Content outline:
Intro
Today, a presentation is not only an indispensable tool for business seminars and conferences but also the current requirements of the market and the fastidious consumer. After all, a presentation only can talk about the benefits of something so demonstratively and briefly. We all know that the purpose of communication is one and only: to explain better and make others understand your ideas.
You can definitely try explaining:
in hand-waving terms;
on a sheet of paper;
through the presentation.
A quality presentation is a modern way to deliver the information for those who want to be understood and heard. And it is very important to create it competently. If so, I am sure the success of the performance is in your hands.
The simplest and the most popular tool to create a presentation is PowerPoint, an application of Microsoft Office. PowerPoint format allows you to integrate video and audio files into the presentation, create a primitive animation at the "slideshow" level.
Quite often, we use slides only as a tool for direct selling advertising to draw attention to an idea or product. They are also used during meetings to summarize, make plans, or brainstorm. If we consider presentations as a content tool, rather than an element of direct sales, slides are popular among speakers, lecturers, and presenters.
Presentations skills are important for a number of reasons.
Nowadays, to make a good presentation, you do not need to draw anything, own Photoshop, and spend hours building slides. Power-user offers a great variety of ready-made PowerPoint presentation templates. Each template is an excellent design to kickstart an effective professional presentation. From now on, you can save a lot of time and take advantage of the powerful ready-made solutions.
The best PowerPoint presentation templates are designed for a variety of professional presentations. It does not matter if you are going to sell a product, speak in public, promote your brand, or educate - anyone will find a perfect option to deliver his idea.
And now, I would like to elaborate further on those fields of activity where you can effectively use PowerPoint presentations.
PowerPoint Presentation as a Powerful Sales Tool
An effective presentation is a powerful tool for selling your ideas, products, and services. There is no ideal presentation scheme. Each expert has his own recipe.
Everyone will agree that a successful presentation is always a mix of three components, three goals: to inform (to confirm your own competence and experience, to tell about alternatives to solve the problem), to convince (to show the client's problem, then to sell him its solution) and to motivate (to encourage the client to perform further steps).
Structurize your presentation. Below is an example of a presentation structure:
A title (company name, contacts)
Description of the problem
The degree of importance of the problem
Solution
Sales model
Success story
Technology
Demonstration of product capabilities
The number of benefits
Inviting a client to perform the next step
It is important to remember that the result of the presentation is not necessarily an immediate sale, sometimes it is an agreement on the next meeting. Be prepared for the fact that the decision-making process may take several months.
The essence of selling presentations is changing of your clients’ stereotypes. It is important to find a problem that is important for your audience. But even more important is to convince customers of the dangers of their passive behavior.
Success stories are also something that is always interesting to the audience. A well-told story can be a great demonstration of your product's strengths.
Prepare visual material. The studies by educational researchers suggest that approximately 83% of human learning occurs visually, and the remaining 17% through the other senses - 11% through hearing, 3.5% through smell, 1% through taste, and 1.5% through touch.
And here are a few more useful tips to make your selling presentation effective:
Use emotionally positive colored pictures (photos).
Graphs and charts. A good infographic does not show numbers, it represents an idea.
Constant slide style – throughout the presentation, you need to use constant style, color, 1-2 fonts, company logo.
Adapt the content to your target audience (existing customers, potential customers, partners).
Think over the ending. People usually remember the beginning and end of a presentation.
Make a "test drive" of the presentation among your colleagues or friends, and listen to all the comments.
PowerPoint Presentation as a Part of Modern Education Technologies
The modern child lives in a world of electronic culture. The role of the teacher in the information culture is also changing — he must become a coordinator of the information flow. Therefore, the teacher needs to know modern educational technologies to be on the same page with a student. Today we can hardly imagine modern education without multimedia technologies, which include graphics, text, video, photography, animation, sound effects, and etc.
Everyone will agree with a famous proverb, “Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.” Multimedia lessons, thus, most optimally and effectively correspond to the triune didactic purpose of the lesson:
Educational aspect: Students' perception of educational material, understanding of the connections and relationships in the objects of study.
Development aspect: The development of cognitive interest to the object of study, the ability to generalize, analyze, compare; activation of students’ creative activity.
Pedagogical aspect: Training of the scientific worldview, the ability to clearly organize independent and group work; education of a sense of partnership, mutual assistance.
The use of presentations in the educational process provides an opportunity to:
give students more complete, accurate information about the phenomena and processes of the study;
increase the role of visibility in the educational process;
meet the needs, desires, and interests of students;
save time since it is much more effective than working at the blackboard.
When explaining new material, a presentation is not something that replaces a teacher at a blackboard, but it should contain unique facts that cannot be explained in words or demonstrated by other means. The teacher should still comment on the information appearing on the screen, if necessary, accompanying it with additional explanations, examples, and notes on the blackboard.
Multimedia educational presentations are designed to help the teacher to conveniently and visually present the material. The use of even the simplest graphical tools is extremely effective. The well-prepared presentation can attract the students’ attention and arouse interest to the studies.
The following methodological features of building an educational presentation should be recommended:
An individual approach should be used, including extensive use of additional training and development material.
Multimedia is an accompaniment to the explanation of educational material, but it does not replace live communication teacher - student in the classroom.
Use a wide selection of illustrative material for a comprehensive, detailed explanation of the lesson.
Do not overload the slides with unnecessary details. Sometimes it is better to present several simple slides instead of one complex one. You should not try to "push" too much information into one slide.
Use ready-made templates when choosing a style and background color. Do not be afraid of creativity. Experiment with the graphics and creating special effects.
Public Speaking PowerPoint Presentation
Is it enough to have charisma only to make an effective presentation? If you want to be remembered, then yes – all you need is charisma. And if you need to convey information to the audience, you need to use other tools. The ability to speak publicly and make high-quality presentations is an invaluable resource for entrepreneurs, sellers, and managers. Modern speakers have access to the tools that facilitate the transfer of information from the speaker to the audience.
A person perceives visual information 60,000 times faster than words or written text. Hence, the recipe for a cool presentation looks simple: it is necessary to prepare important information and strengthen it with the help of visualization tools. This is convenient to do using PowerPoint or similar programs.
In the verbal speech, to explain the idea of several logical elements, you need to present them sequentially. To understand your speech, the listener needs to keep in mind all the logical elements and understand their relations. If you show these elements on the slide — the listener can view them almost instantly.
There are many techniques that successful speakers use to control the audience's attention. Some of them require a long time to learn, while others are easy to remember.
Here you go:
Use images: Let's take a presentation of 10 slides. It will be great if 6 out of 10 slides will include images. People should not (and will not) read everything you have managed to fit on the slide. The minimum of text is a nice touch.
The content of the slide should be simple and clear: It is very difficult to perceive slides that are crammed with information. Try not to have lists longer than three or four items on one slide.
Do not repeat the text from the slides: Reading text from slides is a common mistake among speakers. The presentation will be boring and tedious if the speaker just reads the text from the slides and flips through them from time to time. Your task is to build a dialogue with the audience. This is difficult to do when you stand with your back to your listeners and read the text from the screen.
Do not pile your slides with numbers or statistics: If there is a need to talk in detail about the study or provide detailed statistical information, use the training handouts. By the way, it is better to offer handouts at the end of the presentation, if you do not want the audience to rustle with papers all the time.
The text of the slide should be well read from any place of the conference room: This also applies to the images. If the audience in the back row or at the windows cannot see what is on the slide, the whole presentation is useless. Use large, bold, contrasting colors, anti-glare screens. Make a sufficient interval between words to avoid merging.
Your speech should be more effective than the presentation. Inexperienced speakers may fear public speaking. In this case, they use the presentation as a "shield", trying to distract the audience from themselves. And this becomes their last delusion as a speaker. A presentation is only an additional tool for your successful public speech.
And remember, you do not have to deal with the design of the presentation, especially when time is running out. Professional designers have already cared about a unique template for you. Be assured that the slides of any presentation can always be easily correlated with your company.
PowerPoint Presentation as an Effective Tool to Promote Your Brand
Modern market realities create a situation in which competing companies are forced to fight for the buyer.
Before making a large purchase, people check not only the characteristics of the product, but also they look at the brand. Therefore, the creation of a marketing concept for the promotion of goods and services should be the essential step of the company.
Today brand promotion on the Internet cannot do without creating an optimal image on third-party resources. The company should periodically publish information about itself, declare its products, eliminate negative comments and opinions, and get the brand appeared on the top of the search results. For this purpose, special platforms and other authoritative resources are used to attract attention, increase sales, and bring the business to a new level.
Moreover, participation in seminars, exhibitions, specialized presentations, and so on work fine to promote any business. In order to maintain the reputation of the brand, owners of large organizations take part in charity events and become sponsors.
A presentation is still a powerful tool for any project, and no matter what you are talking about — annual financial statements or a new product.
Pay attention to a few life hacks on how to make a stunning presentation to promote your brand.
Formulate the main value for the client on the first slide: The person should see your first slide and understand: "Wow! That is exactly what I wanted! I just have to watch this presentation to the end.”
Do not use the same slides: If you have 10 identical white slides, throw them away, and redo everything. All slides have different functions, a different type of content, and you need to think about what content to show and illustrate.
Insert photos: People love photos.
Use contrast: The whole design is actually built on contrast. Make big numbers or words. By changing the size and color of the font, you can effectively focus your audience’s attention on the important information.
Add air to your slides: Design is not only about objects, but also about the free space between them, which helps to quickly understand the content.
A presentation today is the language of communication in business. And you have to learn to speak this language.
Presentation and Career Development
The development of modern society takes place in the era of information technology, which is characterized by the use of information technology in many areas of human activity.
Multimedia tools allow to present the material in the most accessible form, based on various pedagogical principles, such as interactivity, individualization, accessibility, visibility, etc. One of the most accessible and widespread software products used in the educational process is PowerPoint.
Besides education, the same techniques are used in other areas. In the industrial sector, it is widely used as a presentation of data for persons in leadership positions.
Its importance for medicine is especially great. Doctors now have a unique opportunity to have a quality training through virtual operations. Software developers use multimedia in various computer simulations.
Depending on the fields of use and functions of these technologies, goals setting is quite obvious. Each industry has its own goals and objectives, the achievement of which allows to improve through the multimedia.
Thus, the tasks of presentation technologies in the educational sphere are based on improving the efficiency of the educative process. In advertising, the main task is to achieve the goals, convey information to the audience, and promote the product or service in this way.
Finally, with the help of PowerPoint presentation, you can feel free to showcase your skills and achievements and impress your boss.
Final Thoughts
The information presented by the multimedia presentation in MS PowerPoint is quickly assimilated by reducing the text part and replacing the verbal descriptions of the object with bright illustrations, visual diagrams, and graphics.
Such presentations are used in advertising campaigns to present business projects, information about products and services, software products, and technologies. They successfully combine the capabilities of the reference book, booklet, catalog, and prospectus combined. With the help of a well-made presentation, you can attract new customers and increase the income of the company. Electronic presentations are often used for visual support of reports, school works, etc.
I hope you will find this article and tips useful. Practice! Get ready! Rehearse! Go ahead! And you will agree that a clear and colorful presentation is the hallmark of your professionalism.