4 Tips for a Great Business Presentation

17th February 2021

A well-prepared presentation will be know how to look confident and be remembered by the audience for years to come. The converse is also true: listeners will instantly forget an unstructured visual accompaniment, even if you provide a high-quality content such as National Casino bonuses. To make your presentation better, follow these tips.

Highlight the Main Point

Presentations should not look like a brief retelling of the oral presentation. A common mistake is placing complete sentences on a slide. Because of this, the attention of the audience is weakened: it is difficult to read the text and listen to the speaker at the same time. 

Using such a technique is risky both at a meeting with the management and at a speech in front of a large audience. If there is a voluminous and meaningful text fragment on a slide, the boss can read it faster than the speaker has time to speak. And the boss will be right in his own way when he asks to go to the next slide. At a speech in front of a large audience, not all viewers will look at the small text, and they will be annoyed. 

For a presentation to help the speaker hold the audience’s attention, you should put a minimum of key data on the presentation slides. When it comes to text, lists are best perceived. A common “6×6” rule states that on a slide, one list consists of 6 paragraphs at most, and one paragraph consists of 6 words at most.

Consider the Importance of Blocks

An important point that is often underestimated when preparing a presentation is the transition between slides. When the speaker switches to the next slide, the audience needs to intellectually engage and make sense of the data presented on the screen. For a few moments, the audience is more engaged with the visual information than the auditory information. Simply put, for a few seconds the audience stops listening to the speaker to read the data from the slide.

Because of this, it is a gross mistake to place information blocks on a slide in a random sequence. With each switching of slides the audience will have to understand the flow of information for a long time and, accordingly, do not listen to the speaker for a long time. To keep the audience engaged in the narrative, use the traditional order of blocks, depending on their priority.

Maintain Consistency

When you write the text for your presentation, keep the narrative consistent. This is important because it is easier for audiences to absorb and remember information that is organized as one big story. If you leave abrupt transitions from one topic to another in the text, the speaker will lose some listeners at each transition. 

The same rule applies to the visual part of the presentation. Although the slides differ from each other in informational content, they must be interrelated.

If the first three blocks have textual information and the last two blocks have visual information, it will be difficult for the audience to grasp the relationship between the diagrams and texts shown several slides ago. 

Accordingly, when preparing your presentation text, you should think in advance about what the slide for each text block will look like. Observe the order of slides with text and visual data, and the audience will follow the presentation more closely.

Add Professional Images

The human memory is designed to remember bad experiences better than good ones. This is a legacy of our primitive ancestors, for whom avoiding repeated negative experiences was a matter of survival. This peculiarity should be taken into account when preparing the visual part of the presentation. A well-constructed speech and a properly chosen color scheme will be forgotten faster than a single poor-quality photograph.

The selection of images is critical because human perception is optimized for the assimilation of visual information. Even if a single photo is used in the entire presentation, you should find a quality photo created by a professional. 

When preparing speeches, the speaker spends a lot of resources, both emotional and time. Since the basis of the speech is a speech, the work begins with writing the text. The presentation is prepared last, and often the speaker does not have enough time to think long and hard about filling in the slides. Using the above six rules, you will make a presentation quickly enough, spending a minimum of mental effort. And, most importantly, the visual support of the presentation will help convey the idea to any audience.