Nearly everyone of you may have already suffered from boring presentations at least once. Unfortunately, those kind of presenters, who are only providing tiring numbers and facts, without engaging the audience in any way, still exist. Now, in times of digitalization and innovation, it is finally time to make a change and to revolutionize your presentations! In order to make your presentation successful and interactive, you need to make sure to include your audience and become an entertainer. Check out the following 5 tips that will turn your presentations into spectacular speeches:





1. Know your audience

It doesn’t matter whether you want to sell a product, persuade, inform, or inspire your audience; for any purpose it is important to know your listeners. Only if you are aware of your viewers’ needs and wants you can develop a proper presentation plan. Business men for example obviously have other interests and want to be approached differently than students. However, these differences will not affect your presentation negatively, as long as you know about them and keep them in mind. After making more concrete who your target audience is, you should spend some time to find out which problems they have, what they care about and which benefits they can get from listening to your presentation. Online platforms such as Reddit or Quora are great channels for getting detailed information about your audience. The more concrete your target audience can be defined, the easier it will be for you to draft a story which touches them.





2. Use anecdotes to break the ice

Especially at the beginning of your presentation, it can be hard to come up with a warm start, which is essential to build a relationship with your audience and to continue your presentation successfully. A nice possibility to break the ice can be a personal story. Storytelling is a great way to catch the audience’s attention and make people listen. Apart from guaranteeing an enthusiastic speech, an anecdote makes the listener feel personally connected to you as he gets the impression to know about you and your private background – Jackpot! Of course, it is much easier to find an anecdote after you got to know your audience. As you might already noticed - all points in this list should be used together to form a perfect speech.





3. Use questions

Sharing a story with an audience you know does not automatically make your presentations interactive. Although there is more that you need to reconsider, tricks to come up with ways to make your presentation more exciting can sometimes be really easy. A simple move can be to ask questions. Questions catch the listeners’ attention and make them think about what they’ve just heard. Additionally, they will feel like their opinions and experiences count. Allowing interactions during presentations can sometimes drive the story to a totally different direction than planned. At this point, you should then come back to the central theme of your story.





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4. Use humor

In order to make your audience remember your presentation, make them laugh. Humor is the best way not only to entertain the audience and also to make sure that they’ll remember your words and therefore the content of your speech. One way to use humor is to simply make some jokes in between parts of your presentation, but carefully: If you feel like these jokes appear unnaturally, you can also simply add funny pictures to some of your presentation slides. The only rule that you have to reconsider is not to exaggerate and to stay true to yourself. We all know that humor is very subjective. Therefore, you should try to avoid extreme jokes and humor which could be understood in two or more ways. Always keep in mind that there are many different people in your audience - nobody of them should feel insulted. Try to share your jokes beforehand with somebody and ask them about their comments. You maybe need to adapt some of your jokes afterwards, but it is definitely worth to get feedback prior to your presentation.





5. Use of gesture

The use of body language is still one of the most important presentation skills. Appropriate use of gesture is not only used to underline important facts, but also to engage people and to make your presentation more enthusiastic. Good use of hands as well as use of space are fundamental if you want to reach your audience and make them become part of the presentation.





Beamium wishes you good luck with your interactive presentations! Your browser does not support iframes.

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