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Why I Killed the Biography Slide in My Digital Marketing Presentations

Why I Killed the Biography Slide in My Digital Marketing Presentations

10/25/19 UPDATE: Hello Facebook Agency Visitor Person!  We’re delighted to have you visit this awesome post. About a year ago, ZATO stopped offering Facebook Ads solutions so we could focus solely on what we do best: Google Ads. Because of this, we’re always interested in partnerships with great Social Advertising agencies (like yourself, wink wink!) and we offer referral fees for signed clients!  Anyway, back to it, and happy reading…

Post Summary

"Hello, my name is Kirk Williams. In 2016 I was voted most likely to hug a goat, and 24 out of 476 people I made up think you should send work to me."

This is how we all begin our presentations.

It's what you should do, right? It's what everyone does so obviously it's the right thing to do.

The reason we take the oh-so-precious commodity of time from our already-too-short presentations is so we can get sales. That's the core of it, we want to make sure people know about our brand, company, agency, non-profit, etc so they can hire us and we can all sing happily together.

The bio slide is a sales tool. But what if we stop thinking of our biographies as the sales tool, and instead think of our presentations themselves as the sales tools.

What if we spend so much time working on our presentations, and making them out-of-this-world good (that's not me, BTW, I'm still working on leveling up my presenting skills!), that we don't have to start off our presentations repeating what the session moderator already said about us 30 seconds earlier?

I remember talking with a couple of Digital Marketing conference veterans about this awhile back. They challenged my thinking, and noted that they liked to add their bio into the middle of their presentations after an insightful story to get the hearer interested.I think that's a great idea, and I did that a few times with some success. But now I'm ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I'm done with biography slides in 2018. I have 15-45 minutes (depending on the session), to convince you why I am the PPC professional you should hire because of my knowledge, illustrations, and personality. If I can't sell you in 20 minutes with my entire presentation, I certainly can't do it in 2 minutes with one slide.

We'll see how it goes :)

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Kirk Williams
@PPCKirk - Owner & Chief Pondering Officer

Kirk is the owner of ZATO, his Paid Search & Social PPC micro-agency of experts, and has been working in Digital Marketing since 2009. His personal motto (perhaps unhealthily so), is "let's overthink this some more."  He even wrote a book recently on philosophical PPC musings that you can check out here: Ponderings of a PPC Professional.

He has been named one of the Top 25 Most Influential PPCers in the world by PPC Hero 6 years in a row (2016-2021), has written articles for many industry publications (including Shopify, Moz, PPC Hero, Search Engine Land, and Microsoft), and is a frequent guest on digital marketing podcasts and webinars.

Kirk currently resides in Billings, MT with his wife, six children, books, Trek Bikes, Taylor guitar, and little sleep.

Kirk is an avid "discusser of marketing things" on Twitter, as well as an avid conference speaker, having traveled around the world to talk about Paid Search (especially Shopping Ads).  Kirk has booked speaking engagements in London, Dublin, Sydney, Milan, NYC, Dallas, OKC, Milwaukee, and more and has been recognized through reviews as one of the Top 10 conference presentations on more than one occasion.

You can connect with Kirk on Twitter or Linkedin.

In 2023, Kirk had the privilege of speaking at the TEDx Billings on one of his many passions, Stop the Scale: Redefining Business Success.

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