To lessen the pressure of presentations, preparation is key. When your slides do the heavy lifting for you, you can focus on… actually presenting!
To help, IG’s compiled some of our top tips for creating presentations that are both professional and engaging.
Clear and Concise Content
This may seem obvious, but it’s a great starting point: it’s important that visual information is concise and easy to understand.
It’s good to remember that the information that’s obvious to you may not be obvious to your audience. When you’re spending a lot of time on a project, it’s easy to fall into this trap.
Have a colleague who is not involved in the project look at your content to make sure it makes sense to someone who’s seeing the information for the first time.
One Point on Each Slide
To ensure your points are hard-hitting and obvious, try to keep each slide to a one point maximum.
It’s a story as old as time: spending hours making a presentation just to go back the next day and realise the most important information is nowhere to be found… or the introductions are dragging on… or you’ve jumped from topic to topic without any real explanation. It can feel like you’re back to square one.
To save yourself time (and frustration!) create a storyboard before you start, keeping one point per slide in mind.
Not only will this save you time creating your presentation, but you’ll also find it’s much more impactful – the first time around!
Prioritise Visuals Over Text
You know what your key metrics are. Consider having these as a visual focus that you can expand on while you’re presenting.
A general rule is that your slides should be more visual than text-heavy; it makes the information much easier to digest.
It’s difficult to read a paragraph of text, look at a graph and listen at the same time. If these are your slides, they may not have the impact you’d hoped.
Consistency
One easy way to level up your presentation is to have your visual content branded.
Nowadays, it’s become standard to put your logo on proposal covers.
You can take it one step further and introduce elements of your brand colours as secondary colours, into your proposal. By having all your visual content on brand, you’ll have the edge over your competitors.
Consider How It Will Be Viewed
With working from home becoming increasingly common post-COVID, it is not unlikely that your presentation may be viewed via screen share rather than in person…Your presentation may even be shared virtually amongst stakeholders without your knowledge!
These are things you should consider when creating your slides. If you know it will be on a big screen in a conference room, then be aware of how your text and visuals will appear there.
If being viewed on a smaller screen, avoiding detail-heavy will ensure none of your important statistics gets missed.
The Easier Way to Nail Your Presentations
If you’ve got an important proposal coming up and you’d benefit from some support, let us know!
Whether it’s implementing this cheat sheet to your existing slides or turning your notepad scribbles into a complete presentation, IG would love to help.
Feel free to get in touch with us here – we’d love to chat!