Do you know how to create a stellar business presentation? Even if you’ve had experience with such tasks before, there is always plenty of room for improvement.
Technologies change and so does your business. Meanwhile, PowerPoint presents new options for presentation developers. Keeping all the above nuances in mind can be tough.
Some people opt for hiring presentation-making professionals. Others try to save money by improving efforts on their own.
Are you one of those guys (or gals), who are trying hard to make their presentation successful without any assistance? These valuable tips and tricks are for you.
1. Do Some Serious Planning
Before you start stuffing information into the slides, you should consider taking a step back. A little planning can help you organize your presentation better and improve its overall appearance.
Many PowerPoint presentations fail because they look like a bunch of pieces of information sewn together without any order. Presentation makers believe they can make up for such disorder with their verbal content. Usually, they fail.
If you want your presentation to proceed smoothly, you need to write an outline and a script. Each point must be illustrated by a slide coupled with what you say verbally. Without sketching an outline, points and slides may get mixed up.
Unless you are an improvisation guru, plan ahead. While writing a script, make sure it has a beginning, middle, climax, and end. Become a storyteller. It’s one of the key methods for capturing the audience’s attention.
2. Coordinate Slides And Verbal Content
Each slide should contain one major point. If you use more than one point per one slide, you are bound to lose some of the audience’s attention. If you follow the presentation making tips and make your slides short, the audience will read them immediately. After that, the attention will start wandering.
The only way to keep the listeners focused is to use one point per slide and coordinate it with your verbal content. Don’t wander away from the information shared on the slide. You can disrupt the wholeness of presentation and lose the audience’s focus.
Remember, no matter how important the point you are making is, if you lose the audience’s attention, it’s extremely hard to get it back.
You can tie the current point to some information you shared on the previous slides but never jump ahead.
3. Keep Text Short Or Lose It Entirely
When you are making a PowerPoint presentation, remember that you have the slides to illustrate your point rather than make it. It’s easy to stuff all of your text into a slide to simplify the verbal part. But by doing that, you lose the audience.
According to presentation designers from PresentationGeeks, it’s vital to cut the text on the slides as much as possible. Add images, graphs, media, and whatever else your heart desires, but leave most of the text out.
Remember, your goal is not just to get your point through. It’s to make your listeners interested in it. If you force them to read long paragraphs, you lose them. It’s better to leave some information out than fail to achieve the key goals of your presentation.
4. Spend Time on Learning Design Tricks
The way your slides look identify the impression your presentation makes. You need to take the time to discover the most suitable PowerPoint templates and invest money in custom solutions. No matter how interesting your presentation is, a bad design can ruin it.
- Never use free templates. They are boring
- Don’t use fancy fonts. They can be unreadable from a distance. Settle for Calibri, Times New Roman, and Arial.
- Make sure to use the right text colour against the right background. Light green on light blue may not be visible. Don’t go too fancy. Learn the most winning colour combinations.
- Always align text to one side rather than putting it in the middle. This way, it will be easier to follow.
- Don’t clutter the slide with images or text. Settle for one image, a small paragraph and maybe a couple of bullet points.
Keep your presentation’s design as simple as possible. Don’t force your listener to decipher your information. It should be easy to grasp from the first glance.
5. Ask Many Questions
Questions are an excellent way to pique the audience’s attention. They may be rhetorical but should force the listeners to think about your topic and try to come up with answers.
Questions play numerous roles in the presentation. Usually, they are used to show the audience how little it actually knows about the subject and increase the desire to learn.
Spread questions throughout your presentation in order to keep the audience’s attention for as long as possible.
Final Thoughts
The success of your PowerPoint presentation depends on the ability to hold the audience’s attention while putting your information through. Anything that keeps the listener interested is worth including in your presentation.