While virtual presentations sit alongside in-person and keynote as their own distinct style, in recent years the lines between each type have become increasingly blurred. Virtual presentations are now the norm, and virtual presenters or audience members are typically present during in-person meetings as well, leading to a new hybrid style of presentation that requires a unique approach to designing slides.
In this guide to creating engaging visual presentations, we’ll walk you through the key ideas, tips, and best practices to help you keep audiences focused on your story no matter where they are!
Start by understanding your audience
Your audience matters: Every presentation should start with a clear understanding of your audience. In the case of virtual presentations, it’s even more important as you aren’t just competing with generally short attention spans, you’re also competing with all the other things happening on their devices.
How to understand your audience: There are two main questions to answer when you assess an audience: 1) who is in the room, and 2) what do they want from your presentation. Of course you can go deeper into your analysis, but at a high level these are the primary questions you need to answer.
Who is in the room can be as simple as the names and titles of the audience. Are they new, or have you previously engaged with them? Are they in sales, marketing, development, etc? Are they high-level executives, or in-the-trenches workers?
Each of these distinctions (and many others) can help you to better understand who you are presenting to, so that you can more clearly answer the second question: what do they want from your presentation?
Different audiences prefer to see different things in a presentation. For example, an executive audience might want lots of data visualization, while a sales or marketing audience might want to see visuals that communicate the brand or product story.
If you present a deck full of brand-focused visual storytelling to an executive audience, you might make it three slides before they interrupt with pointed questions. Similarly, if you go right into the data with a marketing audience, they might tune out entirely.
So understanding your audience isn’t just about knowing what you should say to that person – instead, it’s a way to help you get a handle on how to present your information most effectively. For more help with adapting content for the audience of you presentation, download our free “Understand Your Audience” guide.
Structure your presentation like a story
Stories are the core of communication: Storytelling techniques help you communicate in familiar and relatable ways. They are a clear and relatable way to present information, and help you craft content that is engaging throughout, as opposed to a long list of random slides on a topic.
Techniques for presentation storytelling: The simplest way to format your presentation like a story is to break the content out into three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Seems obvious, right? But few presentations follow this format. Instead, they are typically organized around content chunks: here’s the challenges section, here are the opportunities, here are the tactics, etc.
While this can get the job done, it’s not really helping you to create more engaging content for your audience. Specifically, the problem is this structure lessens the narrative tension that a speaker can create by alternating between opposing ideas.
With a three-part structure, your presentation has a momentum and directionality that keeps it moving forward. For example, if you are walking through the major challenges your sales team will face in the coming year, by chunking all your challenges and opportunities, the tension is resolved quickly.
But if you break each one out and put a little time and focus on the challenge before resolving it, now you’ve created a situation where there is consistent narrative tension that your audience will want to see resolved. This means they have a strong reason to stay focused and engaged, as opposed to quickly reading your slide and then moving on.
These moments of contrast are key drivers of narrative, and help frame your content in more dramatic ways.
Make your virtual presentation slides (even more) visual
Visual slides keep audiences interested: For many old-school presenters, there are only two things on a slide – words, and pictures. Words are essential, and they are what the audience cares about, and pictures are just nice-to-haves. These days, this approach no longer works.
Now, a highly visual slide is the best way to get an audience engaged with your content. There are a few reasons why.
First, content-heavy slides mean the audience will read ahead of your presentation, and they will be done reading before you are done speaking. During that whole time, they haven’t been paying attention to you, and now they are done and you’re still going through the slide. In both of these instances, you’ve lost their focus and attention.
Second, using visual storytelling helps to reinforce your content, not just make slides look prettier. The idea is to choose visuals (pictures, icons, infographics, video, etc) that help to communicate your point and add nuance and detail to your ideas.
Third, visuals are what people are conditioned to look for from brands. From social media to YouTube and beyond, content is becoming more and more visual in all channels. By ignoring this change in audience preference, you are missing an opportunity to speak to them on their terms, which is much more engaging than forcing them to follow an outdated presentation style.
How to make your slides more visual: The easiest way to craft more visually appealing slides is to reduce the amount of content on each. Start by editing your slides to have 50% less content and see if the message is still clear. Remember that the words on the slides are only one part of the equation – images should contribute to rounding out the message, and the voiceover should really drive the message.
For a more visually engaging virtual presentation, your slide content should never be your script. As noted above, if you are just reading off of your slides, your audience can do it faster than you. And if you are simply reading back the slide to them, what’s the point of having a presentation? They can do that themselves on their own time. Instead, the presenter's job is to bring the story together, connecting the words and images on the slide and completing the story with their own voiceover.
So focus on simple, uncluttered slides, with minimal text and thoughtful images.
Get the audience involved
Interactivity is engagement: The biggest challenge with virtual presentations is that you are battling against the entire internet for their attention. When email, online shopping, and social media are just a tab away, it’s hard to get audiences to stay focused on a presentation that isn’t designed for engagement.
How to get audiences involved: While we aren’t advocating for turning presentations into open forums, we do think it’s valuable to find moments in a presentation to get the audience involved in the action.
This could be a poll at the beginning, a pause to ask if anyone has experience with a point you make, a Q&A at the end, or using feedback tools like a poll to gauge engagement.
But be strategic in how you deploy these tools. Overusing audience interactivity can dramatically shift the tone of a presentation, and can disrupt the flow and timing of a tightly-organized story.
Gather feedback for continuous improvement
Great presentations are iterative: The best presentations aren’t typically created and given just one time. They are edited, practiced, refined, tested, and repeated again and again until they are perfect. But without the right feedback, it can be hard to know what areas to focus your efforts on.
How to gather feedback for a presentation: There are a few ways you can ask for feedback from your audience.
First off, you can assess any of the responses and engagement from the interactive elements described above. What questions were asked? What type of interactivity was most effective? These simple points can give you insights on where to focus your efforts before the next presentation.
Polls are another great way to gather information about your presentation. Some presenters will send out a poll after the presentation, but another approach is to share out some follow up materials, like a leave-behind of your presentation or a key infographic, and then embed the feedback form into that communication.
You can also debrief with any of your own teammates who attended the call. Getting feedback on your delivery, any sticking points, and parts that worked well, from a more objective perspective can really help you focus on the places where you can make the most improvements.
Conclusion
Creating more engaging virtual presentations is easier than it sounds, and the return on a rather small time investment that it offers can be huge. Let’s recap the key points:
Start by understanding your audience and the best way to present to them
Structure your content like a story for more engaging slides
Make your slides more visually appealing by removing content and choosing visuals intentionally
Build audience engagement into your presentation
Get feedback from attendees and integrate those changes
By following these steps, you can make your next virtual presentation more engaging and interesting, sharper and more streamlined, and more visually appealing to modern audiences.
Looking for more information about virtual presentations and beyond? Check out our resources for expert advice and tested strategies.
About the author
Danielle John is the founder of VerdanaBold. She has more than 25 years as an award-winning designer and creative lead, directing the visual expression and production of thousands of high-value new business pitches, C-level presentations and internal presentations for major global brands. When she’s not busy at VerdanaBold, she can be found antique shopping and spending time with her husband and two kids.
