How to Make Your Presentation a Success

For making presentations a success, there is one simple rule, i.e., they should be interactive, fun, surprising, and challenging for the audience. Not to mention that they should serve their purpose of explaining certain things, concepts, and issues to the audience in the best possible way.

In the business world today, presentations are a means to train employees, bring in business, and persuade investors to invest in the organization. Looking at the important goals that are served through them, it becomes imperative that to conduct presentations in a professional and interesting manner. Here are some useful and creative presentation ideas.

Even before you start making the presentation, your audience will form an opinion about you with the way you dress. It's not just important that you talk like a professional, but you have to look like one too. So, wear ironed, professional attire and polished shoes. Be well-groomed and put your best foot forward.

If a concept can be explained well in five minutes, make sure that is all the time you devote to it in your presentation. There is no point in going on and on about something which has already been mentioned to and understood by your audience.

Also, do not use heavy words or jargon just to show how well read and knowledgeable you are. Keep your presentation short and simple.

For PowerPoint presentations, always use fonts that are legible and clear. Verdana and Arial are the ideal fonts for a PowerPoint presentation. Sound effects created by PowerPoint can sometimes distract the audience and take them away from the topic being discussed, so it is better that these are not included in your presentation.

Also, at least once before the presentation, play your presentation on the screen, at the venue, to avoid any goof-ups at the last-minute.

An effective presentation technique is to ask the audience a number of questions in between, or take their opinion on every new topic that you introduce, before giving your take on the same. The more you are able to engage your audience, the more they will pay attention to you.

Include a few fun games to keep your audience interested. For example, if you are explaining the features of a product to your prospective investors or clients, you can keep a game show, wherein the attendees have to answer questions with regards to the product features. You can even make teams and allot marks for every right answer to keep up the interest.

It is a known fact that people retain information which they see much more than what they read. So include as many pictures and visuals as you can in it. To make the visuals fun, you can include some cartoons giving out instructions about how to use a particular product or enjoying the benefits of the product.

You can use symbols such as mountains to show something which is very challenging. Including pictures is a fun way to bring forth serious topics during business presentations.

If you want to know how to make your business presentations work for you, then the trick lies in being as creative as possible and surprising your audience once in a while. For example, when explaining something, simply start right away, without giving the title and let your audience guess what is it all about.

Another creative presentation idea that you can use to surprise and engage your audience is to provide them with blindfolds for a few minutes during the presentation, explaining that you only want them to listen carefully and not see anything.

Lastly, at the end of the presentation, many people give out written literature in the form of brochures. Most of the time, this information is tossed aside and hardly ever looked into by the attendees. So, be a little creative when preparing this booklet. A good idea would be to present the information in a comic book form.

One important tip―for any kind of presentation, have a back-up plan ready. If the presentation is on the laptop, keep a back-up on a CD-ROM. There can be a system failure at the presentation venue, i.e., the projector might not work or the power lead may become dysfunctional, so always keep a contingency plan ready to tackle such last-minute hitches.