Content Is King

Without valuable, relevant content you will loose your audience.

Before sitting down to develop your presentation content, sit back and picture yourself as the listener. What do you want to hear, to see, to walk away with? Here are some basic tips for improving your content, to make sure your audience gets what they need:

• Start simple: It’s very easy to assume everyone knows about the topic and rush right into the meat of your sale. However, most of the time, your audience will need to be introduced to the topic with a brief overview of the background.
• Make an outline: Creating a template to work from will help you stay focused. It will also help you to keep a steady flow through your presentation.
• Pare down as much as possible: Take the outline you just wrote and remove the extra data that isn’t relevant to your end goal. Overloading your audience will only confuse them. In addition, your audience will always thank you for ending a few minutes early, instead of late.
• Know all you can about your audience: Being able to relate the content to your audience will help them stay engaged. Using stories and examples they can relate to will create a bond and a reason for them to stay tuned.
• Substantiate: Using information from a third party, graphs created from outside studies or references will help give you credibility with your audience. This credibility not only helps make it easier to tell your story, you also give your audience an unbiased reason to believe in the detail of the presentation.

Keep these tips in mind for your next presentation, and keep your audience in touch.

Meandering

My primary source of inspiration generally comes from outside sources. I’m not the type to sit and create magic from nothing. Therefore, I like to scour the web for interesting design blogs, cool websites, intriguing layouts, etc. I recently spent a little time doing just this on SlideShare, and learning great stuff about global warming, branding, the distribution of income in the U.S. and much more. While doing so, I stumbled across these great examples of what to do in a presentation, just as I’ve been talking about these past few weeks. Each representing simplicity, great graphics and a level of stickiness. Enjoy:

Stickiness

For those who don’t know me personally, I spend a good deal of my time reading books. I read all types of books from educational to fiction to history and more. One book that I’ve been meaning to get my hands on for quite a while is Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I first heard about it on one of my favorite blogs, Presentation Zen. The book has gotten great reviews and won a number of awards over the past year.

I’ve made a goal to obtain and read this book within the next month. After I read it, I’ll let you know my personal thoughts on what it covers. But until then, here are the key points for making your presentation or product/service more sticky:

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

As you’ll notice, all these together happen to spell SUCCESs. Even without knowing the details on these six topics, keeping these themes in mind when creating your next presentation will help you to leave a lasting impression with your audience.

Graphic Gumption

One of the keys to a quality presentation is quality graphics. It’s very common to see presentations with low quality graphics where images are pixelated, too small, have watermarks or other easily avoidable distractions. The purpose of an image is not only to fill space but to also bring life and help clarify or enhance the text. Here are some basic tips for helping make sure your graphics don’t end up as distractions:

Logos: Searching Google images for “company name” + logo, will give you many files to choose from. Not only will you find the logo without a background color, but you’ll also often have a choice of colors so you can pick the one that best suites your color scheme.

Photos: There is a wide variety of sites to pull photography from across a full spectrum of price ranges. Here are some of my favorites:

• Getty Images: High quality, rights-managed and royalty-free images for any category
• iStockPhoto: High quality, royalty-free, low-budget images for many categories
• Free Photos Bank: Medium quality, completely free images for a handful of categories

Charts & Graphs: It’s often easier to copy and paste an already created graph or chart into your presentation. However, I recommend recreating them within your presentation software. This method allows you to have coordinating graphs and charts throughout, as well as use a color scheme that matches the rest of the presentation.

With these tips in mind, you’ll be able to use graphics to the best of their ability. Not only will your presentation look better, but you’ll find your audience is more attentive as well.