5 tips for making your presentation more engaging

Giving a presentation can be difficult, engaging the people who are watching and trying to ensure they are listening and not concentrating on something else can be tricky, especially when people are used to being on their phones!

Try to use your presentation to empower your message, rather than just as notes to read from. Your presentation is there to complement your speech, not be the focus of it.

Show your audience that they are important to your presentation by including them and doing an interactive and engaging presentation! Struggling to think of ways of doing this? These are our top tips!

1. Keep it short
   1. People will lose interest if your presentation runs on and on, especially if it is a subject they don’t know or care much about. Try to keep to the 10:20:30 rules of doing a presentation;
      1. Contain no more than 10 slides
      2. Last for no more than 20 minutes

• Use a font size of no less than 30

2. Add videos
   1. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube alone. Videos are the perfect tool to enhance your presentation. You can make your own videos or use ready-made ones that already tell your story and make your point
3. Tell stories
   1. Don’t speak at your audience, speak to them. Encourage them to become invested in the story you’re telling. People want to know what happens next in a story and are more likely to become engaged with what you have to say. You don’t want your speech to look like you just threw a bunch of information in a blender in no particular order. To avoid rambling, create a strong structure.
4. Ask questions
   1. Engage your audience in what you’re telling them by asking for their experiences, stories or information they have on the topic. This allows people to feel involved and included in the presentation, rather than being spoken at
5. Use props
   1. If you’re giving a product demonstration then props are a given, but you can use props no matter the topic!

Props will help your message go through to your audience and will make it more likely that they will remember the things you tell them.

6. Use (appropriate) humour
   1. Some of the best speeches in the world all feature plenty of humour. It doesn’t matter what you are speaking about, to make your presentation engaging you need to have charisma and humour to convey your points.
7. Practice your delivery
   1. In front of a mirror or to family and friends is the perfect way to get your presentation tip top before doing the real thing!

By practising you will know how the presentation flows and are unlikely to become unstuck by words you are unfamiliar with and will know when a good time is to ask questions to your audience.

Hopefully you’ve found some of these tips to make your presentation more engaging helpful! Let us know in the comments if you have any other tips that you use!