Whether you have to present in a business meeting or conference, share an idea in front of colleagues or pitch your product or service to some potential buyers, presentations prove to be great tools of communication and sharing your ideas and information in an effective way. By incorporating images, videos, and many other kinds of graphics, you can make your textual presentations more appealing and attention-grabbing for the listeners. Still, many presenters fail to prepare and design interactive and killer presentations. They may end up stacking their slides with inefficient, and long texts, fuzzy images, and inappropriately arranged content.
You don’t need to be an expert in public speaking or designing the slides to craft compelling presentations. Most presentation tools offer all the necessary elements for creating eye-catching presentations (PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, etc.). You just need to follow some actionable below-mentioned tips to get your audience hooked and deliver your message more productively. But before that, here are some characteristics of a killer PowerPoint presentation.
Key Elements of a Killer Presentation
Sometimes very basic yet crucial aspects of something can enhance its impact and make it more goal-oriented. We will mention PowerPoint presentations because Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most used presentation tools, and sometimes used as a synonym of “presentations” or slideshows where slides is one of the core elements of the presentation where you present your concepts and content. However, the same concepts here apply to other presentation tools like Google Slides or Canva presentations, which shares the same concept of slides when presenting your slideshow.
PowerPoint presentations need special attention while you try to deliver your message and obtain your communication goals. Your presentation should be a tool to compliment your message and your crafted story. Your slides should not act as distractions for the audience. They should be cohesive, relevant, and integrated with the words coming out of your mouth. Here are some features of a powerful presentation:
Killer Presentations Have a Clear Objective
No presentation is developed without an objetive and goal. There may exist multiple reasons for designing and delivering a presentation like informing your audience about something useful, convincing a buyer to purchase something from you or persuading a potential investor to invest in your business, etc. Whatever the goal it aims for, you need to research the relevant content, organize your data and information, and present your message professionally. Only this way, you will be able to persuade your desired target audience to respond to your message.
Start by defining the purpose of your presentation. Whether it’s to inform, persuade, inspire, or entertain, your objective should guide the structure and content.
Killer Presentations Have a Strong Structure and Flow
A killer presentation has a logical flow that is planned beforehand. It should have a clear introduction, body, and conclusion, with smooth transitions between points to keep the audience engaged.
When making a presentation, take a time to plan the structure and flow of the presentation taking in mind who will be the audience and the key points that you want to present. To plan your structure, you can use your own knowledge on the topic or get support from AI generated presentations. By leveraging ChatGPT or Gemini, you can generate the structure of your presentation and use it as a base. You can also use SlideModel AI Presentation Maker to generate a base structure for your presentation (and its content).
Killer Presentations Have Compelling Content
Content is king. Your presentation should have a strong opening, informative body, and a memorable conclusion. Use stories, examples, facts, and figures to make your points clear and persuasive.
Avoid errors and typos. If there exist any loopholes, and mistakes in your presentation, it will lessen the attention span of your audience and you may end up with distracted listeners. Double-check for Typos, inelegant clip arts, and unnecessary stylish fonts for the text. The way you present your message can be decisive in convincing the potential listener to respond to your call to action (CTA).
Killer Presentations Have Great Visuals
A good PowerPoint is designed and arranged keeping in mind the needs, wants, and requirements of the potential audience and the corresponding presentation topic. Use infographics to blend the complex data with engaging visuals. Make your slides more lively by reducing the text in the favor of graphics. The visuals should also not be much complex as this may divert the attention of the listeners and the ultimate objective of your speech may not be achieved. Proper placement with appropriate clarity and message being delivered are pivotal in making your graphics more appealing to any listener.
Use high-quality visuals, including images, charts, and videos, to complement your message. Aesthetic consistency in fonts, colors, and layout helps in maintaining professional appeal and enhancing readability.
Killer Presentations are Simple
You don’t need to make a very complex presentation to succeed. In fact, most successful presentations are simple. The Rule Keep it Simple is important. Keep simplicity in mind when making a presentation or designing it. Check out some of the simple presentations out there, with examples like the ones delivered by Steve Jobs when introducing the iPhone.
Avoid cluttering slides with too much text or complex visuals. Stick to the essence of your message and use the Less is more principle to keep your audience’s attention.
Why are so many PowerPoint presentations boring?
There can be many reasons behind boring presentations that don’t engage readers and are ineffective in achieving desired results. However, the two most vital reasons are given below.
1. They contain too much text
You may consider adding more text to your slides to make your presentation more inclusive and informative, right? You may also consider it necessary to include bullets, and paragraphs in the entire structure of your presentation for impressing your audience with your in-depth knowledge and expertise. Actually, it is not a recommended and effective practice.
One of the primary aspects that make your presentation boring is overcrowded and data-stuffed slides that decrease the interest of the listeners as they are unable to digest this huge, and stacked pile of information. Less clutter and more white space will make your presentation more engaging and legible.
2. They don’t have enough graphics
Graphics and visual aids add to the appeal and engagement of the slides in your presentation. They help you deliver your message in a way that is aligned with human psychology. PowerPoint allows you to add many kinds of visual slides like images, graphs, infographics, videos, clipart, and more so that you can use a storytelling approach to convey your ideas and concepts effectively. Research at 3M came up with a result that images and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than textual information and data. This proves the importance of proper images and visuals being included in your slides so that you may get success in delivering your desired piece of knowledge and information.
Where can you find the best, premade, and Free PowerPoint Templates for your presentations?
Sometimes you may not have the time or expertise to design and develop a professional PowerPoint presentation suited to your business needs. Not everyone is an expert designer in making compelling presentations. So is there a way to avoid making PowerPoint presentations all by yourself? Can you get premade and free professionally crafted PowerPoint templates? There are plenty of websites offering pre-designed templates for presentations. You can get find websites to download free presentation templates compatible with PowerPoint and Google Slides or access to a huge catalog of free templates on SlideHunter instead.
These sites contains thousands of pre-made PowerPoint templates, download them with a single click (most of them don´t require you to sign up) and edit them easily with no prior experience in designing PowerPoint presentations.
This process saves you not only a considerable amount of time that you may need to spend in developing your presentation from scratch but also monetary resources that may get consumed in paying a professional designer to develop your presentation for you.
Apart from reusing PowerPoint Templates, you can learn more on a wide range of topics like Project Management, Product Development, Public Speaking, Business Tips, Effective PowerPoint presentations techniques, and much more so that you can stay informed regarding the latest trends and patterns in the business world and market dynamics. Our blog with PowerPoint tutorials is a good starting point to learn more about these topics.
10 Actionable Tips for Attention-grabbing PowerPoint Slide Presentations
Have you considered the goal of your presentation before developing your first slide? What does your audience want to listen to? In order to sound more persuasive at the stage and make a killer presentation that achieves its objectives effectively, here are some actionable tips for you to follow, and implement.
1. Avoid the usage of excessive text
The usage of too much text in your slide presentation can prove to be misleading for listeners. Your slides act as tools for supporting your speech and reinforcing the arguments that you are presenting orally. They should not be comprehensive enough that the audience diverts its attention from your actual speech and starts reading your slides. Your slides should represent the summary of the content that you are talking about. They should contain relevant images, graphs, tables, videos, and infographics to support your ideas and concepts. Pictures are powerful enough to effectively communicate ideas and deliver your message to the respective audience. That is why you need to avoid the excessive usage of text in your slide and leverage the graphics and visuals to the maximum extent because a picture is worth a thousand words.
2. Use bullets smartly
Bullets are the elements in your PowerPoint presentations that allow you to segregate your comprehensive and complex data into digestible chunks of information to be shown to the listeners. They are used mostly to simplify concepts and convey the desired information in a more understandable way. Try using no more than 5 bullets in a single as their usage will lead to distraction of the listeners. They may start reading the bullet points instead of paying attention to what you are saying during the presentation. So, to preserve the ultimate purpose of the presentation, you need to be smart regarding the usage of bullets in your slides. You can use different icons and visuals for bullets with respect to different topics and aspects of the content of your presentation. Try using tools like animation in your PowerPoint application software to show one bullet at a time to maintain the focus of your listeners. When you have thoroughly explained a specific topic regarding your bullet, you can make the next bullet appear, explain it completely, and so on. Don’t use complete sentences in your bullets. Instead, write short phrases and explain them yourself while you present.
3. Use the storytelling approach
You can leave a significant impact on your audience if you make them feel connected to the content that you are speaking about. When the listeners are psychologically engaged with your speech, their response to your desired message can be marvelous. Don’t limit the scope of your presentation. Use relatable examples and scenarios to justify your points and use analogies for conveying your ideas efficiently. Just like a story, start your presentation with an introduction, some supporting arguments in the middle, and a reasonable conclusion in the end with a prospective Call-to-action (CTA).
4. Be frank and sometimes, even amusing
You don’t need to present your ideas and concepts in a tense environment. Try using amusing scenarios and analogies in your presentation as carriers to deliver your desired messages productively. You can share some real-life funny experiences of yourself that are relevant to the topic and devoid of any racist or offensive remarks. This will make your audience feel at ease and they will become more responsive to your speech and their attention span will also increase. Try using funny videos, memes, GIFs, or a combination of these elements in your presentation to avoid boringness in your content and sound more active and cheerful while you present your slides.
5. Say less and show more
Sometimes visual aids become more relevant than your oral speech in your presentations. Stay to the Less is More principle. After all, slides are all about visuals and graphics that are meant to reinforce the words coming out of your mouth. For example, if you are pitching a product to potential buyers, show them the pictures of the product itself instead of just telling them about the features and different advantages of using the product. Show them the design, the color, and other aspects of the product so that the listener may analyze the product visually and understand your points easily by making a relation with the pictures being shown. If you are pitching a website, open the link of that website directly while presenting and show them the characteristics and attributes of your website in real-time. This will leave a far better impact on your audience than just explaining the information, ideas, and concepts related to your presentation topic.
6. Metaphors can come in handy in many situations
A figure of speech that helps in making a comparison between two non-similar things is known as a metaphor. The purpose here is to make an analogy between two objects, ideas, or situations to make your points clearer and more understandable. For example, if you are trying to explain the journey of a successful employee, you can show a picture of a mountaineer climbing a hill to reach its top and depict different hardships and calamities that he faces during his journey. You can also mention different measures adopted by that person to reach its destination so that the audience can relate the scenario to the actual topic of the presentation and understand your arguments more conveniently.
7. Use SmartArt Option in PowerPoint while presenting your data
PowerPoint is a great tool for presenters as it allows its users to leverage multiple techniques and methods to engage their listeners with creative measures. One of such techniques is using the SmartArt option available in PowerPoint for developing your presentation and presenting your factual information and data more smartly. You can use SmartArt instead of bullets also to make your present graphics rich and visually appealing. By using SmartArt, you can mimic explainer videos while presenting your slides.
8. Use font sizes and styles wisely
Appropriate font sizes and styles are very important in your slides as your viewers notice every detail of your content and get influenced by it unconsciously. You can use a variety of fonts in your presentation but don’t use complex and hard-to-read fonts. The font style should be legible enough that every person in the room can read it easily and understand the meaning of your words. You can highlight some of the text in your presentation and even enlarge the size of some words to emphasize your desired points and areas. Whatever font or size scheme you use, make sure that you are consistent in your strategy throughout the presentation to facilitate your audience.
9. Incorporate animations and transitions
Transitions can be considered as animation-like effects that appear when on your slides when you move from one slide to another. The movement of slides and their changing mechanism is animated here by using different effects available in PowerPoint like fading, cutting, pushing and revealing, and so on. You don’t need to implement more than three types of transition effects in your slides. Just like transitions, another option named “Animation” in PowerPoint allows you to animate different elements within your slides like texts, bullets, and other visuals. The appearance of your slides gets improved in this way and you make your presentation more catchy. But, don’t over-use these animations as their excessive implementation may result in confusion and annoyance among the listeners.
10. Use high-quality PowerPoint templates with updated designs and features
If you are using a template that has a very basic design and outdated structural arrangement, you may end up disappointing yourself as no one will pay attention to your speech. The usage of the latest yet high-quality PowerPoint templates is necessary to cater to the latest needs and requirements of the audience. Use a website like Free PowerPoint Templates that crafts professional and compelling PowerPoint templates related to hot business and other topics. You don’t need to spend your precious time on low-quality, relatively expensive websites that don’t value your custom requirements and offer much less than the aforementioned ones. When you have a great and free website in hand, why go to another source to fulfilling your needs?
Conclusions
Designing and presenting a Powerful PowerPoint presentation is not as difficult a task as someone might presume. You just need to follow proper strategies suggested by expertise and industry leaders in this regard and align your presentations accordingly.
Your presentation slides should be well-designed, devoid of errors, and readable from every angle of the room you are going to present. By using less text, more images and visual slides, and engaging animations and transitions, you can take your presentation to the next level where your engagement rate is super-enhanced and you deliver your message much more effectively.
Apart from these techniques, the aforementioned 10 actionable tips can also prove to be vital in your marketing and business strategies while you pitch your products or services, seek investments or pursue any academic or business goals through PowerPoint presentations.
