Tips for delivering great presentations

Ways to Get a Connection with your Audience

In today’s digital era having good presentation skills is really important. You need effective presentation skills to present your ideas, projects, plans, strategies, and products in front of the audience or team online and offline. The goal of the presentation is to make communication between 2 or 10000 people simple, meaningful, easy to understand so that viewers, readers, or audience need to use less brain.

But like most of the other skills, presentation skill is not at all easy in the beginning. It requires one to overcome stage fear, acquire the skill to deliver the content to the audience in the most effective way. So in this blog, I will be sharing some of my learnings that have helped me to improve my presentation skills.

CDD of effective presentation

To make a presentation effective one needs to design the presentation well. Once the presentation is well designed, the content needs to be added to the presentation. The last step and the most important step is delivering the presentation in front of a targetted audience.

Tips for Designing a presentation:

1. First and foremost, one needs to understand the target audience while designing the presentation. For example, if you are presenting a technical topic to a nontechnical audience, you need to make sure to add simpler details/examples that might not need any technical expertise to understand.

2. Define the SMART objectives:
S: Your goal is direct, detailed, and meaningful.
M: Your goal is quantifiable to track the progress.
A: Your goal is realistic and you have tools to attain it.
R: Relevant — Your goal aligns with your company mission.
T: TimeBound — Your goal has a deadline.

Once you have set the objectives and know who your audience is, you can start thinking about the content.

Tips for Adding Content to a presentation:

1. If you have time T to deliver a presentation, then it is advised not to have word count greater than 120*T.
2. If you have time T to deliver a presentation, then it is good to limit the number of slides to a maximum of T/2.
3. Don’t add too much content in a slide. Try to interact and connect with your audience as much as possible.
4. In case if your presentation demands a lot of content in the slides, then don’t talk much during the presentation. Let the audience read the content from the slides.
5. If there are too many slides and you have limited time, then talk only on the key slides and email the rest of the slides to the audience.

Tips for Effective presentation delivery:

Effectively delivering the presentations is the most challenging step. This involves overcoming stage fear, connecting with the audience, and structuring the content so that your audience can understand and act upon it.

How to overcome stage fear?

1. Practice ways to calm and relax your mind and body, such as deep breathing, relaxation exercises.
2. Give up trying to be perfect and know that it is OK to make mistakes. Be natural, be yourself.
3. Shift the focus from yourself and your fear of your true purpose — contributing something of value to your audience.

How to connect with your audience?

1. When you start presenting, strong, positive body language becomes an essential tool in helping you build credibility, express your emotions, and connect with your listeners. It also helps your listeners focus more intently on you and what you’re saying.
2. Positive eye contact helps you build rapport with your audience and keeps them engaged with your presentation. It also gives them a sense of involvement and conveys your message on a personal level.
3. Keep a smile on your face. When you smile you appear to be more likable. A smile affects things and it lives around us. And when you and your audience are both smiling, you will both feel good. Resulting in a better and more persuasive talk.
4. Control your voice to the highs and lows, and be able to make it a little more dramatic so that you catch the attention of the audience.

Structuring your presentation:

Despite having great content, if it is not structured properly, there is a high chance that the presentation will be a failure. So an ideal structure for presentation should include a strong opening, body, and conclusion.

1. Opening: Opening is the most important part of your presentation as it sets the tone for the entire presentation. Introduce yourself to the audience, and clarify who you are and your relevant expertise. Set the context of the presentation. Explain the objectives and try to get the audience's attention. The opening should be around 10–15% of your overall speaking time.
2. Body: It’s the longest part of the presentation, and its purpose is to get your key points across. The organization of the body is critical because the audience needs to be able to follow what you are saying and/or doing. The body of the presentation should be around 75% of your overall speaking time.
3. Conclusion: Your conclusion should be short and concise. It should summarize or highlight the main points you made or emphasize what the audience should have learned. End the presentation with a thanking note. The conclusion should be around 10% of your overall speaking time.

That’s it. So are you ready for delivering a killer presentation???