Whether you are selling your services, giving a keynote, empowering others, or sharing your expertise to a live audience, you need to be a persuasive presenter. And, PowerPoint presentations can help you become so.
If statistics from Microsoft are to be believed, over 30 million presentations are created every day. You can call it the handy way for not- so-techy people who want to showcase something important over slides.
But, let’s accept this,: making a persuasive presentation is no easy task. You end up creating unimpressive and poorly formatted slides.
The good news is you can create an impressive presentation that appeals to your audience with some great tried-and-tested tips:
Keep Things Minimum and Simple:
Keep in mind that less is more, and use things that are important. Keep your focus on delivering the message not only on the slides. Also, aim to use short, on-point and simple content so that people pay attention to what you are offering.
Don’t overload slides with different fonts and color, instead stick to basics; you can even use a custom-made PowerPoint presentation template to create consistent presentations easily. Use no more than two standard fonts, and all headings, sub-headings, and content should be the same font, respectively. If you are using images, use one size format to make them look cohesive and clean.
Get Familiar With Tools:
Make yourself comfortable with the tools and other commands; you should know how they can help you create an effective presentation. PowerPoint contains a toolbar or ribbon, situated at the top of the application. The ribbon is then organized in tabs with each tab having the related tools.
For instance, in Insert tab, you will find actions that users need like inserting images or fonts in slides. So, before jumping into the designing process, take some time to explore the ribbon. This will help you become familiar with the tools that can help you in the presentation.
Use Multimedia:
Multimedia slides make things more engaging and also keep listeners stuck to the presentation. Here’s how multimedia can help:
- Shapes: Crop images that you want to insert and put them in the pre-defined shapes. This will make the presentation visually appealing, thereby drawing the audience’s attention to the information you want to show.
- Use Music in The Background: Unless you are giving a formal presentation, consider punching up things with some tunes. You can also add audio for a specific point in your presentation to make your slides more interesting. Just keep in mind that playing music is not appropriate for all presentations and be mindful of who you are presenting to.
- Screenshots: A PowerPoint is one of the power tools to bring all office documents, data, reports, and other media together. Also, when you have more than 20 slides, importing files can become difficult and quite tedious. Hence, to ease the time spend on importing images, you can use the built-in screenshot button to speed up the slide creation.
- Embedded Videos: Whether you want to use a full video or just want to add a clip from the famous video, find it and embed it in your presentation.
Don’t Forget The Audience:
The things you choose will always have a significant impact on your overall presentation. To ensure that you are including useful and relevant information, know your audience. Think of the people whom you want to represent. This way, you will can speak more about what they like and hear. Try to put things from their mindset and perspective, and then make changes.
Stick To One Idea per Slide:
To clearly showcase your business goals, make sure you use one slide for one idea. This way, you can minimize the chance of getting your audience distracted from what you are presenting.
A powerful presentation is all about impressions; so keep the above tips in mind and create something that is impactful and impressive!
