Three Tips to Ace Your PowerPoint Presentations

Before you go ahead and deliver your next presentation, you must understand how you can effectively convey your message and capture your audience’s attention. 

We have put together three checks of an effective PowerPoint presentation that will help you deliver engaging and impactful presentations. Let’s check them out. 

Know Your Audience

Before you start making your presentation, think about the audience and their interests, language preference, and intellectual level. Find out the audience’s values, interests, and beliefs, and remember that the audience is as important a factor to presentation success as you are. If you successfully adapt your presentation to the audience’s interests, you get one step closer to delivering a winning presentation.

This question bank will help you understand your audience. Before you make a presentation, ask yourself

  • Who is going to be there? (education, age, experience, background, presumptions/biases, occupation, etc.)
  • Why are they going to be there? (motivation)
  • What’s in it for them? Why should they pay attention to what you have to say?
  • Do they have some pre-existing knowledge about your topic?
  • Will they understand the jargon, industry terms, and expressions?
  • What types of questions are they likely to ask?

Asking such questions will help you focus on your core message. These questions will ensure that your presentation is relevant to your audience.

Know Your Message

After you have figured out your audience, the next step is to think about your presentation’s core message. Think about your objective and what you want the audience to take away with them.

The simplest way to understand this is to think about what you want your audience members to say if you were to ask them to summarize the whole presentation after you are done presenting. Once you have got this summary/gist written down, try to work backward and find how you can achieve this.

Ask the following questions to develop a key-message framework:

  • What is your goal?
  • Are you trying to emphasize and share some information with a target group, circulate awareness about a cause, or trying to sell a product to them?

Once you are clear about this, frame the presentation keeping the key message in mind.

Next, arrange and split your talking points into separate PowerPoint slides to frame the whole presentation structure. Ensure that you remember the first check, i.e., your audience. 

Know Your Environment

This check relates to the environment of your presentation. The environment in which you deliver your presentation has an immense impact on your presentation’s appearance, readability, and overall look and feel.

Factors like the lighting in the room, projector alignment and quality, aspect ratio, screen size, room size, audience size, sound quality, and medium of communication (offline/online) can make or break your presentation. 

Audience size is also important. Are you presenting to 100 people or 1000? What is the size of the room, and where is the audience sitting? The people at the far back may not hear you or read what you have on display. 

Therefore, you must play safe, as most of these factors are unpredictable. Here are some of the best practices that will help you ace your presentations in any environment:

  • Use a classic typeface and get rid of the fancy fonts, as they are harder to read.
  • Don’t use bright blue and bright red on the same PowerPoint slide. It strains the eyes.
  • Don’t use low-resolution pictures, they appear to be distorted when displayed on big screens, especially on projector screens.
  • Don’t overload your PowerPoint slides. This will make them appear messy and incomprehensible. Your content must be short and easy to read. Use icons, silhouettes, or infographics to convey the same message engagingly.

THE LAST STEP:

After you have figured out your audience, finalized your core message, and made changes to your content while keeping the environment in mind, it is now time to up the ante.

The next step is designing your PowerPoint presentation in a way that engages your audience. You can use PowerPoint templates to achieve this feat.

SlideUpLift has a vast collection of PowerPoint templates to meet all your presentation needs. The PowerPoint templates at SlideUpLift are powered by vision science principles and crafted by industry professionals adept at PowerPoint design. They have a varied collection of PowerPoint templates that you can use to liven up your presentations.

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