4 Steps To Create Professionally Designed Presentations

Whether the goal is to educate, inform or motivate the audience, PowerPoint has been a go-to destination for professionals. Be it sales, marketing, or any other department of your organization, PowerPoint has positioned itself at the epicenter of all the meetings. An ideal presentation provides information that is easy on the eyes and engages the audience while demonstrating professionalism and reinforcing a company’s corporate image.

Today, we will talk about four effective tips you can follow to create memorable slides that capture your attention and enable you to get work done.

1. Ready-to-use Templates:

When it comes to creating an effective presentation, one of the first steps is getting your hands on a corporate-grade, professional-looking PowerPoint template. Presentation creators often spend a significant amount of time creating ordinary slides that don’t entice the audience. With ready-to-use PowerPoint templates, you can focus on drafting quality content rather than worrying about slide design or layouts. You can choose a suitable template, fill in the placeholders with relevant content and create a quality presentation in no time.

Say it’s a kickoff meeting to provide a holistic view of the project, you can use a project management template and effectively cover key areas such as project scope, mission & vision, roles & responsibilities, key milestones, and deliverables. Not just that, since these templates are 100% editable, presenters can easily customize the template and play around with slide elements such that the slides resonate with the company’s branding guidelines. Hence, you can boost the integrity of your presentation manifolds.

2. Less Text, More Visuals:

We all have heard that a picture is worth a thousand words! Well, that’s true as our brain processes visual content over 60,000 times faster than ordinary text. Hence, one of the easiest and most effective ways to capture your viewers’ attention is by using carefully curated visual content. There is no denying that text is, and will continue to be important for your slides. However, if you clutter your presentation with never-ending information, you can throw your audience off the track or worse cause the phenomenon of “Death by PowerPoint”. 

The key here is to strategically use graphics that transform the text information into engaging and meaningful illustrations. Apart from capturing the attention of your audience, visuals increase your brand awareness and make your content more memorable while encouraging the audience to share it. If done right, a perfect blend of text and visuals can multiply your audience engagement and generate a far more positive response.

3. Data-Driven Graphs & Charts:

Gone are the days when a presentation was only about communicating a company’s quarterly numbers. Today, brands of all scales are leveraging PowerPoint as a medium to connect with their audience, that too across multiple touch-points in sales and marketing pipelines. Moreover, with the help of data-driven graphs and charts, companies are getting to the gist of the data, identifying patterns, unlocking valuable inference, and creating near-perfect business strategies.

Equipping a presentation with data visualizations such as Scatter plots, Cone Chart, Heatmaps, Pie/Bar Charts & Radar triangles can draw a line between a closed deal or a missed business opportunity. Presenters can leverage advanced visualization not just to project complex data and relationships but to entice the audience as well. Visualize the datasets and find a link between data like never before, use data-driven graphics, today!

4. Follow the 10 20 30 Rule of PowerPoint:

When it comes to ensuring your PowerPoint presentation is effective and doesn’t overwhelm the audience, the 10 20 30 rule of PowerPoint comes in handy. Used by thousands of professionals around the world, the rule helps you create a just perfect slide deck! The rule states that a presentation should not have more than ten slides in total. Further, it emphasizes that a presentation shouldn’t last more than 20 minutes. 

Lastly, it highlights that the font size of text on the slides should be at least 30 pixels. Often presentation creators come up with a slide deck that is either too large or contains too much information for the audience to digest in a single sitting. The 10 20 30 rule of PowerPoint encourages presenters to keep the number of slides less, use text sparingly, and include visuals instead such that the audience doesn’t get bored.

The End Line:

There is no perfect recipe for creating a compelling presentation, we’ve only scratched the surface with the above four tips. However, these are enough to get you to kickstart your presentation endeavors and create a professional and engaging PowerPoint deck.