Most of the PowerPoint presentations are too-text heavy and speakers generally read them off. We all have sat through poorly designed PowerPoint presentations which often cause a phenomenon called ‘death by PowerPoint’. Your presentation can either make your deal or break it. Well-designed slides when used sparingly with perfect timing can be a complete game-changer for your presentation goals. Especially for entrepreneurs, your PowerPoint presentations should be moving. You can’t walk into a room full of investors with a bunch of slides and expect to fund your new idea. When creating a presentation, one should make sure it stands out from the crowd. There is a real need for presentations which are unique, engaging and relevant in the market. Be it online meetings, all-hands meetings or seminars your PowerPoint presentation needs to be going places.
Always remember that your slides are there to support your speech and not replace it. You should build your slides last and first focus on gathering content, deciding the layout etc. If your slides are not engaging sooner or later boredom will prevail in your audience. You should not let PowerPoint decide how you want to use it for creating your presentation. There are a number of things which you can follow to create amazing and captivating PowerPoint presentations. Moreover, not everybody has a knack for design, but that doesn’t mean your presentation should look cliche or boring. In this post, we will talk about several tips which can help you design amazing PowerPoint presentations while making sure it engages with your audience. At the end of the day, your presentation should be able to get your message across the audience effectively and clearly.
Know your audience:
Not every audience is the same. One should understand that before you even start creating a presentation or brainstorm about layouts, you should gather information about the audience. When you analyse your audience, you can use the findings to establish a common ground between them and your presentation. This step is necessary to step inside the minds of your audience and see your presentation from their perspective. Once you’re clear about the expectations and beliefs of your audience, you can create a presentation which might align more with them. You can only empathize with your audience when you know them.
Keeping the slides consistent:
For your presentation to look professional, consistency in slides plays an imperative role. Be its fonts, colours, graphical styles, it all needs to be consistent. Whatever style you choose for your presentation, your slides must encompass consistent assimilation of visual elements. When you have different visual styles in different slides, it can be pretty jarring and distracting for your audience. A consistent presentation design flow makes things much easier. It will also help your audience understand and grasp the subject matter. Having clutter or inconsistency in design is like communicating with your audience in several languages. Consistency in design eliminates confusion, it increases the clarity of the subject, eliminates friction and provides a smooth presentation experience, respectively.
Use PowerPoint templates:
A beautiful PowerPoint template can be your choice for a perfect layout. A ready to use PowerPoint template design assists a presentation with rich visual appeal and professionalism. You can use a template to make your presentation more engaging and fit for your high-level business meetings. Gone are the days when you could simply read off text from the slides. The audience of today expects you to deliver a visually rich presentation experience backed by facts and numbers. This is how a presentation becomes eye capturing and out of the box. Templates often come with graphs and charts which can be used to depict numbers and analytical data in the best possible manner. Having graphs and charts in your slides can make content a lot more interesting and provide a much-needed comprehensive view of data to your audience.
The 6×6 Rule:
People generally clutter their slides with too much information and ideas. This makes it very difficult for your audience to get a good grasp of information and retain it. You can use the 6×6 rule while creating your presentation to keep your slides look clean and concise. The rule simply means that there should not be more than six bullet points per slide and every point should not contain more than six words. Less is always more. You should try to trim text as much as possible and present only key information in your slides. One should note that as a speaker you will be delivering content and information, so not putting everything in your slides makes much more sense. Only present the core message and key phrases in your slides to grab their attention while you narrate.
High Quality Visuals:
We all have heard that an image speaks a thousand words. Keeping relevant high-quality images, infographics, charts and graphs can suffice for less text in your slides. The goal is to enrich the minds of your audience but in an engaging manner. Pictures evoke emotions and make people listen to you more seriously. Visuals help your audience remember & store information for a longer period of time, it makes communication quick and simple while ensuring better comprehension of the presentation subject. Not just that, attractive visuals act as a simulator for emotions. Thus, help create strong impressions and lasting memories amid your audience. Presentations containing text balanced with engaging visuals are more likely to do better in front of your stakeholders, executives and target audience. High-quality infographics can be a game-changer for your presentation.
In the end, your presentation should convey the message right and cast out a persuasive call to action. A slide or two in the last should quickly summarize your topic and key points should be resurfaced to refresh the memory of your audience. Your presentation is all about the impressions it gives out. Professional looking slides backed by customized content can be a win-win for your presentation goals.
