How to make a beautiful Presentation – Part 1

Today I wanna talk to you about, The 6 Things You Need to Do Before You Create Your Presentation. So here’s a thing, what most people do when they create a presentation is they jump right into it. They open up PowerPoint or any other program they’re using and they start putting together the content, the slides and images randomly.

That doesn’t end up with a good end result. So what I’ll do in this case is I’m gonna divide this video into 3 parts.  Part I, is gonna be about this episode, The 6 Things You Need to Do Before You Create Your Presentation. The brainstorming, define your audience, story line and so on.

And the next one is going to be about actually creating your presentation. Putting the slides together, the color scheme, establishing your theme.

And in the last but not least is going to be bringing it all together which I’m gonna be talking about consistency and basically just you know, finalizing your compelling presentation. Okay, so let’s get started.

1. Brainstorm

First item is brainstorm, as I mentioned. Whenever you’re creating or presenting something creative, you want to first start with brainstorming.

What that allows you to do is to get your creative juices flowing.  By sketching things out in an informal way, you kind of let the ideas pour in. I personally like to use pen and paper. There’s something about being able to write things, being able to scratch things, being able to you know, fold it and throw it away and then bring other things into place, it allows you to through process of elimination come up with a better and compelling presentation.

The other part is mistakes are welcome when you’re brainstorming and that again it allows you to come up with a better end result.

2. Define your audience

The second part is to define your audience.  When you are presenting to your audience, you have to understand who your audience is, what their needs are, you know, what is the style and the vocabulary, the type of images that you wanna use that actually pertains to your audience.

Are they scholars?
Are they Businessmen?
Are they investors?

Will they have a short or long attention span?  (of course, most people have a short attention span when it comes to presentations) We’ll get to that a little bit later.

And you want to think a little more broadly. Because in the real life when you’re presenting, you’re in school, you’re gonna be presenting to a certain age group and certain very specific audience. But in general outside of that, often your audience instead of saying they’re gonna be one type of very specific person or individuals, you actually have to create user persona.

The user persona embodies a type of people you’re gonna be talking to. It allows you to tell them your arguments with strong evidence, you’ll be appealing to their interest and their concerns as a whole.

And last but not least, you wanna kind of stick to 3 main arguments, if you have too many, you won’t be able to support them with enough evidence and the presentation way too long.

3. Define your goal/purpose

Number three is defining your goal and the purpose.  This is a very important part of presenting because you’re going to be doing everything but at the very end, you actually have to have a purpose.

What is it that you’re trying yo do?
That’s the conversion process. The conversion is the ending of the presentation.   I like to compare that to let’s say when you walk into a store, retail stores are made in the way that they welcome you in, they give you a certain type of experience, find the products that you want and through discounts and certain other incentives, that you’re kind of enticed with, at the end of the day, you walk with a certain number of items and you purchase them and that is the conversion.

So your presentation should be the same thing. There’s gonna be a conversion, and there will be an end result with it.

4. Define your setting

Now, let’s go to the next one, defining your setting. The medium they’re gonna be presenting in, you have to understand up in order to create the presentation that appeals to that environment. So, where are you gonna be presenting? Is it a seminar, a school? Is it for webinar or is it a video, the slide deck that’s behind me. That’s actually created for purpose primarily for video. It would have been a little different if I was doing let’s say a webinar or seminar and so on.

5. Define your story

Defining your story is also important. In fact, a lot of presentations and the people who create them, they don’t match to it being a story.

It’s an actual journey from the start to a finish. If you can attach a story to your presentation, you can have a bit more memorable experience. Ask most people, the last presentation that they remember. Most likely they’re going to remember something about a certain story about it, not so much the depth of the content.

If you can actually attach certain points into that story, you’re going to have a much more memorable presentation. And with that said, your story, of course, there’s a start and there’s an end.

You’re taking the user from a certain experience, you’re taking it from a certain destination from point A to point B.

But that doesn’t mean that it has to be a linear experience, it actually you know, straight roads are boring. So you wanna actually have curves. And through that it allows you to have a much more compelling presentation with your audience.

And of course, it’s absolutely you know, one of the great things you can do in a presentation, you can emphasize it enough to have a surprise.

The element of surprise, helps to kind of introduce some excitement, catch your audience off guard. It may just be a Gif, or a certain type of imagery, it might be a comical thing that you throw in.  It just kind of helps to create a better compelling presentation.

6. Create an outline

Once you have all of those in place, you have an understanding that now you can create your outline.  Then what you want to do go to your computer, word processor and so on and start typing things in.

But, don’t get too far. Stick to the main points.   You’re not writing a book, you’re just outlining the main key points and the supporting ideas because you are going to be filling the gaps. When you’re presenting, most of the talking is gonna be done by you, therefore your presentation slides are just a medium in terms of supporting your points.

Let’s go through another experiment.   You have to tell it like a story. And as I mentioned, stories need to be memorable and so you want to start with an introduction.  And next, this is actually going through a process of how it’s done in theater, there’s a certain process that you go through telling stories.

There’s a rising action and that’s where you actually create suspense and tension in narrative. And then you go to the climax. A climax basically is where the tension which is the highest level and then you go to the falling action and in that case what you’re doing is you know, it’s the main problem that story is resolving. So the main problem of the story is resolved.

And last but not least is the resolution that’s the conversion, the end point of it.

Here we are,  the 6 things you need to know before you create a compelling presentation.

Put these simple pointers to work and let it marinate.

In the next episode I want to talk about, creating your theme and slides and the color scheme. We’re going to have a lot of fun with that.

See you guys on the next episode!