Creating powerful and efficient presentations involves capturing your audience’s attention by using the correct techniques. There are two ways to make good presentations – either personalizing pre-existent presentation templates or custom-making your slides. Whichever you choose, it will take you some time and dedication to develop a creative and entertaining concept on your slides. However, creating powerful and efficient presentations will need a few extra hours on the computer and some strategies to make your work outstanding.
Below are four strategies to assist you in making powerful and efficient presentations.
Create an Attractive Title Slide to Grab Your Audience’s Attention
At the beginning of your presentations, ensure you create a captivating title slide that can grab your audience’s attention right away. Go straight into introducing the main message your presentations aim to share. Also, grab a good hold of your audience’s attention a little further; remember to let them know the added value they get from paying attention to your presentation.
An example is informing them upfront about the important new information they are about to receive and applying it to their business of interest. Another idea is to talk about a general common goal within the niche you are pitching about, i.e., Marketing, how about branding: Who wants to redesign your company’s logo?
Try to come up with something attractive and catchy, so they are engaged from beginning to end.
Emphasize on a Precise Point per Slide
The secret to making powerful and efficient presentations rests on your ability to emphasize a precise point per slide. Through this, you allow the audience to take in and process information systematically. Piling up many bullet points in one slide may lead to information overload and a lot of confusion.
Additionally, accumulating many bullet points in a single slide may act as a distraction to your audience as they struggle to follow your presentations. Some might be quick readers, but some others may not.
A distracted audience becomes restless and losses attentiveness during your presentations; besides, a distracted person tends to start distracting others, so disinterest spreads quickly in a room full of confused people. Therefore, make sure you restrict content in a single slide to optimize attention and message delivery. You should always write precise points that you can quickly explain during your presentations.
Another good strategy to keep your viewers’ attention firmly on your presentation is to create legible text in your slides. Ensure you pick at least a font size of 24 to guarantee easy readability of the information you include on your slides. The bigger the room, the bigger the typeface.
Include Slide Transitions and Modify the Order of Your Slides
Powerpoint Add-in allows you to include slide transitions to make your presentations look more professional and slick, adding a tremendous systematic content flow. When adding slide transitions, you access the ‘Animations’ tab in your Powerpoint program. Ensure you scan through and preview pre-existing transitions before choosing a suitable one to add to your presentations. Try them out, give them a run, and show them to others to get some feedback about it if the time permits. Once a good transition has been chosen, you can replicate all the slides, either picking the same or different transition.
Once you’ve made all the slides for your presentation and included appropriate information, modify the order of your slides accordingly. Here, you should select and drag a slide from where it’s situated to a different section to create a logical flow of information.
Therefore, modifying your slides’ order re-arranges information to make your points clear and understandable to your audience; you can use the funnel system or the martini glass system; the idea is to get your point across in layman terms an exciting, understandable way.
After completing all the slides starting with the title slide to the last slide, ensure you preview your presentations by playing them. Here, access the ‘Slide Show’ tab and select ‘From the Start’ to preview your presentations’ slideshow. Previewing is vital as it helps you identify areas that need improvements, sometimes helps when you take some time off in between reviews. You might be able to catch errors better after resting your eyes for a little while.
Add Visuals and a Persuasive Call-to-action
Adding visuals and a powerful call-to-action is another crucial strategy to make powerful and efficient presentations. Carefully pick visuals to add to your presentations to emphasize and enhance message delivery.
For example, you can add visuals such as graphs or charts to help in illustrating statistical information. When utilized well, visuals can be useful in describing information much better compared to text. Additionally, most people tend to follow demonstrative presentations more attentively than text.
Include a powerful and persuasive call-to-action in the final slide of your presentations. A perfect call-to-action needs to be precise, re-assuring, and viable. Join, click, view, watch, donate “HERE,” ETC.
In case your presentations were for an external audience, add a call-to-action that encourages them to get in touch with your organization for more information.
Creating powerful and efficient presentations requires unique strategies. You have to understand how to grab your audience’s attention through all of the slides you create.
You can make these strategies into a quick checklist to keep in mind while working on your presentation; these are:
- Adding slide transitions.
- Modifying your slides’ order.
- Adding visuals.
- A persuasive call-to-action.
With these strategies, you are sure to make powerful and beautiful presentations every time you have to give a pitch.