It is essential to learn to breathe, whether before or during the presentation.
This means taking 1 or 2 good breaths just before you start, but also giving yourself time to breathe during your presentation.
Most failures during presentations, meetings…. come from the fact that the person talks without breathing, and in the end he suffocates!
Remember that if for you a silence can last for a very long time, for your listeners it passes very quickly.
So on the contrary, take your time to breathe between the sentences and slides, it will give more impact to your speech and implicitly it will give a signal when they have to listen to you.
At the same time, you must convey a message through a modulation of your voice: knowing p-r-e-e-n-d-r-e s-o-n t-e-m-p-s… and leaving gaps in your speech to let the audience think.
Do not hesitate to repeat and hammer the strong ideas of your speech to get the message across by insisting on a key word.
Remember that it is easy to forgive a person who has difficulty speaking out for shyness, stress… but not for people who make inaudible or incomprehensible presentations.
Marketing advice: Modulate your voice!
What characterizes a good presenter is the ability to make silences and modulate his voice.
Indeed, there is nothing more soporific than a monotonous and monotonous voice.
It is therefore necessary to vary the intonations throughout the presentation: to put enthusiasm, to take the tone of explanation, to question…
It’s almost like acting, preparing some “tricks” to do during the presentation: puns, pretending to ask yourself a question and asking the audience what they think, adding a silence after a question or a key point, repeating terms to hammer an idea, talking fast and then talking more slowly…
Of course, it should not be abused, but it will allow your interlocutors not to be bored and to stay tuned to your presentation.
To convince yourself, look at the shows of Standup, comedians… you will see that systematically they ask a question to the audience (ex: who does…), that they take “scapegoats” in the first rows…
This technique keeps the room awake because the audience will be afraid of being caught in the next question, so it will force them to keep their attention. For further details, read more here.
Marketing Tips: Use a customized and consistent PowerPoint presentation template.
A major sign of amateurism for a powerpoint presentation is not to have a powerpoint presentation model in your colors….
However, it is very simple to make your model.
Just take a free image editing software such as Picassa, Paint, or Photo Filter, then:
– Create an empty image with a white background measuring 1024 x 768 pixels.
– Add on the left a border of about 10 to 15% of the window with the dominant color of your logo.
– Add a bar at the top always with the color of your logo about 15 to 20% of the window.
– Add your logo at the bottom left or top right.
– In the center use a light color of your logo, or lighten the color of the border. Note: Alternatively, use a different coloured strip on the right and left, and leave white in the centre.
Here is an example:
Add a cover page with the major color of your logo without the bars and you’re done!
Once this template is established, set up a consistency between the font size (no more than 3 or 4 sizes in total), the font (1 type of font, maximum 2), the bullets (nb: use the advanced templates by clicking on the “Images” button in the “Bullets and numbers” dialog box of the Format Bullets and numbers menu).
Note: now 16:9 format presentations are the norm, so prefer this to the classic format.
Marketing Tips: Stay neutral if you don’t have the floor.
When several speakers have to speak, they may be placed on a “stage” in front of the audience.
However, we often see a total relaxation, or even speakers yawning outright during the speeches of others.
Of course, this has a very negative impact on the whole conference (see section on non-verbal communication).
It is therefore necessary that all the speakers remain attentive and do not hesitate to agree with the presenter’s comments in order to reinforce the speech (no cigarettes, no crossed legs…).
Ideally, the speakers should rather be in the front row of the room and go on stage only when necessary.
