How to Give a Powerful Presentation

Presentations are often the ultimate opportunity to put across concepts and ideas in a manner that is engaging and fully convincing to your target audience. As such, it’s always a great idea to follow the guidelines of a professionally designed presentation template to ensure that you cover all the essential details that will help you put the idea across appealingly and adequately.

A good PowerPoint template, for instance, will feature the ideal color range, background design, and text format which can grab the attention of your audience and communicate effectively. In this article, we are going to explore how you can beef up your presentation with powerful tools and features such as Google Slides Templates and lots more!

So, what makes a powerful presentation?

Getting your audience interested in what you have to say is just the start. Every presentation requires several features to make it a success, the main ones being: develop your ideas in an organized order, pay close attention to detail and ALWAYS present with confidence. Let’s take a look at these key points:

Order

Many good ideas, whether business or academic ones, failed to convince the audience that they were presented to simply due to a lack of order. As such, a powerful presentation should always be well-organized in a way that can deliver the idea or concept to the audience gradually. Each slide or phase should build on its predecessors hence giving the presentation a traceable progression.
To achieve this sensible order, simply establish first the key points that you want to include in your presentation. These points should essentially cover the core idea behind your presentation fully. Once you establish those points, they become your talking points, and you can divide them into smaller and easy-to-understand segments. These segments then become your slides, and each segment will present a further development of your idea or concept from start to finish.

Detail

The last thing you need when making a presentation is to leave your audience perplexed as to the validity of your idea. This can be avoided by simply paying attention to the presentation detail. Research your idea thoroughly and provide factual, irrefutable facts that will eliminate any doubt from your audience. It’s also critical to keep the details simple so that they can be easily understood. If the concept is quite complex, use easily relatable details, examples, and simulations to put it across.

Confidence

Now, this is often the tricky part for most presenters. Confidence is one of the key components of a good presentation that can tie it all up and help you to convince the audience. The best way to ensure that you present the idea confidently is through mastery of your facts and a flawless presentation system. How? Simply familiarize yourself with the finer details of your presentation and ensure that everything is in place before the big moment.
Lack of confidence when presenting something often stems from the realization that you don’t have the facts on your fingertips. After all, how can you convince someone on a topic or idea that you don’t fully comprehend yourself? Your confidence will also suffer heavy blows if your presentation is visually unappealing simply because it will fail to grasp the attention of your audience in a very obvious manner such as distracted audience members, sleepy ones, and even the ones who exit midway.

How can I design a powerful presentation?

If you’re setting out to convince an audience with a presentation, there are a number of design features that can make it powerful enough to convince as mentioned briefly earlier. The visual appeal takes a lead in this simply because it provides the first impression to your audience before you can even utter a single word on your topic. You can consider the design features of your presentation as an appealing cover dressing that will intrigue and command attention from everyone in attendance.

Presentation templates come in very handy in ensuring a powerful design that can help you create your presentation without having to think about designing it. These templates are ready to use for whatever idea you have in mind. They can be customized easily to suit your particular brand or concept in several subliminal yet highly effective ways such as color schemes, conceptual graphics, and lettering. If you’re looking to create your presentation easily and professionally, Presentation templates are easily editable even by amateurs with no design experience using convenient tools or applications such as PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Illustrator.

While words on a presentation are ideal for communicating the basic idea or topic of discussion, repetitive use of text can easily bore your audience. Instead, spice up the slides with visual candy such as charts, diagrams, and even 3D simulations. This will pique the interest of your audience and provide a versatile ‘show’ that demonstrates creativity and ingenuity. Presentation templates are designed to cater for all such multimedia, all you have to do is add it where you deem appropriate during the slide show.

Delivering the Presentation

Once all you need is in place, it’s time to work on your delivery. Your delivery can either warm your audience up to the idea that is being presented or repulse them into rejecting it outright. Here are a few pointers to help you win hearts on the day:

Make a Powerful Intro

Remember the importance of first impressions? Well, your intro is your first chance to hook your audience. Studies have shown that people generally give presenters about 7 seconds before they make conclusions in their minds about them. As such, take your time drafting it, making sure that you drive the main concept behind your idea home in the first few seconds. The intro will also set the tone for the whole presentation. Once you get them excited, the going will definitely be smooth.

Be Relatable

Even though presentations are often about displaying your knowledge and expertise on the subject topic, people generally reject know-it-all vibes. As such, make yourself relatable to your audience by acknowledging your shortcomings, mistakes, and challenges just like every other person. The important thing is to demonstrate that you have put so much effort and research into the subject NOT that you know everything about it.

Engage With Your Audience

Since presentations are meant to convince the audience on a particular concept, it’s important to engage directly and intrigue their minds into thinking along specific lines of thoughts. This can be done by asking questions, both serious and rhetorical. These questions will prompt the audience to actually give serious thought to your idea and see things from your desired perspective, all of which works in your favor. It also, therefore, enables you to then answer those very questions as part of the presentation, hence proving your competency on the subject or the validity of your idea/concept.

As we wind up, it’s important to note that no human is ever perfect, and nobody expects you to be so while presenting. If you slip-up or err during the process, simply acknowledge it and pick up from where you erred. You can even joke around a bit about the slip-up to add a zest of humor and lighten the mood, it will only make you even more relatable to your audience! You should also be able to read your audience and adjust your presentation techniques accordingly. For instance, if your audience is less familiar with your concept, tone down the technical jargon and use more commonly understood terms. If it’s a learned crowd, crank up the floweriness and tickle those learned minds!

Lastly, avoid boring your audience by droning on and on like an old country song. Rather, swoop in, unravel your concept concisely in the shortest possible timeframe, and bow out while everyone is still intrigued and attentive. Good luck!