The 37th President of the USA, Richard Nixon, was sure that “the American people don’t believe anything until they see it on television.” Today we don’t believe anything until we see it on the web. The Internet is the endless source of visual information – necessary or useless, true or false, beautiful or ugly, but at any rate, this is info that could be analyzed and leveraged. No one should underestimate the power of the internet. Since its appearance more than 50 years ago, it has assisted people to accomplish great things, and one of the most significant among them is global communication by means of a wide variety of the social media platforms.
The Internet has become an effective tool to boost and promote the business of any kind. Having a website or making a presentation looks like a business card with endless opportunities. Remember that a poor or unprofessional presentation can ruin your business forever. For brands, getting the moment when come-and-go visitors turn into loyal customers is the best reward for their products and sales efforts. This is where the power of visual perception is off the scale. Thus, you must take a titanic effort to achieve a captivating, and not ordinary presentation packed with a number of appropriate visual tools.
Role of Visual Perception in Everyday Life
Visual perception or eyesight is defined as the human ability to detect light and see the surrounding world. It plays a big role in people’s everyday life serving the main means of learning and interacting with others. There are some undeniable facts about its importance:
Due to the Social Science Research Network, 65 percent of people are visual learners who better perceive and remember visual content.
90 percent of information coming to the brain is also visual.
70 percent of human sensory receptors locate in eyes.
The brain processes the visual information in 60,000x faster than textual one.
40 percent of people respond better to visuals.
Thus, visual presentations based on different visual aids will be more engaging and persuasive. How to turn such a marketing strategy into reality with minimum effort? Use ultimate PowerPoint templates for your business presentation. Moreover, if you blend visual and audio you will get the highest quality product that will definitely stand out of the crowd and sink into the mind for a long time.
Seeing is Believing or How People Perceive Visual Information
If you deal with a presentation, website design or other visual information, you have to understand how people perceive information in whole, and how they interpret what they see. Having understood the psychological basis of human perception marketing managers will have a chance to build an adequate strategy for creating an impeccable visual presentation and drive a business forward.
Visual assumption theory based on conceptual-driven processing belongs to psychologist Richard Gregory. According to his study, people’s perception is firstly built on expectations, memory, previous experiences and knowledge. Our brain calculates assumption on the basis of the past. Gregory’s theory says that just nearly 10 percent of that we see reaches the brain, but the most part is lost. Thus, we constantly construct our perception of reality. The eyes receive information that is then combined with the prior stored knowledge. That is why an efficient visual presentation has to contain data with the relevant theme, meaningful headlines to meet key expectations, and visuals with meaningful text.
As for Binocular rivalry phenomenon our eyes can’t see two equal images in the same location. One of them will always dominate. If during the short period of time we see two dissimilar images that are located very close, we will not be able to distinguish what object we see.
Typography influences human mood and even has an effect on a reader’s cognitive performance. According to Larson and Picard’s studies, it was determined that a proper printed text is more engaging than its poor analog that can even irritate and cause negative emotions. The same context can be perceived in absolutely different ways. That is why while preparing posts or other visual info for your website, ensure that there is an easy-to-read font type, correct spaces in the text, and no needless images inside text. Each and every element on the web page should have its own separate location.
According to findings in the area of color influence on scene perception, people can quickly determine the scene if it is colored normally. To define something of natural colors is rather easier than the same object but of incorrect colors (for example, black and white). As for your visual presentation, use standard colors for traditional objects. For an efficient layout design should be used proper images or icons to represent data. In addition, try to reduce color palette for better perception.
Due to Thomas Sanocki’s and Noah Sulman’s experiments on color relations human eyes better perceive and remember harmonious color palette with fewer colors than the disharmonious multicolored palette. So, be attentive to use contrast colors for your presentation content.
As you can see our brains process visuals faster in comparison with text, but you can't put a hand on presentation irresponsibly and throw just any visual out there. Each and every visual aid needs to be relevant to the context and to the end user.
How to Take Full Advantage of Visual Content in Presentation
To have a quality visual business presentation is not a whim but an urgent need! Visual content taps into the minds of your audience, putting them on discovering your brand deeper. Your business reputation and awareness directly depend on the quality of your visual content. That is why you should take much effort to generate high-quality visual promotion of your brand. Bland and poor designed presentation can poison the audience’s mind against your business or ruin its reputation forever.
Experienced graphic designer and teacher Joe Sparano once noticed: “Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” So how to understand when your design is awful? How to reach that “magic transparency”? Good web design or online presentation is functional and recognizable at the first sight. Here are some demands for creating efficient and impeccable presentation:
Keep content simple and clear. When looking your presentation, people should get to the meat of your business from the very beginning.
Avoid huge, blinking and extra bright colors. Such tricks will irritate and frighten customers away.
Your content must breathe. There should be sufficient white space. Do not try to place much information on one page.
Each and every element must be located appropriately. Only the correct placement can draw visitors’ eyes and make them move further.
All images and graphics must be relevant and of high quality.
Packing too much information into a slide is an awful mistake since the audience will not be able to process everything while seeing.
When sizing your fonts, remember about the person in the back of the room. The text must be large enough.
Do not play with more than 5 colors in one presentation. Keep in mind that everything has to be harmonious and don’t use complex gradients.
Insert a single image in a slide. The audience will not catch several pictures at the same time so use one but of high quality.
Importance of Visual Aids for Your Business Presentation
People always prefer images and other visuals over boring and plain text. With the help of PowerPoint software it is possible to create a quality and informative business presentation with numerous visualization techniques. So if you want to draw the audience’s attention to your presentation for a long span of time, it would be beneficial to use diagrams, mindmaps, infographics, etc. Visual tools are enhancements to your presentation aimed at engaging the audience, providing additional information, creating excitements, and emphasizing key points.
A diagram is a visualization technique to represent qualitative or quantitative information. Diagrams are mostly used to show interrelationships particularly in a qualitative way. There is an enormous variety of their types: chart-like, schematics, graph-based, pyramids, family tree, relationship, others. By using this visual aid, tones of complex information can be presented more efficiently.
A mind map provides with an easy-to-understand visual overview of a topic. With this visual aid you can turn a large list of monotonous information into an efficient and comprehensive visual mapping. Mind maps are used for underlining a lot of conceptual words and important tasks. They stimulate thinking process and rational analysis. Besides, this eye-catching visual technique attracts the audience’s attention better than a plain text. Keep in mind that mind maps are useless if 50 percent of their data is left off.
Frowcharts can help to explain any process flow or a chain of serial operations. It is a proven method of decision making process that helps to weigh all the pros and cons of an issue.
SWOT analysis (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) will help to break your business venture down and examine the situation in detail.
PEST analysis (political, economic, social, and technological) is a strategic tool and part of market research that gives an estimation of different macro-environmental factors.
Infographics is an ultimate visual aid providing the most efficient interaction with the audience. Smart mix of quality images and meaningful phrases or sentences always draws people’s attention. High quality infographics are read 30x more than only-text posts. Moreover, they can help to boost your traffic significantly.
Concept maps illustrate the interaction between ideas and concepts. Most of them are represented in boxes or circles that are linked words. As usual they begin with a main concept which can be broken into numerous specific issues.
The goal of any business presentation is to impress. The premium PowerPoint templates will help you make a modern and pleasing to the eye material without Photoshop. They are fully editable to any taste and adaptive to any brand. Take a look at two captivating PowerPoint Templates available at TM Marketplace.
Efficient and Impeccable Evolution – Multipurpose PowerPoint Template
This easy-to-edit PowerPoint template can serve as a very effective tool to present a business strategy in an attractive visual manner. An eye-catching design with 3 premade colors was crafted by professionals to satisfy even the most experienced customer. The template is great for both corporate presentations and local business projects. All features are adaptive to any modern mobile with any screen resolution. To adjust the template to your needs you should have only Adobe Illustrator CS2 and PowerPoint 2003 or 2007 (the newest one is preferred). With Evolution you have a great chance to make a revolution in your business and bring it to the next quality level.
Ultimate – Sleek and Top-Notch PowerPoint Presentation for Your Business
Ultimate corresponds 100 percent to its name. This creative, clean and fully editable template will come in handy for entrepreneurs of any kind of business or for personal needs. With its unique structure and efficient features you will be able to present your business project in the most favorable way. The template is easy as pie to install and edit. For that, you just need three software on your desktop: Adobe Photoshop CS+, Adobe Illustrator CS2, and of course PowerPoint. The stylish carefully crafted template will help you create tones of slideshows with no effort. The light and pleasing color palette adds credibility to your business message, and each slide helps you tell a visual story to your audience.
Turn your knowledge about visual perception into the powerful marketing weapon. Remember that people are more likely to remember content with visual elements – images, infographics, mindmaps, video, etc. Our easy tips on creating a powerful presentation are gathered in free eBook. It will help you combine different efficient visuals in your PowerPoint presentation and achieve a really compelling business tool.