Inside Small Business » 2008

The Perfect Presentation Part 2: Content is King

Inside Small Business | June 25th, 2008

Lindsay Lake

Without valuable, relevant content you will lose your audience.

Before sitting down to develop your presentation content, sit back and picture yourself as the listener. What do you want to hear, to see, to walk away with? Here are some basic tips for improving your content, to make sure your audience gets what they need:

Start simple: It’s very easy to assume everyone knows about the topic and rush right into the meat of your sale. However, most of the time, your audience will need to be introduced to the topic with a brief overview of the background.

Make an outline: Creating a template to work from will help you stay focused. It will also help you to keep a steady flow through your presentation.

Pare down as much as possible: Take the outline you just wrote and remove the extra data that isn’t relevant to your end goal. Overloading your audience will only confuse them. In addition, your audience will always thank you for ending a few minutes early, instead of late.

Know all you can about your audience: Being able to relate the content to your audience will help them stay engaged. Using stories and examples they can relate to will create a bond and a reason for them to stay tuned.

Substantiate: Using information from a third party, graphs created from outside studies or references will help give you credibility with your audience. This credibility not only helps make it easier to tell your story, you also give your audience an unbiased reason to believe in the detail of the presentation.

Keep these tips in mind for your next presentation, and keep your audience in touch. During the following weeks I’ll be digging into tips on improving your graphics and technique. Stay tuned to learn more about improving your presentation to improve your business. And, if you’d like some more ideas before the next issue, please visit my blog, Presentation Perfect.

Author: Lindsay Lake, Presentation Perfect, lindsay.lake@gmail.com