Do you have a presentation coming up that will include PowerPoint slides? It might be difficult to create the content and design for a new presentation. It’s not unusual for a few questions to arise when brainstorming, settling on a design, filling it out, and finishing the specifics.
What is the best location to begin? Are some stages preferable to others? How can you be certain that you haven’t overlooked anything? And how can you learn those crucial but somewhat technical design skills that may elevate a presentation from excellent to great?
You’ll be able to navigate PowerPoint far more effortlessly and create a spectacular presentation that will leave your audience wanting more if you have the following tactics in your arsenal.
1. Decide Your Presentation’s Title and The Message You Want To Deliver
Aside from selecting a subject, your initial step should be to create a working title for your presentation. A subject is more general than a working title. Recollect that a captivating presentation title is similar to a great blog post title in that it is concise, factual, and helpful.
Once you’ve decided on a working title, develop a list of the important points of your presentation to begin to arrange it. This will assist you in concentrating while drafting your overview and expanding on those aspects.
2. Consider Your Audience and Create a Rough Outline
Once you’ve decided on your primary takeaways and narrative, it’s time to start drafting the content of your presentation in more depth, keeping your unique audience in mind.
A presentation on any subject should sound different whether you’re giving it to a group of college students vs a group of investors, for example. For optimum effect, adapt the tone, wording, style, and execution of your presentation to your individual audience.
Consider this: What do people in the audience already know? What fresh knowledge can you convey to them? What do they want to gain from your presentation? What will be of interest to them? What will keep them interested and focused? Then, at each level of the presenting process, make appropriate selections.
3. Leverage The Powers of Storytelling
This may not apply to more formal presentations with inflexible formats (such as performance reports), but for more flexible presentations, presenting your material as a narrative can be considerably more engaging.
Stories touch people on an emotional level that knowledge, facts, and data might not. They help you connect to your audience, which makes you and your message significantly more engaging to them. They also aid in making complex subjects more clear to your audience, who may not have the same degree of expertise or work in the same field.
4. Select A Consistent Color Scheme
Before you start converting your text outline into PowerPoint, you need to add some fundamental design components to your PowerPoint presentations. First, choose a color scheme with enough contrast between tones to make the colors stand out.
It is up to you whether to utilize two, three or four distinct colors in your presentation, although some color combinations work better together than others.
5. Design The Background of Your Slides
Less is more in PowerPoint. You never want the design to detract from your message. But, even if you’re trying for a really basic design, you should be more inventive than a plain, white backdrop.
There are three primary methods for adding a backdrop design to a PowerPoint presentation:
- Use free PowerPoint templates and Google Slides templates by SlideUpLift.
- Create a different background out of a solid color.
- Use a picture to make a unique backdrop.
6. Add High-quality Images to Your Content
Great visual signals can make a significant difference in how effectively your audience gets your content. Including beautiful photographs in a PowerPoint presentation is an excellent approach to keep things interesting.
It is critical, however, that you do not utilize photos to embellish. This is a relatively frequent blunder. Images are supposed to enhance or supplement your message, but they may sometimes be distracting. Look for photographs with excellent quality so that they may be extended without becoming fuzzy or distorted.
7. Use Text in a Concise Manner
Your slides are there to supplement, not replace, your speech. If your slides include too much information, such as whole phrases or paragraphs, your audience members will be compelled to read the slides rather than listen to you. That’s tedious. Instead, utilize slides to highlight keywords and display graphics while you stand up and perform the hard job of creating a narrative and summarizing your findings.
Focus on the essential words of a bullet point in your slide text, then discuss specifics vocally. We suggest utilizing up to three bullet points on each slide and keeping any text as brief and basic as possible. A fair rule of thumb is that if you utilize more than two lines of text per slide or topic, you’ve used too much text. Two lines may be a bit text-heavy depending on the manner of display.
8. Hold a Q&A Session at the End
Q&A is another excellent approach to conclude a presentation. This is something that expert presenters usually do. The only tough part is knowing how to end it if you’re receiving more questions than you have time to answer or if you’re not getting any at all.
For in-person sessions, they will direct the audience to seek them out after the presentation to ask more questions. For virtual meetings, though, they will let people know how to contact them, whether via LinkedIn or email.
3. Use a Call to action
Calls to action are an essential component of every piece of material, including presentations. What are you hoping your audience will do with this information?
Include practical strategies for your readers to implement your knowledge into their daily lives in your summary (if applicable). You may also tell folks to contact you if they have any questions about the presentation, so they know what to do next.
Wrapping It Up
Now that you’ve learned some great presenting strategies, it’s time to put them into action! Go out there and provide a presentation that will blow your audience away.