Three Most Important Aspects of an Effective Presentation (2024)

Presentations have become a powerful tool to communicate and present your idea to a large group of audience. There are many other tools like PowerPoint, Prezi or Keynote which are also hugely used and popular for creating a very attractive presentation. But only using tools do not make an effective presentation presentations. It is the way the presenter present along with the presentation makes a very well understandable and efficient presentation. A presentation is successful it effectively accomplishes it’s intended effect.(Gallo, 2013)

There are many aspects to prepare and deliver business presentation successfully and I will be highlighting the three most important elements that make an effective presentation.

1. Understand the Audience: A presentation where the audience is not giving any attention or feeling disconnected with the speaker is the most useless presentation of all. Knowing the audience is the most important aspect of a presentation. The presenter must know if they are friends or colleagues or students or boss or if the audience is public. (Larkin, 2015) After identifying the audience, the context and style of the presentations should align with that. For Example, Presentation that are targeted towards educational purposes should have lots of color and effect because the study shows that for that age group it works better to keep the attention of the audience. But using those in office Presentation would have a negative impact. That is why understanding the audience is a crucial aspect of a good presentation.
2. Clarity & Understandable context: Clarity and easiness to understand the context of each slide decides a successful presentation. A presentation should be free from Jargon, Complex words or buzzword as not all the audience will be aware of such words. (Gallo 2013) A beautiful and effective technique is this aspect used to be used by Steve Jobs for all the presentations that he used to give and it is called “Twitter-Friendly Headlines”. This technique states that when you are preparing for a presentation, the context of each slide and topic should be expressed in 140 characters and it should be understood easily. While preparing a presentation, select those words and topic that have the most impact and create the most value. (Kaye, S. 2017) Sometimes providing images regarding that topic keeps audience focus on what the speaker is speaking while creating a basic imagination about the topic with the picture and that makes a presentation very effective.
3. Delivery and Presentation- To give an effective presentation, it is an absolute must that the presenter is well rehearsed and prepared with what needs to be presented to the audience. Story-Telling and engaging audience with questions are two of the most used and very effective techniques of keeping them focused on your presentation. There are some aspects of the presenters that are very important in this case. They are:

• Positive Body Language and Posture.
• Eye contact to all the audience. Do not look at the slides all the time.
• Clear speech with proper gaps between sentences so the audience can digest the thought.
• An adequate tone of voice. Emphasize the keywords
• Humor and smile while presenting.

Keeping these three crucial aspects of presentation in mind while preparing and delivering will make a successful presentation.

Reference:Gallo, C. (2013, February 22). The Three Basic Secrets of All Successful Presentations.Retrieved October 18, 2017, fromhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2013/02/22/the-three-basic-secrets-of-all-successful-presentations/#47f8d1095fbbLarkin, M. ( 2015, August 4). How to give a dynamic scientific presentation. (Elsevier). Retrieved fromhttps://www.elsevier.com/connect/how-to-give-a-dynamic-scientific-presentationKaye, S. (2017). it's ShowTime! how to give effective presentations. Supervision, 78(5), 8-10.