer-facing product story

Before you write anything customer-facing, whether for your homepage, your sales deck or any other early marketing asset, you’ll need to hone your positioning internally.

This is where my positioning framework comes in. Answer these four questions in the language your customers speak to build a foundation for your website:

1. What’s the alternative to using your product?

• Building it internally
• Using a mix of tools and homegrown solutions
• Using an incumbent product
• Using a horizontal, non-purpose built tool

2. Who is your product for?

• Get specific and stack rank or tier potential ICPs.

3. What exactly is your product?

• Describe it in plain English. Be clear, not clever.

4. Why is it better than the alternative?

• Pick the high-level reason your product is better than what the majority of your initial ICP(s) will compare it to.

Your marketing story is bigger than your product story

Positioning covers your core product message: who it’s for, what it is, why it’s better. But your marketing story should extend beyond just your product.

In addition to writing clear positioning, choose three to four narratives you want to focus on that speak to your audience. These can be related to market trends, what your customers have in common, your founding story or a unique insight or contrarian view you have.

Here are some examples of how you might describe those narratives:

• "Usage-based pricing will increase our revenue over subscription-based pricing."
• "I can build products now, even though I can’t code."
• "Diagnostic errors occur all the time in medical images read by humans."

Your early marketing story should accomplish these four things:

• Hook people fast. Lead with the customer’s pain and explain how you solve the problem.
• Assume zero context. Explain what you do in plain language.
• Speak to your beachhead users. This isn’t your total addressable market, or every potential use case.
• Prove it. Even if you’re early, use real quotes, early traction and your team’s credibility to build trust.

Translating your pitch deck slide by slide

Your marketing story comes from the same foundation as your pitch deck. But it has a different job.

Here’s how you can directly adapt your pitch deck into your marketing messaging on your website, building off of the positioning and narratives you’ve developed.