Stop Giving Boring Presentations: Use Slide Templates to Boost Engagement
Best presentations are not just a mere collection of slides; they are stories, knitted together with charming content and captivating design. Although PowerPoint has been around for decades with a limited repository of themes and tools, your presentations don’t have to be dull.
In this post, we will talk about how you can create breathtaking PowerPoint presentations with the help of ready-to-use slide templates.
Build Your Slides Last
Before you jump on to creating your masterpiece, you must sit back, write your ideas down and outline the presentation. In simpler terms, you must start by writing out your talking points. This step also includes assessing your audience.
Since one size doesn’t fit all, you must analyze your audience, outline slides with relevant content, and then build the slides. Take your time to research, prepare the presentation outline revolving around the subject matter, objectives, and audience as a whole for maximum engagement.
Use Templates
PowerPoint slide templates bring aboard consistency, branding, ease of formatting & help you save time. Rather than creating a presentation from scratch, you can create quick and intuitive presentations with the help of ready-made templates. The key to presentation success is engaging content backed by consistent aesthetics.
Templates can make your life much simpler. Readymade PowerPoint templates encompass consistent & pixel-perfect design across all slides. Not just that, the templates are often 100% editable, thus allowing presenters to showcase their creativity and attune slides towards their business goals better.
Go More On Image, Less On Text
Someone has rightly said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures make your presentation more engaging while increasing the likelihood of your audience paying attention. One should remember that no one likes to read a wall of text/bullet points straight off the slides. High-quality images attract your viewers and help them understand the presentation material better.
Not just that, using great visuals in your presentation saves you time. Rather than populating the slide with bullet points about the company’s growth metrics, you can simply create an appealing infographic and charm your audience. Images are preferred over text because our brain processes visuals much quicker than random text. Thus, through visuals, you can help your audience remember the subject matter for a long time.
Iconify the Slides
Icons improve your presentation design manifolds. You can include stylish and compelling icons in presentation slides to draw attention to the content and further increase the readability. Icons also help compare and contrast different functions, products, or services. Moreover, your audience doesn’t have to navigate manually on the slides.
Through icons, you can naturally draw your audience’s attention to paragraphs, pointers & other blocks of content. Not just that, they occupy less space and greatly reduce the slide clutter. Thus, pay attention to the iconography for communicating the core idea and intent of the presentation with added efficacy.
Visualize The Data
When it comes to making sense of complicated data, drawing valuable inference & making faster decisions, data visualization goes a long way for your presentation slides. Effective data visualization on slides makes it easy for your audience to comprehend the information and get to the actual gist of the message.
For instance, you may consider using 3D horizontal funnel template visualization to showcase reports, metrics and understand the impact of those metrics on your business. You can consider including interactive data-rich infographics in the presentation slides and provide your audience with a real-time view of statistics and analytical data.
The 5/5/5 Rule
You might have heard of the famous 10/20/30 rule of Presentation making. The 5/5/5 is another powerful presentation rule that keeps your audience from getting overwhelmed. As per this rule, you must not include more than five words in a single line, the slides must not have more than five lines & there must not be five text-heavy slides one after the other.
The goal here is to present your audience with bits of pieces of information without puzzling them. The same goes for the animations; slide transitions might look exciting, however, overloading slides with animations can become irritating. Both- text & animations should be used sparingly throughout the slides to boost engagement.
Wrapping It Up
A PowerPoint presentation that is researched, outlined, prepared professionally can help you deliver the message effectively. Each point must visually stand out and engage with the audience without overwhelming them. Ready-to-use PowerPoint templates are one great way to come up with presentations that are designed correctly, tailored to perfection & free of mediocrity.
This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’ disclosure policy.
