No matter what industry you work in, chances are that you have to sit through a PowerPoint presentation from time to time. While these are not always the most exciting meetings in the world, they are an essential way to communicate valuable and crucial information to a large number of people.
But what about when you are the one up there delivering the talking points? If you don't want to bore your audience to tears, you need to find a way to jazz up this form of corporate communication. Luckily, we've got a few simple tips to help you create effective, engaging PowerPoint presentations:
- Tell a story: Before you create a presentation, think about the key points and messages you want your audience to walk away with, then build a story around those elements. Do not simply create slides with information that you click through robotically … make sure every slide has a key takeaway and a clean transition into the next slide. If there is a slide in your presentation that doesn't have a key takeaway that your audience will care about, delete it – it serves no purpose. By paying attention to key messages that follow a logical flow, you will effectively build your story throughout the presentation and keep your audience engaged.
- Support your story with facts and data: When you get the opportunity to deliver a presentation, be it your boss, a customer, or a group of coworkers, they are looking to you to provide them with information that they don't already know. That's why it's important to support your presentation (story) with facts, either from industry sources, customer research, internal data, or any other source relevant to your story. Facts and data help you establish credibility with your audience and educate them on things that are (or should be) important to them.
- Use graphs and charts to visualize data effectively: Once you compile the list of facts and data you want to include in your presentation, it's important that you communicate them in a way that won't bore your audience to death, or confuse them. That's where graphs and charts come in. To be able to point out a trend or a spike in a data set effectively, you need to use charts that clearly show what you are trying to communicate. Use line charts to highlight a rising or declining trend, pie charts to show what % of the industry your business makes up, bar charts to show how well your products sell in comparison to your competitors. Simple, easy to read charts will go a long way in keeping your audience on track with your key messages.
If you are looking for ways to be creative with data, contacting Interactive Edge is a wonderful first step! Take a look at the rest of our website to learn more about the services we offer to our clients, which will give you more time to focus on your most important business objectives.
