Effective Ways to Make Your PowerPoint Presentation Engaging and Catchy
PowerPoint slides provide a perfect way to inject visual interests into your presentation. However, if not well prepared, they can spell doom regardless of your experience in PowerPoint presentations.
The ultimate way to succeed in making your PowerPoint presentation engaging and catchy is to make sure that your slides are just but a visual aid and not as read off notes. Your PowerPoint slides should be there to compliment the story or concept you’re presenting and ultimately empower your message.
So, what can you do to make your PowerPoint presentation engaging, interactive, and catchy? By ensuring the slides are there to help you empower your presentation, instead of focusing on them as your notes.
Keep reading as we are going to show you different PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks on how to spice up your PowerPoint presentation to be engaging and catchy.
Basic Rules to Building Engaging and Catchy PowerPoint Presentation Slides
Before we delve into the tips and tricks on ways to spice up your presentation, first, let’s look at the basics of your PowerPoint presentation.
- Write your Speech Outline Before Building the Slides
Keep in mind that your PowerPoint presentation is available to compliment your message and concept you are telling your audience. Therefore, before you write your slides, the goal of your presentation should be at your fingertips, as well as the main takeaways you want the audience to remember. Make your speech or concept your focus, not the slides.
- Use More Images and Fewer Texts
Note that your PowerPoint slides are there as extras to your speech and not distracting you from it. So writing too much text in your slides can not only be distracting but also confusing to your audience.
As an alternative, use more images that are relevant to your speech with minimal text. More importantly, make sure the pictures are of high-quality for clarity.
- Focus on You and Your Presentation, Not the PowerPoint Slide
During presenting, make sure you have full control of your presentation and your audience by walking around while drawing attention to you and whatever you are saying. Occasionally, stand still when referencing information on a slide. However, don’t turn your back to the audience to read your slides. You and your speech are the presentations; the slides are there to aid you!
- Your Presentation Should be Legible from anywhere in the room.
As a presenter, don’t use anything less than a twenty-eight point font size. If you can’t comfortably fit all your text in your side using font size 28, then use more images along with bullet points instead.
Best Practice PowerPoint Presentation Tips
- Use Consistent Presentation Design
The main reason for your PowerPoint presentation is to aid you in conveying information as efficiently and concisely as possible. So keeping the theme and design consistent, you will be allowing your content and images to stand out.
But by varying the theme and design from one slide to another, you will be creating confusion and distraction from the main focus, which are you and your presentation of information on the PowerPoint slide.
Search for an appealing and beautiful PowerPoint Template, which will provide you with a consistent design for your PowerPoint slides.
- Write One Topic Per Slide
Make sure each slide presents one topic or talking point. By doing so, you will be maintaining the attention focused on your speech. And using one PowerPoint slide per talking point makes it easy for you to prepare and present information while allowing your audience to follow along with ease.
- Use the “Rule of Three”
When writing information in your slides, don’t over-explain. Just make it simple and straight to the point. You can do this by using the “Rule of Three.” This concept enables you to stick to 3 main ideas when delivering your message. A PowerPoint concept should be broken into three parts for a further explanation with ease. The parts include:
- Give an appealing structure to your PowerPoint presentation.
- Make it simple.
- Keep your audience engaged.
- Display one sentence at a time
If you must include text in your slides, avoid using a bullet list. Instead, use a single PowerPoint slide for every sentence. Make sure you are short and concise. Bear in mind that simple messages are easy to retain in memory. As such, each PowerPoint slide should follow your speech lines, introducing your audience to each idea while you speak as opposed to listing all your ideas beforehand.
PowerPoint Presentation Tips: Mistakes to Avoid
- Avoid Unnecessary Animations
Is there any need for animations or having transitions in your slides? It is essential to know how to give your texts a sparkle effect in your PowerPoint transitions. Nonetheless, you should entirely focus on the message.
Using simple transitions or no transitions at all, let your content stand out during the presentation rather than the graphics you use.
In case you want to use animations, ensure you use only professional animations that are modern and relevant to help your audience follow your speech or the story you are presenting.
- Add Content the Only Supports your Key Points
If you have a great chart, image, or phrase, and you want to use it when creating each slide, it is vital to ask yourself this question. “Is it of any help to my key point in this slide?” If your answer is negative, remove it. Bear in mind less is more!
- Don’t Use PowerPoint Slides as a Teleprompter
Like we said above, don’t use more text on your slides. In case you want to read something, prepare, and have with you some index cards that you can carry in your hand. However, never turn your back on your audience and read off of your slides, no matter what! If you do this, you make the presentation the main focus and end up losing the audience as a presenter.
- Don’t Give out Copies of Your Presentation
Make sure you don’t give out copies of your presentation, at least not before delivering the presentation. Giving out copies of the presentation allows the audience to get distracted as they will get preoccupied with flipping through them. As such, they will entirely ignore whatever you’re saying.
Moreover, your audience may easily take your slides out of context without understanding the meaning behind every PowerPoint slide. It isn’t recommendable to give out a copy of your presentation but is it helpful to give them out after the presentation is delivered.
PowerPoint Presentation Tips:How to Make Your Slides More Engaging
- Fade to Black when Speaking
I cannot stress enough that your slides are not the focus, but you are. So when you fade to black during the presentation, you can regain your audience’s full attention. For instance, after presenting one idea in the slide, I will fade the screen to black as I expound on how useful the concept is and probably how to apply it in your work or life.
- Write One Story Per Slide
If you have a one-hour speech, you might have around 30 to 40 slides, depending on the story or complexity of the message you’re delivering. Regardless of whether you are presenting statistics, teaching a lesson, or recalling an experience that leads to an idea, make sure you stick to one story per slide!
- Reveal One Bullet at a Time
The trick of presenting text, such as a shortlist of bullets, is to ensure you deliver your point without losing the attention of your audience. To keep your audience, reveal a bullet at a time.
You can do this in PowerPoint by right-clicking on your text box, pick Custom Animation, add entrance Effect, and select the Effect you want. In the Keynote, click Animate then move to build in and choose the Effect you want!
- Change Your Voice Tone When Presenting
Bear in mind that when presenting, it is not all about what you say rather how you say it! To make your PowerPoint presentation more engaging, you must be ready to use all available tools at your disposal to drive the point home.
As such, changing the articulation and tone of your voice will help you make your content and the message more notable.
- Identify and Tell the Story
When you deliver a presentation, you do it to tell a story that has some goals. You are trying to inform your audience about an idea you know and that they don’t. So you should persuasive to them to adopt your view.
As such, you must identify from the beginning, the middle, and the end of what your story seeks to accomplish then take advantage of the slides to deliver your message.
Don’t make your presentation a data dump. But if you seek to present some data, you would be better off calling it off and send out the data to your audience. Bear in mind that you are giving an impression that data cannot provide by itself.
- Use PowerPoint to Amplify and Clarify your Message
The purpose of having your PowerPoint slides with images and text is to provide a visual representation of the message or idea you are delivering. Your visuals are to augment, not repeat your words. PowerPoint slides should aid you in conveying, explicitly, what words cannot.
How to Make Your Presentation More Interactive
- Ask Questions
Asking questions during the presentation process helps to engage your audience, trigger interest, and curiosity. Also, it comes with the added benefits of making the audience pay attention, in case you get called on.
So, don’t hesitate to ask your audience question, even a rhetorical one. Asking a question gets us to engage in a different part of our brain. More importantly, it makes us reflect rather than merely taking in information one way. As such, make sure you ask questions when presenting.
- Embed Videos
Bear in mind that the main objective of your presentation is to pass one or two messages across. As such, it is better to use resources such as short videos in your slides to drive the message home.
A short and relevant video can give you room for breathing as you prepare for the next slide while equally informing your audience on a concept on the current slide. However, be sure to run the video beforehand, and ensure your audience can hear it loud and clear during the actual presentation.
- Use Live Polling to Get Immediate Feedback and Engage the Audience
The use of a live polling tool is a trendy engagement tool among most presenters. The tool allows the audience to participate, engage, and collect instant feedback. A live poll tool offers you as a presenter an interactive platform to engage your audience in actual time while permitting them to take part in your presentations.
Google Slide has a Q&A function, which allows you to make your slide deck more interactive as it offers an answer to your audience’s questions. Therefore, by using the Q&A function in Google Slides, you can begin a live Q&A session, and the audience is open to ask questions directly from their devices like smartphones and mobile phones.
Summary –Effective Ways to Make Your PowerPoint Presentation Engaging and Catchy
Even though all these tips and tricks will help you make your PowerPoint presentation more engaging and catchy, it can only happen if they are applied correctly. As such, be reminded that when you’re trying to make your PowerPoint Presentation engaging and catchy, you must be well-prepared.
Your preparations should include having a thorough research and well-cited and rehearsing of your presentations. Rehearsing shouldn’t just revolve around your slides but also rehearse your delivery style and tone. The more you rehearse, the more relaxed you will be when delivering your presentations. Besides, you will feel more confident!
With design, theme, style, and presentation practice under your belt, you can surely do more with PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint slides applications are versatile tools that you shouldn’t forget.
With great PowerPoint slides, you are on your way to delivering a powerful, engaging, and catchy presentation that your audience won’t forget the message!
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