What if we were to ask you about the most important aspect of delivering winning presentations? What comes to your mind? Preparation? Powerful oratory skills? Body Language?
The most important aspect of any impactful presentation is audience engagement. Audience engagement can be defined as the extent of interest the audience shows in whatever you have to say.
But how can you engage your audience? It’s rather straightforward, actually. Share something of substance and share it in a way that is easy to understand.
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Hence, it boils to two factors:
1. What you have to say –
If you’re at the liberty of choosing a topic, then choose a topic that you believe the audience would be interested to hear. But sadly, for most of us, this is not the case.
We are mostly limited in our choices and have to make do with what we have got. You cannot afford to choose a different topic for a business meeting or client interaction. You are stuck with the topic and the audience that comes with it.
This makes the next point all the more important.
2. How you say it –
The most important thing here is to understand your audience and build your content accordingly. If you feel the audience has a short attention span, try to stay away from boring data and figures. Use minimalist and engaging graphics to keep their attention. If data is still important to your presentation then, find ways to make it less boring. Build context and explain how the figures fit in the grander scheme of things.
If you’re in an environment where time is money, try to keep it short, concise, and straightforward. Keep in mind that the audience is as important a factor to presentation-success as you are. Factors like preparation, body language, and oratory skills can also be clubbed in this point.
Hence, ‘How you say it’ is the culmination of everything from preparation to the kind of tools you have chosen to display your content.
As you go along making your presentations more engaging and less boring, you will understand that this process is highly inefficient and extremely time-consuming. The whole process of substituting text with aesthetic graphics, icons, and displaying important data, in short, consumable packets is painstakingly long and cumbersome.
You need to be a graphic designer or at least have some graphic designing skills to achieve this feat. Not to mention the amount of time you will waste doing this.
Fortunately, there is an easy way around this problem i.e. pre-designed and customizable PowerPoint templates, icons, graphics, and isometrics.
Here are 4 reasons why you should use Free PowerPoint templates:
Productivity – Any pre-designed PowerPoint resource is an immense time-saver. It lets you do more in less time and leaves you with aesthetic, engaging, and easily interpretable content.
If you’re worried that resources like PowerPoint templates will take away your originality, then you must consider the point of customizability. The Free PowerPoint templates on SlideUpLift are 100% customizable. You can change the color, text, shape, and content, as per your needs.
Think of templates like a guiding hand; that guides you in the right direction by taking care of your design needs but makes you the hero of your story. As you should be.
Professional Designs –
All templates on SlideUpLift have been crafted by professionals by keeping in mind the principles of vision science.
Graphic design professionals understand how factors like fonts, shapes, color schemes, isometrics, etc. should be intertwined to achieve the best-looking product possible.
Since graphics and visual imagery can be easily stored and recalled by our brains, you must use them effectively to create engagement.
Reduces Efforts –
Free PowerPoint templates will help save time and reduce your efforts, thus, giving you enough time to focus on the more important aspects of your presentation.
In the time that you save, you can work on your delivery, body language, and focus on your content. If you are giving a remote presentation, you can spend some time reading about the best Virtual Meeting/Remote-Presenting practices that you must keep in mind.
PowerPoint templates will give you the independence to focus on your content by taking care of the design/visual aspect of your presentation.
Uniformity –
PowerPoint templates give your presentation a uniform and consistent look. Thus, saving you from unappealing and uncoordinated fonts, shapes, and colors.
Color schemes, shapes, and icons that don’t look good together can have a huge negative impact on your presentation. They can lead to a disinterested, distracted, and unengaged audience. And that is the last thing you would want.
Hence, themes, backgrounds, and PowerPoint templates help your presentation portray a sense of cohesion and consistency.
