To boost your confidence before delivering a presentation, you might visualize it happening: You take the stage, podium, or front of the room. Then you kick things off with the introduction you’ve practiced plenty of times. You flip through your supplementary slides or visual aids to accompany your words. Then there’s the opportunity for audience members to ask questions. Since your audience will inevitably only see your public-facing delivery, it’s important that everything goes smoothly on the big day.
However, any successful presentation begins well before this “spotlight” moment. Preparing a truly engaging presentation requires understanding your audience and creating opportunities to connect with its members.
Tailor Information to Your Audience
Put it this way: Explaining rocket science to a group of elementary schoolers will likely be a futile exercise in patience. It doesn’t matter how energetic your delivery is if the level of content you’re conveying doesn’t match the audience’s ability to comprehend it, much of it will be lost in translation. This becomes a frustrating situation for everyone—but luckily, it’s avoidable.
It’s always a good idea to lay some groundwork for your audience by discussing the topic from a broad view before diving into the nitty-gritty details. Furthermore, as one Entrepreneur guest writer advises, you can prepare more fully by asking yourself these questions ahead of time:
- What does your audience currently know about your topic?
- What new information are you presenting that may be difficult to understand?
- How can you help boost audience comprehension from the get-go?
- What biases or preconceptions might audience members have that you should address?
- What presentation style will ultimately be most effective to engage this particular audience?
A presentation can only be engaging if it’s comprehensible and informative, so closely consider your audience’s point of view when you’re designing your talk.
Create Opportunities for Mutual Engagement
Avoid the common pitfall of talking at your audience in a one-way flow of information, as this only serves to shift the audience into a passive learning role. A better goal is creating a mutually engaging dialogue between you and members of the audience to encourage active learning.
But how can you do so without interrupting the flow or eating up valuable time? A simple tool like an interactive poll creator allows you to embed a live poll directly into your slideshow, to which people can respond using their mobile devices. You can ask your audience members multiple-choice questions, create a word cloud together or host an interactive Q&A session using live polling technology.
Taking the time to get your audience involved unlocks several benefits like increasing audience attention span and boosting retention.
Consider the Narrative Structure
The best stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end—but more importantly, they follow some sort of narrative structure. Interesting presentations have ups and downs, too, because this gives people a reason to care about what they’re seeing and hearing.
The exact structure of your presentation will depend on its subject matter and content. Persuasive presentations tend to lend themselves well to a “problem, then solution” structure. Something more anecdote-focused like a Ted Talk tends to work well with a more classic narrative arc that drives the central story.
No matter the specific structure you choose, it should help amplify the “why” of your presentation—that is why people should tune in and care about what you’re saying.
How you prepare affects the final outcome of your presentation, so put plenty of thought into what you can do to make it a truly engaging experience for each audience member.
