Making a Powerful Impact: 8 Ways to Avoid Mistakes in Presentations

09 Jun

Making a Powerful Impact: 8 Ways to Avoid Mistakes in Presentations

Making an impact on my audience is a must when I’m delivering presentations. How do I make sure that happens? By avoiding common missteps, of course!

With so many people around the world giving presentations every day – 36 million to be exact – standing out from the crowd takes effort and smart planning. If you follow these 8 tips for effective presentation delivery, your performance won’t go unnoticed!

Interact with the audience: Use Q&A sessions, and other interactive tools to engage the audience and keep them interested. Better yet, provide icebreakers. That will surely do the trick!

Test your technology: Make sure you test your equipment before the presentation. Check your microphone and make sure the presentation is reflecting on the screen.

Flexing your voice: Don’t use PowerPoint as a teleprompter. Summarize and talk about your message and use facts and examples to bring it to life. Use intonation, pauses, and vary your tempo to engage the audience.

Don’t Use too many words: Dense, confusing, or unattractive slides can make it hard for the audience to focus. Instead, use key words and memorable short phrases.

Don’t Fail to get to the point quickly: Keep any background information brief and avoid detours. State your main idea within the first two minutes and explain how it will benefit the audience directly and clearly.

Use enough slides: Business presentations are often complex, but too much data on one slide can cloud your message. Spread your content over several clear slides to keep the audience engaged and make your message more effective.

Use enough images: Images are a powerful way to make your presentation more attractive and help the audience understand your message more easily. Use good quality, eye-catching, and interesting photos to capture or underline your message.

Follow up: Send a follow-up email to the audience after the presentation to thank them for their time and provide additional resources or information.

Delivering a great presentation takes practice, but I’ve learned that avoiding these 8 mistakes makes all the difference in keeping my audience engaged. That way, not only will I stay on-track and focused on achieving success with whatever project or message is of interest – having fun along the journey doesn’t hurt either!