März 22, 2016
You should provide clear objectives and key messages in your presentation. Listeners want to understand why they should pay attention to you and what advantage they can gain from it. The key messages must be like a red thread through the presentation to ensure that they are truly understood. Therefore, used language to formulate the key messages should be easy to understand. They should be catchy, original and easy to remember and possess the qualities of good advertising slogans. Ideally, even a mental image arises connected to an emotion and both together act as a strong memory-anchor.
A few examples of this:
Another important aspect is a clear formulation of the practical utility for your audience. What will happen if they follow your advises? What are the benefits that your speech offers? Avoid any vague formulations such as “could” or “probably”! Thereby you are diminishing your statements and attenuating them up to ineffectiveness.
Unique key messages about the expected benefits are transmitted to the audience directly and generate interest automatically. Therefore, they should be completely clearly formulated. Examples:
Note the correct placement of the key messages in your presentation. If you speak for half an hour and leave until the last minute “the cat out of the bag” to explain why your speech was so important, the effect will probably dispel. Your audience will probably be thinking about the next lecture or on the way home. Therefore, give at the beginning of your speech already a glimpse of what your audience can expect. Awaken the curiosity by giving some key messages from the very beginning of your speech and promise to explain its accuracy step by step. Look at the central key messages of the red thread and make sure that your key messages accompany small highlights within your presentation for the public.
Matthias Garten is an expert of multimedia presentations. He is businessman, speaker (TOP 100 Speaker), trainer (TOP 100 Excellence Trainer), author of various books, presentation coach (presentation training), a member of the GSA and the club 55, organizer of the presentation conference, the presentation bootcamp and presentation rocket day. In addition to PowerPoint and presentation trainings, he inspires and advises companies to present themselves in a more effective way and to stand out as competitors. He is proprietor of the presentation and PowerPoint agency Smavicon Best Business Presentations and has created with his team since 1993 over 10,000 presentations for over 150 industries.