Presentations, pitches, and speeches are all important tools for promoting your business. You are the face of your brand and naturally, you want to portray your brand in a good light. So how do you create an effective presentation?
1. Plan
The key to success is planning. That’s basically half of the job done. In order to give a good presentation, you need to plan it out.
Just imagine you have an opportunity to present a new product or service to a bunch of people. Those people are either potential customers or potential investors so you want your presentation to go down well. Without a plan, you run the risk of not only rambling on but of missing out on crucial information that may be the make or break in a sale.
With a plan, you can make sure that your presentation is straight to the point, engaging, and that you convey all the information that you want to.
Think of the plan almost like a story. You need to have an engaging beginning, jam-packed middle, and strong ending.
2. Timing
This kind of ties in with planning. Presentations usually should only go on for a certain amount of time. As a start-up, your presentations are likely to be short so they need to be memorable.
Naturally, in your plan, you may want to include a lot of information but that can make a presentation excessively long. If the audience isn’t listening, you may as well not be saying anything at all. This is why timing is crucial.
You should be able to say everything you need to in ten minutes, but obviously, each presentation is different so plan the timing as per your time slot.
In a lot of presentations, you are allowed to have some slides going in the background as a visual aid. These are great to assist with timing. If you have ten minutes to present, you could plan a slide per minute. That’ll help you keep focused with prompts and keep you moving forwards. Without prompts, it can be easy to lose track of time or lose focus on the topic.
3. Visuals
The best thing about presentations are engaging visuals. These are usually in the form of slides on a PowerPoint but sometimes people like to get a bit creative. Really, it depends on the topic but you want to bring something that is interesting to look at.
Of course, if you can have presentation slides you should do that, and they should reflect your brand. That means fonts, colours, image style, logos, etc. There shouldn’t be too much text, but just enough to hammer the point home.
If you can, bring in some props too. If you are selling products, bring them in. A lot of speakers bring in banners, balloons, things to make the “stage” more interesting to look at. The more eye-catching it is, the more eyes will be on you and the more potential customers you will have.
4. Information
Presentations are often about showmanship, but in an attempt to put on a great performance, it can be easy to lose focus on the information you are trying to convey. It’s not just about being entertaining. You are giving that presentation for a reason, and this is the opportunity to tell people about your business and why they should be a part of it.
People like statistics and creative ways of showing them, so any chance you get, use graphs and infographics.
Keep in mind the information that is important in a sales pitch. How can they benefit from purchasing your product/service? What benefits does your business bring to the world? What are your ethics? What does your business stand for? Think about the questions you would ask about someone just starting a new business.
5. Personalisation
Finally, you want to make the presentation personable and entertaining. Look at people directly, and try to make it friendly. It’s a professional situation but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring or that you have to be stone-faced. You can make little jokes, you can engage with members of the audience, you can talk about the good and bad experiences you’ve had on your journey. After all, you are the face of the business. They would be buying or investing in YOU.
Presentations are a fantastic opportunity to reach a large number of people in a short period of time. Keep practicing and don’t be disheartened if it doesn’t go well straight away.
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