You are challenged with finding a way to put your ideas across, engagingly and persuasively, all whilst making sure you don’t let any nerves show.
Just because presenting has always been deemed tough, it doesn’t have to be stressful or nerve-wracking. If you believe in what you’re discussing, your slides look neat and professional, and you leave adequate time to prepare, there’s less to stress about.
The following guide is full of tips on how to ensure your presentation lands with the desired impact and goes off without a hitch:
- Use a template.
Templates make for neat, professional-looking presentations. There’s little room for error when you stick to one.
If you don’t follow a template when initially putting together a presentation (use one!), the slides are at risk of appearing overwhelming, inconsistent, and, even worse, off-brand. Let’s avoid all this by following these simple rules to maintain consistency:
- Choose two or three colours and stick to these throughout
- Choose a font and stick to it
- Alternatively, take a look at our services and we will create professional, branded, and neat presentations for you!
- Use divider pages.
If you’re planning on presenting a particularly lengthy presentation, divider pages are a great tool for keeping your audience engaged and on the same page.
These pages are commonly created using a plain slide, titling it with the topic you are about to cover and one line to introduce it. Nothing more. This way, your audience knows when you’ve covered one topic and when you’re moving on to the next.
- Agendas.
These days, people plan their days down to the minute. It’s important that your audience can keep track of time and are provided with clear expectations from the moment they sit down to listen to you.
If you’re giving a long talk, agendas are a fantastic way to make your audience aware of the slide contents and timings before you begin. This way, there are no unexpected topics to cover, no one wondering when you’ll be done or waiting to leave. Instead, the audience can fully engage with you and relax knowing the purpose of your presentation, along with timings and contents.
- Use notes, don’t cram.
When people are nervous about presenting, they tend to cram their slides full of text – the theory that if slides are filled with words will make you a better presenter is WRONG!
When your slides are filled with text, not only will you be tempted to robotically read from the screen, but your audience will begin to read your presentation themselves and switch off.
To combat this urge, use the ‘Notes’ section which appears underneath each slide. Add in the notes you need to reference when presenting, keeping extra text off your actual presentational slide and ensuring that it stays neat.
Another way to avoid your presentation being overlooked or dismissed is by using visuals such as infographics and animations. When you use visuals instead of written statistics and bullet points, it engages your audience and increases their understanding of the topics you’re covering.
- Include an Appendix to accompany your slide deck.
The appendix would consist of more detailed slides that didn’t fit into the main body of the presentation because of time constraints or because they go into a level of detail that’s not required for the big picture. Attendees may want to dig into the detail after the meeting, or you can use them during the presentation if the conversation goes deep into one of those areas.
So, there you have it – five ways to ensure your presentation lands impactfully.
If you’re struggling to give impactful presentations, our slide write-up and presentation design services will let us get to work on making your slides look professional, engaging and on-brand, letting you focus on the delivery of your presentation.
Get in touch with our team to discuss how our services can help your next presentation land with impact here.