Your audience takes a small amount of their time and attention to sit down and listen to your presentation.
Considering this, you have to ensure your presentation is top-notch and keep your public’s attention since it’s easy to lose.
According to a study, the average attention span of a person has significantly dropped from on average 12 seconds to only 8 seconds. Therefore, now, it’s much more challenging to keep your audience interested in what it used to be many years before. However, businesses have noticed this and are now trying to improve their methods on how they present.
Well, don’t worry, because, in this article, I will show you the 10 steps you can undertake to enhance your presentation skills as a digital marketer.
10 Steps To Boost Your Presentations Skills In Digital Marketing
1. Figure out who your audience is through surveys
Your presentation success firmly depends on how well you know your audience and what you are telling them. Therefore, the first step of success in presenting is understanding your audience.
You can use surveys to learn more about your audience. Here are some alternatives you can choose from:
In setting up your survey, you should get straight to the point and ask simple questions. Avoid asking long and complex questions that’ll only make your audience abandon the survey. For example, here are some question structures you can consider using:
- Ask questions regarding your audience’s demographics
- Ask them about the level of knowledge they have on your topic
- Ask about their perceptions on the topic
- Ask for suggestions
This way, you can determine how your respondents feel about the topic you will present. Try mixing things up using scales, multiple-choice, and short-end questions. Don’t make the survey too long, as it’ll increase your abandonment rate. According to a study, surveys that are shorter than 15 minutes will have a better response rate.
2. Use an online presentation maker
An online presentation maker can significantly help you combine the best parts of a design, productivity, and presentation software. Moreover, it can be built in only a few minutes with many design decks.
Depending on which online presentation maker you are using, you can even choose from many templates to use that are custom-made. You have to add your brand colors and upload any custom fonts you want to make your templates look the way you want.
3. Pay attention to your cover page
Your cover page is your first impression when it comes to a presentation. Moreover, if done well, it’ll bring a positive introduction to your audience and influence how they feel throughout the presentation.
So, in other words, you want to make it persuasive enough that the audience will get excited about passing it on to the next slide. Make your cover’s design eye-catching and relevant to your presentation’s content.
4. Practice
Yes, practice makes perfect. Therefore, you want to rehearse your presentation multiple times and ensure you are comfortable enough and know what you are talking about before presting. Maybe you’re wondering how you can feel more comfortable across an audience; well, try rehearsing in front of your team. Ask them their honest opinions of the presentation and what you can improve on. After all, that’s what your team is for.
5. Include graphs & charts
Instead of writing long texts on your presentation slides, you might end up better, including graphs & charts. After all, people will understand graphs and charts much better than reading a large chunk of text. According to research, 90% of the information our brains process is visual, meaning that it processes visualizations much easier than textual information.
6. Use a friendly tone
As a presenter in the digital marketing field, you want to use a friendly tone when presenting. Try smiling, and acting friendly instead of staying serious and looking like you don’t have the energy to conduct a presentation. Instead of thinking you might do terribly when presenting, set a positive mindset; thus, it’ll also help you speak in a friendly tone.
It’s the same case scenario if you attended a presentation and find it entertaining. For example, have you seen when Jimmy Fallon presents? His tone is friendly and entertaining to follow; thus, that’s what makes a presentation successful. Be yourself, and don’t be afraid to laugh!
7. Attend more public speaking events to overcome fear
Not every presenter can publicly speak easily unless they have done it frequently enough. Therefore, it’s best if you do the same thing. Especially if you’re presenting for the first time, you might have emotions while you present. Here are a few ways you can reduce these emotions:
- Speak more in front of the public
- Voluntarily participate in meetups
- Try gathering lots of friends and colleagues and presenting in front of them
- Present in front of professionals who are willing to correct your mistakes.
The more often you get in front of the public, the more confident you’ll be. After all, success is a repetitive act, so before you present in front of an investor or your manager about a plan you’ve come up with, build the confidence first.
8. Use the 10/20/30 rule
The 10/20/30 rule was first created by Guy Kawasaki. It states that a presentation should have no more than 10 slides, not last more than 20 minutes, and shouldn’t contain a font smaller than 30 points. Now, you may be wondering by Kawasaki came up with this rule. Well, it’s firmly due to the fact of promoting simplicity.
Guy Kawasaki, himself, is a venture capitalist himself and mentioned that he has to listen to many presentations, and most of them are tedious and complex. Therefore, he explains what the 10/20/30 rule means:
- 10 slides: define the problem, solution, business model, magic, marketing, competition, team, projections & milestones, status & timeline, and summary of your presentation. Moreover, that’s what the investors care about, right?
- 20 minutes: not everyone may be on time when presenting, and setting up the projector may take time; also, don’t forget people’s attention span has dropped in the past decade. Therefore, 20 minutes is more than enough to present.
- 30 point font: most presentations you will attend will have the tiniest fonts and lots of text. If you’re at the back of the room, how on Earth will you see the text? The person at the back should be able to see the text, and using larger font also means you use less text; less text means less complexity.
9. Engage your audience
You shouldn’t only be the person in the room concerned about your presentation, but your audience should be engaged to express their thoughts as well. Of course, a presentation isn’t a one-sided thing, so at the end of your presentation, answer questions and even ask them throughout the presentation.
Asking questions boosts engagement levels and makes participants feel valued since they are part of the discussion. Start with a question at the beginning and one in every couple of slides until you reach the end. Don’t wait for the end to ask questions, as your audience may not feel the amount of energy they have throughout the presentation. Instead, diversify your set of questions.
10. Entertain
Even if your presentation has lots of helpful information, if you fail to entertain your audience, you might end up losing lots of attention from them.
So, how can you be entertaining? Well, try including some jokes while you are presenting, but not extreme jokes to a level that you’ll anger someone in the room; you’re not performing stand-up comedy, so include some light jokes. The moment you can consist of a joke should be when you can relate a subject in the presentation to yourself and others in a non-offense way.
After all, jokes are an excellent way to make the presentation exciting and keep your audience engaged.
Conclusion
Well, that’s about it for this article. These were our ten steps on how to boost your presentation skills. Hopefully, only by reading the article, you’ve come up with new ideas on how you can improve your marketing skills and be the best you can be when presenting to your audience.
The most important thing to consider when presenting is that presentation skills depend on how simple and confident you are when in front of an audience. Long and complex presentations will only bore your audience and make them lose interest from the beginning. Instead, keep them engaged through humor, simplicity, and asking questions.
It’s easier than you think, but it just requires some adjustments. After all, you want your presentation to be different from the rest and make investors or your managers impressed enough to say ‘yes’ to any idea you may have.
