What makes a GREAT presentation? We’ve all seen presentations and they run the gamut from good to bad to ugly. But what goes into making a presentation GREAT? Is it the design? The content? The structure? The speaker? Let’s find out the 4 keys to great presentations for businesses.
I’d like to suggest that it’s all of those things and go even further to say that a great presentation needs all 4 key elements to be great. Just having one or two or even three of these elements is nice, but for a presentation to be GREAT, you need all 4 key elements: Content, Design, Structure and Delivery.
At CustomShow We’ve been building and delivering presentations for over a decade and at Sales Graphics for 40 years before that, so we’ve seen our share of presentations.
We’ve also seen and heard experts talk about the various elements that go into dynamic presentations and their relative merits, and we’ve learned a lot from the presenters we’ve worked with over the years.
What we’ve learned is about building a GREAT presentation isn’t easy, but it can be broken down into 4 understandable elements. And once you understand the elements, the building becomes a lot easier.
The 4 Keys to GREAT Presentations:
Content: Every presentation needs to start with the right content.
- First, have a clear message. Make sure you know what you’re trying to say, whether it’s convincing a sales prospect of the value of your product or service, a trainee of the value of learning a process or skill, an audience of the importance of your cause or an investor in the value of your idea.
- Second, support your message with thebest fonts for presentation, facts, and NPS tools. Facts can be data, NPS survey results, testimonials, photographs, or personal experience. Supporting your message gives you credibility and engages the audience on a deeper level, silencing that little voice in their heads that questions bald statements.
- Finally, curate your content. Make sure you only use what you need, what’s relevant, and what you can support. For that, you can hire any content marketing. Too much information is worse than too little. Better to engage your audience and leave them with questions than to bore or overload them so they tune out. If you have lots of data, pick the most compelling or most relevant. If you have a great personal story, whittle it down to its essentials so you can tell it concisely.
Know more about What do you Need to Think Before Designing the Presentation.
Design: Everything is designed for clarity and consistency.
- With presentation design, there is often confusion between beautiful design and effective design. While beautiful design is nice to have, it’s not essential to a creative presentation. Effective design is essential. Effective design makes your content clear, leads viewers along the path of your argument or story and reinforces your brand. Effective design looks great, but you don’t need to be an artist to create it. You just need to have a clear idea of your message, your audience and your delivery.
Here are some presentation examples for your next presentation - Just as you need to curate your content, you need to curate your visuals. Too much visual information is just as bad as too much data or a story that goes on and on. Eliminate any visual elements that don’t reinforce your message.
- Using the right tool to design your presentation is also a critical aspect that cannot be missed out on. The right tool presentation tool will help you create amazing visuals that will keep your audience engaged with the presentation.
CustomShow is a presentation design tool that empowers you to create presentations that nobody has seen before.
Check out the Sample CustomShow presentation to know more.
Structure: Everything is in its place, both in the presentation and out.
- Presentations are stories told in time, and as such they need to have a beginning, middle end. Just the fact that you start your presentation, talk for a while and then finish doesn’t count as structure, however. The work of curating and supporting your content and design elements will give you a clearer idea of how best to structure your story, and there are lots of valuable resources out there to help with picking a narrative structure.
- Presentation structure, unlike other documents or interactions, also needs to be structured with the audience in mind. A great presentation is targeted to its audience, both in terms of message and content.
Everytime you curate the structure you need to keep asking yourself these questions:
- Does the narrative speak to the experience of this audience?
- Is the call-to-action targeted to this particular audience’s needs?
- Are the data, demos, products, competitive sets, or case studies targeted for the objectives of today’s meeting instead of yesterday’s or tomorrow’s?
- The structure can also apply to your entire Library of presentation materials. If you’ve been giving any type of presentation for a while, or your company has a shared drive full of presentations, there’s a lot of available content for you to work with.
The question is whether you can find valuable and appropriate content for the presentation branding you’re working on. Applying the idea of structure and organization to not just your presentation but to your Library of previous presentations and presentation materials can be just as important as structuring your information within your presentation. Being able to efficiently find what you need and know that it’s accurate and up-to-date will make you a more effective presenter.
Read more How Snackable Content Helps Sales Teams
Delivery: It doesn’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
- All your great work on content, design and structure doesn’t mean a thing if no one sees it. Presentations aren’t merely documents or files; they are an experience shared between a presenter and their audience. A great presentation is only as good as the delivery, both by the presenter and by the presentation technology. Whether presenting in a boardroom, off an iPad, over the Web or as a print-out, the right delivery is the difference between a great presentation and, at best, a missed opportunity and, at worst, a presentation disaster. All the other elements don’t matter if the delivery doesn’t work.
- Delivery refers to how the Presenter delivers the presentation. Skills are necessary for anyone who plans on making a living from presentations or whose business depends on giving effective presentations. We’ve worked with a wide range of presentation coaches and read a lot on the subject, and taking the time to find out more about your presentation skills and how they can be improved will always return results.
- But just as important as the Presenter’s skills is the platform and technology you use to deliver your presentation. The tool you use to deliver your presentation is one of the most overlooked elements of a presentation.
- Here once again selecting the right presentation tool becomes a important as it is the sole thing that help you deliver the presentation. In early days PowerPoint used to be the go to tool for presentation. But today there are free presentation tool that offer more features and benefits than PowerPoint.
Read more 10 Free Presentation Software Alternatives - You can learn more about The Importance of Deliver
These are our 4 Keys to GREAT Presentations, and we’ve seen that only having a few of them doesn’t work. If you just have great content you have a great spreadsheet, but you don’t have a presentation. If you only have an excellent design, you have some nice art, but you don’t have a presentation. Putting it all together is what makes it a presentation.
Every good presentation is a good presentation builder that fits the intricacies and identity of your organization. At CustomShow, we believe our presentation software can do just that.
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On CustomShow you can elevate your existing presentation by simply importing the PPTx file and replacing static images with videos, helping you create Dynamic Presentations.
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