Easy Ways To Make Work Presentations Less Boring
Do you have an upcoming presentation at work?
Or maybe you run a home-based business and need to provide important monthly updates to your team.
It’s almost impossible to avoid doing presentations nowadays and the range of paid and free presentation software options is growing.
They are a key part of school coursework and work.
Presentations are also often part of job interviews, especially for corporate roles.
As scary as presentations may feel, they’re the perfect opportunity to reflect your professionalism and expertise.
Whether you want to impress your manager or ace your job interview, a great presentation can take you a long way.
One of the most essential factors in any presentation is visual impact.
You need to create an eye-catching presentation that grabs your audience’s attention.
Below, we’ve listed some top tips to make your presentations pop:
1. Tell a story
Business storytelling is almost a genre in its own right. Storytelling in business should spark curiosity, make emotional connections, and persuade people to take action – all at once.
Your story should answer the following questions:
◉ What motivates the company’s founders and its employees?
◉ What important problems were the company and its product created to solve?
◉ Why do buyers pick your brand over competitors?
People are more likely to remember your presentation when you weave a story into it. Think about the message that you want to convey and communicate your story to keep your viewers engaged from start to finish.
Even if it’s a basic, factual presentation, you can still create a beginning, middle, and end to make the information flow nicely from one point to the next.
2. Create eye-catching designs
It’s not what you write, but what you show in presentations that matters.
The graphics and colors you use in your slides are the most important factors for a memorable presentation.
You don’t need to do any extravagant designs to make a strong visual impact. Simple is often better for presentations to avoid overwhelming your audience.
Your banner design, background color, and imagery should capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged as you speak about the contents of each slide.
Try and use complementary colors and don’t be afraid to leave white space to keep your slides uncluttered.
3. Make it interactive, ask questions
Here’s what you can do specifically:
- Ask the audience a question
- Try out a quiz
- Use humor
- Make eye contact
- Add in some visual and audio effects
- Let the audience answer anonymously
- Encourage movement in your audience.
- Turn to social media, ask people to follow a hashtag
4. Use imagery to break up text
Nobody wants to read huge blocks of text. Slides with no imagery and hundreds of words will quickly disengage your audience.
Try and keep your text to a minimum and use graphs or charts to represent some of the information. Include plenty of images on your slides to break up your paragraphs. You can also split large blocks of text up into bullet points to make the information more digestible.
Don’t feel obliged to fill every area of the slide with text or imagery. Blank spaces and gaps are a great way to make your slides easier to follow.
5. Be consistent in style
Consistency is important for any presentation. Of course, you don’t want every slide to look exactly the same but they should look similar.
Use the same color scheme, the same font and font sizes, and similar graphics throughout your presentation.
This will be more visually impactful and cohesive, and hence – more professional.
Use free Microsoft PowerPoint templates and themes to maintain consistency throughout your presentation. These themes add the same borders or graphics onto every slide so you just need to add your text and imagery.
