The right kind of engagement is what ultimately drives people to listen to you and helps you close more deals. Your business presentation should feature enhanced audience engagement. It is only then your viewers are likely to trust your services, products or brand, as a whole.
Your audience, when rightly engaged through your presentation is more likely to return for more. An innovative & engaging business presentation can help you convert your audience to paid subscribers. For that, your presentation needs to get them interested and provide them with a reason to listen to you. Telling a story, sharing personal experience, amusing visuals and facts are all great ways to engage better with your viewers.
A successful business presentation guides its listeners, makes use of language which is easy to comprehend, states facts and findings and then draws an effective conclusion. Keeping your viewers engaged throughout the presentation can be one of the biggest challenges. We all have sat through presentations at some point in our careers. A dull presentation results in ‘Death by PowerPoint’ and drifts you off professional goals.
The only way to keep hold of your audience’s attention is to engage with them throughout the presentation. In this article, we will talk about four out of the box tips to engage the audience during business presentations.
Structure your presentation:
One of the most important tips in engaging your audience begins even before you start creating your slides. You should define the beginning, middle and end just like a story. Transforming an ordinary presentation into a story can help engross the audience at an entirely different level. The first step should be creating a desire in your audience as per business objectives. Further, the presentation should illustrate how your business fills that desire and can be an asset for your audience. You should consider the setting of your presentation upfront.
One should understand that an interactive presentation helps in building rapport with the audience. Connecting with the audience and connecting right ultimately drives sales. A well- planned business presentation with a logical structure can help you deliver with more confidence.
You are less likely to lose your audience on the way. The presentation should feature the need, roadmap, the first step, the next steps and conclusion. A good approach can be to plan from the audience’s perspective. The purpose of the presentation structure is to inform the audience about the plan, provide fresh insights and enable learning.
Presentation design:
Before you start designing the slides, it is always a good idea to check corporate and business PowerPoint templates. Visual consistency throughout the slides is imperative. It helps your audience comprehend the content better & grasp the message easily. Companies often have formal brand guidelines, tweaking a template per design guidelines can be a win-win for your presentation. You are more likely to engage with your audience when your presentation resonates with your brand. It can be said that not everyone has a knack for presentation design.
A professional PowerPoint template will help you with consistency, branding, quick- customization while providing intuitive visual elements. You can edit the template as it pleases you. Change fonts, colours, backgrounds, slide size & layouts on the move. Inculcating a ready- to-use template in your presentation will help you save big on time and ensure superior design throughout the slides. Your job is to put quality content and you’re good to go.
Less is more:
One should understand that your slides are there to support your presentation and keep you in limelight. It should never be the other way around. The goal here is to keep your slides intuitive and not clutter them. Often we have seen presentation slides with too much text. This drastically reduces the focusing ability of your audience and takes a toll on engagement. One should not make slides overwhelming for their audience by putting in all pieces of information as it is.
One good approach is to follow the 10-20-30 rule. The revolutionary presentation rule helps presenters make sure the audience is not bored. Going by the definition, the rule says that your presentation should not feature more than 10 slides, it should not be more than 20 minutes long. And, it should feature a larger text size, probably 30. Amplifying key portions of the text helps your audience retain the information for a long time. Moreover, including high-quality and self- explanatory images in your slides can be of great worth.
Use visuals:
One of the best ways to engage with your audience is through visuals. Placing captivating visuals throughout the presentation, be it infographics, charts, graphs or images can boost engagement significantly. There are studies which show that powerful visuals can increase information retention manifolds. You should pick images which convey the message for you. One approach can be creating customized infographics. These help in conveying critical business data by enclosing it in attractive visuals.
Graphs and charts can also be used as a visual aid to make your business presentation a worthwhile experience for your audience. Since no one likes to read raw data right from the slides, you should create and include relevant charts and graphs to put a soul to the numbers. By this, you can make it easy for your audience to understand the numbers and draw conclusions. This boosts engagement since your audience now can understand the data on a glimpse.
You can also include polls, QnA’s, quizzes or feedback in your presentation. These are amazing ways to have fun with your audience and engage with them. The goal is to make your audience believe that they are a part of the presentation. When everyone feels involved, you can create the best presentation experience for them.
