Most presenters use PowerPoint for their presentation slides, however many presenters make quite a few mistakes. They make their slides too wordy, don’t add enough images. The audience then just ends up reading the slides instead of listening to the presenter. The presentation is then not interesting and of course the audience starts yawning, walking out or switching off the webinar well before you get to your sales pitch. Here are a few key things that you should add to your presentation slides to induce greater engagement and keep your audience wanting more:

Less words, more images to your presentation slides

This is simple and effective. Don’t add your whole speech to your presentation slides, make the wording on the slides simple with lots of images. If you had to give out a truckload of information, then you could have just handed out a book or a digital white paper. Why would you pile on information in the presentation slides? A presentation is about your engagement with the audience and you, not that of the audience with the PowerPoint presentation slides.

Set the agenda at the beginning of the presentation

Tell the audience at the beginning what they are going to get out of your presentation. Get them excited and engaged from the start, include a funny quip if you are humorous but the main trick is to get your audience engaged from the very start.

Make your presentation slides enticing

Your presentation slides must be enticing. They cannot be just slides loaded with three to five points talking about two or three numbers and a handful of facts. PowerPoint presentations should have images, videos, audio effects and evoking stories that would make the facts relevant and fun to learn. If you bore your audience with a humdrum of presentation slides, then the first casualty would be engagement and the second would be the whole purpose of the presentation.

It’s not just about the slides

You are the expert in your field! Give your audience facts, give them information, give them quality content! Make them want more! This doesn’t need to be listed on the presentation slides. Show them with videos, share your screen if you are working through software examples or use other visual cues. You can even set up interviews with other experts!  Get your audience engaged with many different visual cues, it doesn’t just have to be on a set of presentation slides!

Ask questions

The job of conveying the message is yours as a presenter and the presentation slides are only there to set the mood. But don’t make the presentation a one way or a one dimensional discussion. You need to consider multiple views or the possibility of other opinions. As you present your facts and the information, raise questions with your audience and engage your audience to answer those questions. While you would have slides concluding with facts, have slides that raise objection, shed light on contrasting views, to set the agenda and to make space for discussions which will allow your audience to get involved.

Call to Action

At the end of your presentation, have an explicit call to action, use your business logos and contact details effectively and conclude with key takeaways. Once you are done with your presentation, encourage questions and have backup slides that would be answers or illustrations responding to those questions. You should be able to anticipate some of the queries while preparing the PowerPoint presentation slides.  Another option is to send out for the questions earlier.