3 Steps to Your Best Presentation Content
You’ve been tapped to present to some pretty big fish. No big deal. You’ve got this knowledge down like the back of your hand. Now all you need to do is get it all down into PowerPoint, right? Almost. There’s an art and a science to effective content structure in presentations. I’m going to walk you through three easy steps to share your best knowledge in the best way with your audience.
Why do I need to care about this?
No matter how beautiful and branded your slides are, if your content is off-base, you’re wasting your time. Crowding your presentation with extra information can confuse your message and lull your audience into that boredom we all want to avoid.
You want your audience to track with you as you speak, to be nodding along in agreement and taking notes on what you’re saying. It’s the presentation dream.
Step 1: Define Your Purpose
So how do you determine what your purpose is? Start by looking at why you were asked to present and what your goal for the presentation is at the end of the day.
Are you launching a new product? Do you need to prove success in a business metric to your superiors? Maybe you want to educate the masses?
Presenting the same topic with these different goals will yield very different presentations. Focus your content to fit your purpose. Let’s look at this a little closer.
You probably know a whole lot about your topic. You probably know more than your audience. Hence, the presentation. I have a news flash for ya: they do not NEED to know all the nitty-gritty that you know. And they likely don’t want to (more on that in a moment!).
This is actually fantastic news for you. It’s an opportunity to highlight the best parts of your expertise in an exciting way! You don’t need to feel pressured to include every detail that’s stored up in your brain. What a relief, right?
Knowing your own purpose helps guide your content creation process by giving you an end goal. so you can bring forward your most relevant content. Relevance + purpose = conversion.
Step 2: Speak to Individuals
Now that you’ve defined the purpose of your presentation, narrow down who you are speaking to. Develop your content around what they specifically are going to find value in.
Say you’re speaking to a room full of marketers. Would you want to dive into legal jargon? Probably not. You’ll lose their attention very quickly. What if the situation were reversed? Would lawyers care about the success of a social media campaign? Again, likely not.
Bring your knowledge depth in the areas that your audience wants to know or would benefit from knowing more about.
Having this in the back of your mind allows you to look at each point you want to incorporate and ask yourself: who does this speak to? If it doesn’t speak to anyone in the room, you may consider setting it aside.
How can you figure out who’s in the audience? The best way to determine this is to ask in advance. I guarantee your presentation organizer or host will appreciate the nod to efficiency and be happy to clarify their needs. After all, they want you to be successful and valuable to their audience.
Step 3: Map Out Takeaways
How many key points do you remember from the last presentation you sat through? 1? 3? None? That’s about right.
A fatal misstep in presentation content is treating all ideas like they are your main idea. Studies show that people only remember a few things from presentations and focusing on too many ideas reduces audience retention.
Knowing this in advance, you can intentionally decide which ideas to highlight to up the odds that they walk away with value.
My favorite trick is writing my main goals out on a piece of paper or a whiteboard and filling in my supporting content under each of them.
This accomplishes two things:
It’s a double check for me that my content supports my main ideas. Occasionally, I’ll get attached to a statistic that I love or a quote that resonates but it just doesn’t make sense for my audience in a specific framework.
It helps me balance my content to make sure that each of my main ideas is given equal weight. I want to make sure that my audience won’t hear me talk for 45 minutes about one idea while only briefly hitting two others for a few minutes each at the end.
Simple as that.
There you have it! Three easy steps to your best presentation content. Defining your purpose, speaking to individuals, and mapping out takeaways will set you up to draft engaging and effective content. Next time you are called to present, you’ll be ready to make the most of your opportunity and leave your audience with value while fulfilling your own purpose!
You got this.