The prospect of hosting a meeting or preparing a presentation can definitely seem daunting the first time. Even if you’re a veteran but haven’t done it in a while and just need a refresher, the thought of so many people looking at something you’ve made would be enough to give anyone anxiety. That’s why we’ve put together an easy guide to make sure your slides have the intended impact with minimal stress.
Step 1: Organize the information.
You can’t make an impact, as business owner, when throwing all your information at your audience in one unorganized chunk. Organizing the information you want to convey will make it easier to understand and can also help when presenting so you do not get lost if asked a question.
If you have a pre-written word document, you can start by re-reading it and seeing how it can be divided into smaller parts, which will then be turned into slides with their own titles and pictures added later. If you’re not starting from a document, then think of what you want to convey and do the needed research first.
Something that isn’t often mentioned when talking about presenting is that not everything you’ll talk about will be on those slides you worked so hard on. Many people making business presentations have only the main topics on the slides, while improvising around a few key sidenotes that they’ve written down or memorized.
If it’s your first presentation, you might not be comfortable improvising too much. However, questions can come up and you’ll need to be ready for them. Think of what questions could be asked and either proactively address them in your main slides, or write down possible answers. You can even use a decision tree creator to easily organize here.
Step 2: Structure the Presentation
A good way to jump start a presentation when working from scratch is to start with the agenda contents, so you know the main topics to research or present, as well as the number of slides you’ll have to work with. This will already give your presentation a better structure.
Depending on the topic, make sure not to make too many slides, as it can lead to viewer attention fatigue. A general rule of thumb should be not to have more than 10 slides. If you do, then it might be worth considering to summarize the content.
This is the general structure any presentation should have:
- Introduction: this is the title and the agenda slides that shows the contents.
- Middle slides: This is where you’ll have most of your content. The information needs to logically flow from one topic to the other.
- End slides: Here you’ll usually include a call to action and take-away slide to serve as a quick recap and also explain how the information you gave them applies to their day-to-day life.
This is where your presentation will start taking form. Don’t stress too much about the theme or color yet. Focus on just including the information you’ve organized previously into bite-sized chunks while keeping a look out for places where pictures or graphs would be appropriate.
Step 3: Choose the Theme
After you have a bare-bones presentation with just texts and some graphs or pictures, it’s time to think about the look you want to give it. It might seem counterintuitive to do this after writing the text, but we need to keep in mind that the layout, font, theme and every picture and eye candy you’ve included will serve to create a feeling.
This feeling is what the viewers will associate with the topic discussed and it is as important as the actual content of the presentation. This is why we need to make sure to set some time aside to think what is the impression we want them to have and find visual cues that can facilitate that.
This might mean choosing other graphs or pictures, or removing some entirely to make space for more or bigger text. It might even mean removing some text to add more visual cues. Whichever it might be, you’ll need to imagine you are the viewer and follow the feeling you want to create.
Step 4: Practice! Practice! Practice!
As they say, practice makes perfect and the more you exercise your presentation skills the easier it will be for you. You can also try rehearsing in front of an audience or recording yourself and then analyzing to see what you can improve.
If at the previous step you were channeling your inner artist to view it from a feeling perspective, now we’re switching the lens to communication. Here, it doesn’t matter what you say, it matters how you say it.
This doesn’t mean you can say everything you want and get away with it. But it does mean that if you get into a flow and are able to direct the viewer’s attention you can cover for some mistakes made in the presentation. If you feel that there are some things that seem to work on paper but not out loud, don’t hesitate to take them out or rephrase them.
Conclusion
Making a presentation can seem like a terrifying monster but with the proper preparation you can be well equipped to slay it. There is no such thing as a perfect presentation and everyone has their own style of holding one. Like with anything, doing the needed work will ensure you can take on any challenge that comes your way!
