15 Ways to Give a Killer Presentation
- Know your audience. Wrong context or topic won’t resonate with them.
- Know the impact on your audience. Think about how your presentation will benefit your audience. Give them advice? Provide insights that they weren’t aware of?
- Build your Story Flow.
- strong opener – ask a rhetorical question, tell a joke, vote by a show of hands, tell a story
- body – Talk about the problem, show evidence or stats, then propose a solution
- finish – strong finish with another joke or story but leave them with an action or a catch phrase that they will remember.
- Keep your slides snack-sized. 1 Idea or key point per slide. Don’t cram in tons of text.
- Don’t repeat bullets or just read the presentation verbatim.
- Format your slides to have variation. Don’t make every slide look the same.
- Use visual aides. Charts, GIFs, memes, Videos under 60 seconds.
- Avoid Jitters by visualizing a successful presentation and be positive!
- Avoid words that convey uncertainty like Hope, I think, Perhaps, Maybe.
- Throughout the presentation, use captivating questions or rhetoricals (when you don’t expect them to answer. Ex: What can we learn from this?)
- Audience involvement or participation. “Come up and show me or point out…”
- Pause before making a big point to build the anticipation.
- Speakly slowly. Don’t ramble off too fast. Give it space to breathe and your audience a chance to digest or think in between points.
- Use pitch variations in your voice. Don’t be monotone.
- Recap with an overview slide.
