Your Effective Slide Deck – Engagement Tools for Your Business Presentation

Presenting with a visual aid is a common challenge in our day-to-day settings, be it online or face-to-face. Aside from your traditional PowerPoint slides, visual aids can come in the form of other tools (such as flip-chart, Prezi). Notwithstanding the variety of tools, your goal as a communicator remains the same – to engage your audience and achieve your speech purpose. This is especially important in a business presentation scenario!

One common pain point relates to the use of slides as a visual aid. While there are many techniques (or schools of thought) on how best to arrange your slide content, there is room to maximise your audience engagement using your visual aids. This goes beyond your slide design, font, or colour! Instead, you may want to re-visit your slide deck and try out these three novel ways to engage your audience in your presentation!

Pose a Question; Not Just a Statement

Resist that temptation to fill your slides with content from the start all the way till the end. You have to keep in mind that your audience members have to take in information from the visual aids and the speaker in a presentation setting. If your presentations involve constant drilling of content to download and internalise, you are more likely to lose your audience’s attention. Even if meant as a hand-out, your audience will need the space to take in the information.

One method to change this is to use more question prompts as part of the slide design. This creates a ‘thinking space’ or a dedicated section for your audience to internalise the content you are sharing. For example, create a check-in slide (a slide with a reflective question) and assign your audience a brief duration to think about the response. You can even use this space as a discussion opportunity for your audience members to play an active role in knowledge creation.

Integrate Technology Tools

While there are various technology tools that you can incorporate in your presentation, we recommend finding collaborative technology tools that will allow your audience to unpack the content. Instead of playing a passive role in taking in the information, the audience can work together to understand the learning points. Inviting them to participate in the discovery process will lead to a more engaging session!

One platform that you can incorporate is the Mentimeter (https://www.mentimeter.com/) platform – this allows you to gather insights, thoughts, or opinions about a given topic or prompt. Beyond just a consolidation platform, your collected data can form the basis of your discussion with the audience members. The best thing? Your audience members can access the responses from their own phone!

Make a Shareable Framework

Finally, as the saying goes, you want to end your presentation on a high. Ending on a high does not just mean ending on an energetic note (louder volume, higher pitch). Instead, you want to maximise the audience members’ retention of the key learning points shared. To put it simpler, you want to ensure that your audience members can leave the session with an easy summary of the content shared.

To help you achieve this, try summarising your key content and having them presented neatly on a slide. For example, you can start by setting out the expectations or objectives for the audience at the start. What are they expected to gain after the session? Building on this, your concluding slide can be an opportunity for your audience to take in a shareable framework. This would be the very summary of what they need to apply the learning points immediately!

Enhance Your Business Presentation!

Business presentations on their own can be challenging and tedious – throw in a visual aid, and you may find yourself struggling to balance various considerations in engaging your audience. Instead of leaving your audience with a wall of text, curate an accessible and engaging learning experience for your audience members – try out the three tips above to bring your presentation to the next level!

By The Way…

If you are keen to take your public speaking skills & presentation skills (either business/corporate presentation / kids in-class presentation) to the next level so that you may communicate and deliver speeches with greater flair and charisma, feel free to check out our public speaking/ presentation skills course for adults and public speaking course for children below!

For more about our (weekly group classes) Public Speaking/ Presentation Skills Course for Adults :

https://publicspeakingacademy.com.sg/courses-and-programs/group-classes-for-adults/

If you are looking for a 2-day intensive public speaking/ presentation skills course for adults instead (for our adult learners who can’t do weekends), learn more about our presentation skills training course here: https://publicspeakingacademy.com.sg/presentation-skills-training-course-by-world-champion/

If you are looking for Public Speaking/ Presentation Courses for Kids / Children:

https://publicspeakingacademy.com.sg/group-classes-students-age-9-18/

If you are a human resources manager/ business owner in your company…

We want to help you bring out the best in your team, organization, and company. Public speaking and communication skills for the workplace, such as persuasion, remain a priority for most corporate training out there. We believe in staying ahead of the curve in sharing the contemporary communication skills to help you and your team remain relevant, competitive and nimble. Through our customized corporate training programmes, your team will benefit from an in-depth, hands-on, and potential-maximising public speaking & presentation skills training programme!

Feel free to reach out to us to curate your own public speaking corporate training programme for your team, company, or organization! Let us help you develop them into highly effective public speakers at work, empowered with effective presentation skills & storytelling skills – them giving speeches with charisma, influence and impact is something you can look forward to!

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