What is a good practice while presenting?

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1. Keep your slides consistent.
2. Make it visual.
3. Make your title slide stand out.
4. Show, don’t tell.
5. Have your slides tell a continuous story.
The takeaway
What are 5 important things a presenter must do when presenting?
What 3 things make a good presentation?
What are 4 strategies tips to consider when presenting?
What are 10 qualities of a good presentation?

The marketing priority for small- to medium-sized B2B companies should always be to ensure they are utilizing the web and its global reach before all else. Yet the ultimate goal is to generate leads, create opportunities to engage the customer, and ultimately close the sale. Often this requires face-to-face meetings, product demonstrations, and targeted presentations. In order for your company to really shine at these prospect meetings, you need to be armed with a polished presentation that builds credibility, shows your experience, and conveys a memorable message that doesn't put people to sleep.

Most often, presentations like this are done in PowerPoint slides. Here are four best practices to create a powerful and reusable slide deck, using examples from TREW clients.

1. Design
Hopefully you already have a company slide template, but if not, apply a clean and simple design based on the color palette and font of your brand for visual consistency. Use a minimal header and footer to give yourself plenty of space to maneuver the content as needed.

Testek's corporate slide deck uses a colorful design that matches their website and corporate brand.

2. Content
Two words: reuse & shorten. If your website is current, effectively designed and includes targeted content throughout, use this as your source material, and then convert it into slides for optimal reuse. You already created it on the web - why recreate it again? Create a cohesive story about who are you as a company, what your offering is and the benefits you can provide, and why your audience should care. Instead of providing lengthy bulleted paragraphs to be read verbatim, use large images and short bullets as visual prompts for the presenter. And build your more complex material with multiple slides instead of animations in case your customer wants to print out the presentation.

Silex used dynamic graphics in its corporate slide deck to showcase complex, technical content.

3. Script
Everyone in your company has a different way of describing the same diagram or mission statement, so a script is key to making sure all the presenters deliver the same message consistently and coherently. This also allows you to insert pre-planned pauses to engage the customer, ask about their challenges, and bridge back to how your company has the perfect solution.

4. Customization
After all the work to polish and standardize your message, make sure the presentation is customizable for each audience. A simple tweak you can always do is add your customer’s logo to the title page. To make further customization quick and easy, create an appendix with additional case studies, in-depth technical details, and extra images to personalize the slides for a specific industry or application.

Mechanical Solutions, Inc uses custom images and graphics in its slide deck to appeal to their ideal customers.

For more helpful tips on how to create compelling content targeted towards engineers, scientists and technologists, download our content marketing ebook, Getting Started with Content Marketing.

Most PowerPoint presentations are the worst.

Far too often, the slides are text-heavy and the person simply reads them off. And while there is important information being discussed and employees have the best of intentions of listening, their minds invariably begin to wonder and boredom prevails.

Don’t let that happen. Make your PowerPoint presentations memorable by having awesome slides that enhance your presentation, not take away from it.

In her LinkedIn Learning course Content Marketing: Slides, Instructor Dayna Rothman gave five tips for creating awesome slides that’ll make your PowerPoint presentation stand out. To further help you create great slides, we found examples of SlideShare presentations that embody those best practices.

1. Keep your slides consistent.

Whatever style you pick, you want to keep it consistent throughout the piece. Having one style for one slide and then a different style for a different slide can be jarring to the audience.

Instead, one consistent tone makes the presentation flow much better. If you are doing an internal presentation, it’s best to use a branded template for your decks (and if you don’t have a branded template for your organization, make one).

2. Make it visual.

Nothing makes peoples’ eyes glaze over faster than a text-heavy slide, or slide after slide of just text. Use images, charts, graphs, videos or anything else visual to break up the monotony of words. It’ll also add emotion to your presentation.

A good example:

3. Make your title slide stand out.

This is particularly important if you are using your slide deck as a marketing asset for email, social media or any other channel. But, even if it is internal, you want to have a title slide that stands out.

What does that mean? It means having a visually engaging title page and an enticing title that draws people in.

A good example:

4. Show, don’t tell.

Wherever you can, don’t simply speak to problems. For example, if you were doing slides on a new product or new webpage, don’t simply describe it.

Instead, a far more effective deck would highlight the product or webpage and show off its important features. Along with being more visually stunning, it’ll increase your audience's understanding of exactly what you are trying to accomplish.

A good example:

5. Have your slides tell a continuous story.

The absolutely most engaging slide presentations tell a continuous story, where the audience becomes curious about what’s coming next. While highly effective for stand-alone presentations used in marketing, it’s also a great technique to use for internal presentations with a speaker.

A good example:

The takeaway

Creating great slides is similar to creating any great content. It’s about making it easy-to-digest and visually appealing while telling a compelling story.

These tips from Rothman’s course will help accomplish that, and turn your next PowerPoint presentation from something people have to sit through, to something people get excited about.

Looking to learn more? These LinkedIn Learning courses can help: