Do you know the number one killer of presentations and speeches? Self-indulgence. Holding your audience hostage with long factual speeches or information-heavy presentations is not going to earn you a genuine applause. Bore your audience and their attention will wane quickly. Remember, the longer you talk, the more likely the balk!
Here are some tips to writing a great memorable speech or presentation:
Short and sweet: Keep your messages clear and concise and to a maximum of three to be impactful and allow your audience to process and retain the information. If it’s a presentation keep slides to a minimum of 10, with no more than six words on a slide – talk to your audience, don’t let them tune you out and read your slides instead.
Be memorable: 80% of your speech or presentation should be entertaining – 20% informational. Using shock statistics, humour, emotional videos, story-telling case studies and visual graphics can get your point across while engaging your audience with emotional impact. Considering the human attention span is about 8 seconds, you’ll need to connect with your audience fast and keep them wanting more.
Follow a path: Ensure your speech or presentation has a structure, with a strong opening and closing. Audiences want to know where you’re going and why – so be clear upfront and make sure you stick to it. Veering off on a tangent makes the audience lose faith in you, weakening your message. Respect their time, make a logical journey and they will voluntarily loan you their ears.
Keep it classy: Toilet humour, cheesy images or distracting spinning transitions are better left in the bar or the 80’s than in your presentation or speech. Use professional stock images, engaging videos and large clean modern fonts. Your appearance extends to your presentation.
Connect and humanize: If the audience don’t connect with you, they will not buy-in to your message, so be comfortable, smile, make eye contact and be confident.
Your audience is doing you a favour in giving up their time and attention for you, so make a good impression by keeping it short, leaving them with two or three takeaway messages and entertain, entertain, entertain.
