Grabbing the attention of an audience during a presentation is not easy. You have to figure out how to present your information in a way that connects to your audience without being confusing. The following are some ideas that may help improve your presentation and make it more captivating.
The Sentence
One of the most important steps to ensure that your presentation is interesting is to make sure your central idea is never lost. To that end, you are going to have to work on summarizing your entire presentation into one sentence.
This sentence needs to be treated as the North Star for the presentation to ensure that you do not lose track of your goal. One reason people lose focus is because the presentation is a little too vague, or it seems to go off on tangents. You don’t want to give your audience a reason to wander, so stay as focused as you can.
Define the Takeaways
Every presentation must have three pillars or three main takeaways. These are the points you want your audience to remember from your presentation. If the one-sentence is your North Star, these three points are your navigational tools.
Every single piece of information or story has to relate to these three points, or they probably have no business being in your presentation. Creating a captivating presentation is all about skimming the fat and being as brutal as you can, even if you think people would really benefit from whatever it is your cutting.
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Clean and Drawing Design
Refining the focus of the presentation works wonders, but that is not the only tool you have at your disposal. A big part of a presentation’s power comes from the actual visual presentation of information. It is imperative that you work on creating concise and captivating slides for the points you are making.
An easy way to get this done if you are using PowerPoint is to simply use prepared PowerPoint templates. Try to stick to templates that offer a clean, minimalist look to help ensure attention is focused on the information presented. Of course, your presentation design should also match the overall mood of the piece to keep things cohesive.
Relevance and Facts
You need to make sure you understand the way people are. The audience, for the most part, may end up losing interest if you fail to connect the facts or the stories in your presentation. Yes, every single piece of information in the presentation must be relevant to every person listening.
You want to be able to answer an audience member who says “why should this matter to me?” If there is a piece of information you don’t know how to make relevant to another person, then it is time to consider getting rid of this information or set of facts. These facts are important, but alone they are attention killers.
Be Sure to Get Personal
Another important feature a good and captivating presentation should have is a sense of personality. You need to show the passion you hold towards the subject matter. Let it come out in your voice, your mannerisms, and in the way you present the work. Showing your personality doesn’t always have to be entertaining; sometimes, it could be touching or evocative.
The key here is to find a way to make sure you interject moments of depth using the right image or the right personal story as long as you make sure that any of these additions still follow some of the aforementioned ideas. One of the dangers of getting too passionate is that you can easily lose yourself and go off tangents, so make sure you tread lightly.
These are just some things that can help improve your presentation, and make it captivating. Of course, there are other little tricks to use, like making sure you’ve got a few shock figures or additions.
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Allow your voice to alternate between low, high, quick, and slow. Make sure you find ways to interact with audience members, even if it is just looking at them.
Hopefully, this information is helpful and your presentation goes as smoothly as possible.
