Preparation

How can I keep my audience engaged and my presentation easy to follow?

Jonas Barre

Learn how to pace your presentation to keep your audience from zoning out.

Avoid these common presentation mistakes.

Look familiar?

Information overload

Too much of the wrong kind of information will overwhelm your audience.

Lack of structure

If your audience can't easily follow your train of thought, they quickly tune out.

No engagement

If you don't regularly recapture your audience's attention, your presentation will fail.

Develop your content in alignment with your audience's needs and your own goals.

Constantly ask yourself if your content is essential to your story.

Too many speakers fail to ask themselves "so what?" when preparing their presentation content. Every piece of your presentation needs to serve a purpose and that purpose is to move your audience closer to where you need them to be.
Your audience's capacity to absorb information is limited, so you need to be very selective about what to include.

Murder your darlings
Even though you might like an idea or section, you need to be rigorous in eliminating certain segments or slides if they are not serving your goals.

Build in little spikes of engagement and interactivity.

Turning your audience into active participants keeps them listening and invested.

You do not want your audience to drift into passivity and slowly tune out. You want to keep them engaged and alert. This is easy in a one-on-one conversation, because you have a fast back-and-forth that sustains involvement. Here are some simple ways to involve you audience in a presentation setting.

Try these simple and effective ways to make your presentation more interactive.

Prompt a moment of reflection

Use phrases like "Think back to the last time you encountered XYZ", "Imagine how this would change your XYZ" or "What is your biggest XYZ" to make your audience personalise your content for themselves.

Ask for a show of hands

Use phrases like "Raise your hand if you have encountered XYZ" or "How many of you have experienced XYZ" to make people reflect on your content and show their involvement to the group.

Prepare a quiz question

You can do this verbally or prepare one or more quiz slides. You can pose open questions or give pre-defined answers. For example, instead of telling your audience "Last month, we processed 25.000 customer tickets", ask them "How many customer tickets did we process last month?".

Request audience input

When you ask your audience open questions, it is easy to lose track of time or drift off topic, so you need to be disciplined here. Ask your audience to share relevant experiences or contribute ideas. The key is to keep it short.

Be a tour guide for your content.

Navigate your audience through your presentation so no one gets lost.

Always remember that your audience has a wildly different perception of your presentation than you. You are familiar with your subject and content, while your audience is most likely to be less knowledgeable and they do not know your presentation, so they do not have the foresight of what is ahead and most importantly, they constantly need to relate your materials to their own situation.

Think of your topic like the neighbourhood you live in. You are familiar with your area and can navigate it effortlessly. Now imagine bringing in someone unfamiliar with the territory. You will have to lead them, make them comfortable and announce your plans along the way. You would use language like "I will now take you to one of my favourite spots, because I want to show you the beautiful view of XYZ", "Let's take this route instead of the other, because of XYZ" and "This is special to me because of XYZ".

Announce your path
At the start of your presentation, you need to provide your audience with a simple sense of direction where your presentation is going to take them. Be careful to phrase it in a way your audience can understand it, such as "First I will introduce the main components of XYZ, then why this matters to you and then how you can apply XYZ in your daily operations".
Comment on your transitions
Along the way, help your audience's sense of direction by updating your position on the path. This is especially important when you are moving from one section to the other or if you a starting a new idea or angle that is different from the previous. For example, "Now that we have covered the main components of XYZ, let's move on to why this matters for our daily operations." More specifically, you can put different sections into relation to each other to help them process your ideas.