Whether you’re presenting for an audience of five or a hundred, you need to learn how to capture their attention to get your message across. The best presenters have a lot of experience and have finely honed their skills. 

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Not everyone is gifted with the power of persuasion. But with these simple tips, you’ll learn how to capture your audience with a persuasive presentation. 

Beginners and experts alike will want to find the best way to avoid delivering bad presentations. From the designing phase all the way to the actual discussion, both cases will want to make a memorable presentation. 

Persuasive PowerPoint presentation is more than just creating a beautifully designed and cohesive presentation with impactful Powerpoint themes.

In this article, we will share with you the tips on how you can create a persuasive presentation. 

We will be grouping the tips into three parts:

1. Things you need to do before making a PowerPoint presentation
2. Creating and designing your PowerPoint presentation
3. Delivering the presentation to your audience

So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Things you need to do before making a PowerPoint presentation 

A persuasive PowerPoint presentation is more than just creating a beautifully designed and cohesive presentation.  There are a lot of things that you need to consider beforehand:

1. Set a Goal and Work Your Presentation Around It

What is your goal with your presentation?

You need to know what you want to achieve with your presentation. This will help you determine its structure:

• Are you convincing investors to fund your project?
• Are you trying to sell products or services to a group of potential customers?
• Do you want your audience to support your charitable causes?

Whatever your purpose is, you’ll need to set your mind to it. Create a presentation flow depending based on your goal. Let’s use a sales presentation as an example.

2. Know your audience

Knowing your audience seems to be one of the most overused tips for creating presentations. There’s a reason for that. It has always been, and still is,  one of the most important things you must do.   

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You wouldn’t want to put together a presentation using coding jargon for an audience who has zero knowledge about coding. You must consider these factors about your listeners:

• Age group
• Occupation
• Socioeconomic status
• Gender groups
• Related interests

You can know this by doing your research beforehand. You can get a list of the attendees or ask the coordinator of the event about the audience. 

By knowing your audience, you can prepare for the type of tone, mood, and language you’ll need to use with your listeners. Will you be presenting in front of an international audience? If so, how are your language skills and how can they be improved?

The end result is a detailed analysis of the general demographic. Having this at hand will give your presentation that extra advantage when it comes to relatability. 

3. Know your venue

Besides your audience, the venue where you’ll be presenting also plays a key role in your success. Are you going to be in a large hotel conference room? Will you be in a small business center where your audience sits relatively close to you?  

Here are a few points to consider when selecting your venue:   

• How large is the space of your venue?
• Where will the audience be seated?
• Will it be an open area or a close-spaced venue?
• Would you have some space to walk around?

You can search online for photos and ask the event coordinator for additional information about the venue. 

Being fully informed will place you in a great position and at best advantage to know and reach out to your audience as well as interact with them. Remember, with strategy every little detail counts.

Creating and designing your PowerPoint presentation

Often the part that takes the longest. What people forget to consider with this phase is how well it would run with the branding strategy. Here is where you can put your creativity into action:

1. Make use of amazing PowerPoint templates

PowerPoint templates unify your slides and allow the main content points to be the focus of your presentation. However, to keep your presentation from looking generic, stay away from the built-in and basic PowerPoint templates. 

Fortunately, there are many free PowerPoint templates for all types of presentations that you can use on your slides. 

Below are some amazing breakfast templates samples from FPPT.

You see, the design phase doesn’t have to be as expensive or as much of a headache. The trick is finding the right approach in bringing your message to the audience. 

2. Control your timing and duration with animation

Animation is one of the most frequently used features in PowerPoint. Many know how to use PowerPoint animation, but what many don’t know is how to best utilize this feature.

Once you know where to add the animation, it’s time to understand when to animate. And in this case, timing is everything!  

Animations are ideal when you want to highlight the content of your presentation. Both the duration of your animation and its timing are important. 

You can find the animation setting in the Animation window and you’ll need to time your animation as slow or as fast as needed depending on how you project your content.   

3. Transfer MS Excel data to MS PowerPoint

Undoubtedly, making a table is much easier to make in MS Excel because of the cells that form a ready-made table. For example, if you are to present financial reports in PowerPoint, you will want to input accounts and their value on MS Excel. 

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to transfer those data from MS Excel to MS PowerPoint. And fortunately, it is a total time-saver.

In MS Excel, select the cells that you want to copy in MS PowerPoint then click the Copy button. 

Then on MS PowerPoint, click the Paste button and select Keep Source Formatting. 

The table on your MS Excel will be pasted to your slide.

4. Use videos as slide background

Oftentimes, we use pictures as slide backgrounds which can provide a personal note and point of connection with your audience. It’s a reliable way to get your audience interested. 

But did you know you can also use videos as slide backgrounds? If you already have a video on your PC, you can insert it directly. 

However, there are also websites where you can get free stock videos such as Pexels, Coverr, Pixabay, and more. Just drag and drop the video on the slide. Then, resize it to fit your specs.

You can also loop the video if it’s too short to play through your slide’s entire discussion. On the Video tools menu, click on Playback then select Loop Until Stopped.

Delivering the presentation to your audience

1. Present Evidence, Facts, and Proof

You can’t persuade someone if you don’t have the facts. The same goes for PowerPoint presentations. How can you inform when you don’t have the facts to back it? You can’t base it on a hunch, right?

These three essentials are necessary in illustrating your important points:

• Evidence
• Facts
• Proof

Mind you, people will listen more to presentations that are well-researched. Don’t forget to mention and reference your sources in your slides. If there’s an important claim that you want to prove, support it with evidence. 

If, at the beginning of your presentation you have asked your audience for some survey questions, include those findings. Transform your collected data into custom PDF files to include in your slides. This way, you will have a base of reliable facts and real-time evidence to prove a point.

2. Be Interactive: Let Your Audience Participate

The key to persuading your audience with your presentation is to make sure that your presentation is engaging from beginning to end.

To give you an overview of how an interactive presentation works, it’s something like this. When you click on specific content on your slide, a pop-up box will appear that will display important facts. Or you can jump to another slide to further support your claim.

Interactivity definitely changes the way you present and engage with your audience. It is a non-linear way of presenting and creates a personal experience with your audience.

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3. End With a Call-to-Action

Call-to-actions are the best way to invite your audience to act and do something after your presentation. It is a driving force that motivates action and change. A call-to-action establishes the purpose of your presentation. Without it, your presentation may lack purpose. 

A good call-to-action must challenge your audience and help shape their perception.  It could be a clickable button that would lead to your website or texts. Some commonly used call-to-action texts are: 

• Sign-up now!
• Read this.
• Buy now
• Add to cart
• Follow my social media accounts

Conclusion

One thing to remember is that in order to create a persuasive PowerPoint presentation, you will have to carefully consider your message from start to finish. Will it run parallel with my brand’s message? Does it contain the right information?

A well-researched, beautifully designed PowerPoint and a well-prepared presenter adds up to an amazing presentation. Following a few design blogs might help spark your creativity.

Let these tips on the best ways to fully engage your audience be your guide to a presentation they will never forget!