How To Create a Fact Sheet

Intro

Our step-by-step guide, complete with design tips and examples, will help you create an engaging and effective fact sheet tailored to your needs. To maximize the impact of your fact sheet, it’s essential to understand when to use it, identify your audience’s pain points, and include critical elements such as a compelling title, clear problem statement, and robust value proposition.

What is a Fact Sheet?

A fact sheet is a concise, single-page document that presents essential information about a product, service, organization, or event. Its primary purpose is to provide a quick overview that highlights key details, benefits, and statistics in an easily digestible format. Fact sheets are often used in marketing, sales, and communication strategies to inform and persuade stakeholders, customers, and partners. They distill complex information into clear, visually appealing summaries that can be quickly understood, making them a valuable tool for efficient communication.

When to Use a Fact Sheet

Use a fact sheet for targeted pitches to address specific audience pain points, as a follow-up to webinars or presentations, at networking events, during in-person meetings, and for cold outreach. They are also effective for pitch meetings, executive briefings, direct mail campaigns, introducing new features or products, and in any scenario requiring rapid decision-making. Fact sheets ensure key details are easily accessible and memorable.

Design Tips

When designing your fact sheet, visuals are your best friend. Use images, charts, and infographics to make your information pop and break up the text. This makes complex ideas easier to grasp. Keep things simple and straightforward to avoid overwhelming your reader. Clear, concise language paired with straightforward graphics does the trick.

Make sure your design isn’t cluttered. A clean layout with plenty of white space helps key points stand out. Stick to your brand’s colors, fonts, and logos for a cohesive look. Finally, guide your reader through the content with a clear visual hierarchy. Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to direct their attention to the most important information. This makes your fact sheet easy to navigate and understand.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

When creating a fact sheet, steer clear of information overload. Too much text can overwhelm your audience and obscure your key points. The structure is equally important; a disorganized layout can confuse readers and diminish the impact of your message. Visual appeal matters too—an unattractive or cluttered design can deter engagement. Finally, always consider your audience’s needs. Tailor the content to address their specific pain points and interests, ensuring the fact sheet is relevant and useful to them.

How To Create a Fact Sheet: The Basics

Modify your header

The header gives the fact sheet a general direction and acts as the title of the page. You can add dates and contact information in this section as well. Remember, by sharing your folios as responsive links, you can change your header, and refresh its date to update anyone who has the folio link, anywhere in the world.

Add essential information

Use this section to provide a brief description of your company. Include essential facts such as your company size, date of establishment, company type, industry, location, a few keywords that summarize your business, and your company logo to reinforce brand recognition. Feel free to add any other information about your product, service, or company as it pertains to the fact sheet’s overall purpose. Fill out the Business Model Canvas, to pinpoint key company information and streamline planning, development, and execution across your business.

Xtensio Tip: If you’re looking for a template to test an idea or measure interest, you can also check out the one-pager template and the landing page template. These both include an email form module so you can collect email addresses for marketing and bizdev.

Modify your footer

Insert your contact information, website, and relevant social media links into the final section of your fact sheet.

Add a Call to Action

Add a clear call to action that aligns with the purpose of the fact sheet. If this is to capture investor’s interest, insert an email form module. If you are using the fact sheet for sales purposes, include a number to call, or email to reply to.

How To Create a Fact Sheet: The Big Picture

Summarize your vision and mission

Write a brief but detailed definition of your organization’s raison d’etre or use a simple bolded company slogan in larger font. Explain your organization’s grounding principles and long-term objectives. You can also add tags or graphs to your folio to add visual indicators of your company’s values.

Describe your product and services

How does your brand benefit your customers? What advantages do you hold over your competition? If you are creating a product fact sheet for sales or marketing (example on the right), consider listing out and comparing your top products. Utilize graphs to show metrics. Insert images or icons to describe features.

Caution: Keep jargon to the minimum. Only use the most vital information to cite sufficient facts and pique your reader’s curiosity to learn more.

Define your market-fit

This module helps you display an overview of your industry and show where your company stands. This provides your readers with some general context for your organization.

Tip: Fill out our competitive analysis for a deeper look at the market and where you stand next to your competitors.

How To Create a Fact Sheet: Business Insights

Mark important events

Listing out your milestones gives both the team and your stakeholders a sense of your organization’s accomplishments. Write down turning points for your company: product launches, fundraising rounds, sales and revenue milestones, and usage metrics. This gives an overview of your progress and adds credibility to your business and product. You can also insert a table to show more detailed dates and metrics.

Outline your business metrics

Lay out the Key Metrics that represent your progress. Show relevant and overarching metrics that are based on normalized data captured over the course of a significant amount of time. These metrics could address the methodologies through which you will measure success, such as conversion, retention, and churn rates. For startups that may not have enough data to work off of, use applicable industry-related metrics that showcase the potential of your idea.

If you’re creating a fact sheet for investors or internal reporting, consider expanding this section to show your growth.
Note: The consulting services proposal and the pitch deck template are also great ways to show potential investors and clients why your product or service is valuable.

Caution: Avoid hyperbole such as – this is a billion-dollar industry. Every industry is, and it does not prove that you will get a slice of it. Be specific and list only concrete information.

How To Create a Fact Sheet: Customer Insights

Identify your customers

Who are your customers? Are you mainly dealing with enterprises, small businesses, or individuals? Organize your consumer base into Customer Segments to provide the audience with insights on the value your product or service offers customers.

If you have any Key Customers, you can add them by uploading their logos into this module.

Tip: Try Xtensio’s User Persona Template for a deeper analysis of your customers. You can also use your findings from the User Persona Comparison to draw a high-level picture of your customer segments.

How To Create a Fact Sheet: Organizational Facts

Introduce Your Team

Starting with key players such as Founders and Executives, give a quick intro of your team members and link to their profiles (LinkedIn, AngelList, etc.).

Showcase your organizational breakdown

For larger companies where it’s not applicable to list out every member of your team or management, you can focus on an overview of your enterprise’s departmental breakdown or organizational chart. 

How To Create a Fact Sheet: Collaborate and Share

You can invite others to work on your fact sheet together. When you are done, Xtensio enables you to share your fact sheet with flexibility.

Other Fact Sheet Examples you can Customize

You can start with Xtensio’s free Fact Sheet template and customize it to your needs (and match your branding). We also offer free editable examples: For example, TruMusic’s startup fact sheet focuses more on business operation and growth to appeal to potential investors, while BackpackCo’s product fact sheet highlights different models and features to provide customers with better insights into their merchandise. Think about how you can make relevant information pop for your audience as you organize your fact sheet.

QUICK TIP: Follow along with the “How To Make A One Pager (With Template and Examples)” guide to create your brand’s one-pager to support your fact sheet.

Why use Xtensio to create a Fact Sheet?

Your Fact Sheet is not set in stone. Like other Xtensio tools, it can and should be repurposed, revisited, and revised to suit your evolving needs. You can always add, delete, and move your modules and sections around with Xtensio’s versatile editor to adapt the fact sheet as you need it. Your team can collaborate on your fact sheets in real-time, together. And everyone with the link sees the latest updates. This multipurpose business essential can help you attract investors, reach new customers, recruit new employees, and achieve your business goals. Good luck!