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Giving a great presentation takes more than standing in front of an audience and dumping information on them. To truly engage your listeners, make an impact, and have your message resonate long after you’ve left the room, you need to take some specific steps both before and during your talk.
On The Business Storytelling Show, I spoke with Steve Gavatorta, an expert on presentation skills and public speaking, to get his tips on how to give more compelling, memorable presentations. Steve teaches workshops on high-impact storytelling and works with clients to help them “uncouple themselves from their competition” through powerful presentations.
In our conversation, Steve shared his best practices on how to craft and deliver presentations that inspire your audience and make you stand out. Here are some key takeaways from our discussion:
Focus on Making an Impact Both In the Moment and Afterwards
A common mistake people make with presentations is focusing solely on the live delivery and not thinking enough about the impact afterward. As Steve explained, you need to structure your talk so it makes an emotional connection during the presentation, but also sticks in people’s minds long after you’ve left the room.
Steve used a sales example to illustrate his point. When you present to a potential client, you may have their full attention for your allotted 30 minutes. But after you leave, their attention gets pulled in a million directions by daily fires and issues. If your presentation wasn’t memorable or impactful enough, all the value of your message gets lost.
So how do you make sure your presentation has an effect both in the moment and thereafter?
Use stories, anecdotes, quotes: Hook your audience emotionally so they engage with you.
Make it simple and memorable: Your content should be sticky and easy to recall later.
Print handouts, record presentations: Give people assets to reference after the fact.
Follow-up emails: Continue delivering value after your talk is over.
By keeping your audience enthralled during the live presentation and giving them tools to retain the information afterward, you can extend the impact of your talk exponentially.
Uncover the Audience’s Needs, Pain Points, and Interests
One of Steve’s top tips for impactful presentations is to go through a “discovery phase” beforehand where you research and learn about your audience. Too often, presenters just show up and blast information without considering who specifically they are talking to and what that audience cares about.
Your discovery phase can take a few different forms:
Talk to stakeholders and decision-makers ahead of time to get insights directly from them on issues, goals, and opportunities.
Research the industry, company, or topic online to understand pain points and interests.
If it’s an existing team you already work with, draw on your knowledge of their needs.
For large conferences with diverse attendees, look at overall demographics, role types, industries represented.
The idea is to uncover what matters most to the people you’ll be speaking to. Then you can incorporate that context into your presentation to show them you understand their reality and are offering them relevant value.
For example, let’s say you discovered through stakeholder conversations that a particular team struggles with ineffective meetings. You could open your talk with an amusing metaphor about bad meetings, then tie that back to solutions you offer for streamlining communication and alignment.
Making those connections between your content and your audience’s needs hugely boosts your impact because you’re solving real problems for them.
Start Strong with an Engaging Opening
How do you grab people’s attention from the very beginning? Steve suggests opening presentations with a short anecdote, metaphor, or humorous story that engages the audience right away before diving into your main points.
Some examples Steve has used successfully:
- A Harley Davidson quote about how they don’t just sell motorcycles, but an image and lifestyle. This set up his theme of how to differentiate yourself from competitors.
- A funny metaphor about ineffective meetings before presenting solutions for better alignment.
- A relevant industry statistic that shocks the audience and prompts them to listen more closely to what you have to say.
A strong opening draws people in emotionally, sets the stage for what’s to come, and primes the audience to fully engage with your content because you connected it to something that already matters to them.
Give Yourself Time to Practice and Internalize the Material
Ever been asked to give a presentation on short notice? It can be tempting to just slap some slides together at the last minute and wing it. But Steve warned that lack of preparation leads presenters to rely on their emotional brain which triggers stress and fight-or-flight reactivity during the talk.
Instead, he recommends building your presentation gradually over time, reviewing it regularly, and continuing to refine it up until showtime. Here are some tips:
Create an initial outline 2-3 weeks out at minimum. This gives your brain time to organize thoughts. Use artificial intelligence to level up your deck.
Print out slides and make handwritten notes on them about how to deliver key points.
Look at your deck daily for a week or more before the presentation.
Practice telling stories or key anecdotes out loud to get comfortable with them.
Ask someone to listen to you present and give feedback several days prior.
This regular preparation over an extended period of time trains your rational brain so that come presentation day, you operate smoothly and confidently from a place of knowledge and reflection instead of nerves. In other words, you’ve built up muscle memory through practice.
Maintain a Natural Dialogue with Your Audience
Picture a traditionally bad presentation. Someone drones on in monotone about features or financial results, eyes glued to their slides as they rapid-fire bullet points, ignoring the audience. Unfortunately, this presenter-focused, one-way style is all too common.
For a truly engaging talk, think of it instead as an ongoing dialogue with your listeners according to Steve. This means:
- Making frequent eye contact rather than reading off slides.
- Using vocal variety in tone, inflection, volume rather than monotone.
- Inviting audience input through questions and discussions.
- Sharing stories and anecdotes people relate to.
- Monitoring nonverbal reactions and adjusting your pace or content accordingly.
- Feeling the energy in the room and modifying your delivery to maintain interest.
Master presenters read their audience skillfully and adapt in real time to keep people tuned in. They present in an interactive, conversational manner that makes each person feel valued and addressed.
This dialogic approach helps you take your audience on a journey with you, rather than just talking at them. The difference this makes in audience engagement is massive.
Tell Impactful Stories
Within your presentation, look for opportunities to illustrate key points through stories and anecdotes your audience can connect to emotionally. For example, if you are presenting to fellow marketers about improving storytelling skills, you could tell a story like:
“I remember early in my career wanting to improve our email campaigns, so I put together what I thought was a beautiful, artistic graphic-heavy email. When I proudly showed it to our head of communications, she took one look and said ‘This is lovely, but what does it say?’ It was a painful but important lesson that visual flair means nothing if you aren’t clearly communicating your core message.”
This meaningful story with emotional resonance sticks in the audience’s mind far more than a dry statistic about how clarity boosts engagement. Help your listeners relate by pulling from your own experiences for examples. And keep the stories concise enough that they don’t bog down your talk.
Sprinkled strategically throughout your presentation, impactful stories act like glue, binding the rest of the content together in people’s memories.
Simplify Complex Concepts
Many presenters overload their slides with text and launch into complicated processes full of industry jargon. This risks losing or confusing non-expert audiences very quickly.
Instead, look for ways to boil down multifaceted ideas into digestible tidbits for listeners. Steve used the phrase “stupid simple” – simplify concepts down to the essential core that average people can grasp and recall.
Some tips for simplifying:
Break large concepts into smaller component pieces people understand individually.
Use metaphors and analogies to link unfamiliar ideas to common experiences like parenting, sports, etc.
Prioritize explaining the meaning and impact of something over the intricacies.
Give specific examples relevant to that audience rather than abstract theory.
Alternate complex slides with simple visual slides to give brains breathing room.
Repeat key takeaways frequently for reinforcement.
Making presentations simple without being simplistic shows your audience respect by speaking plainly in their language. It also massively boosts memorability when people aren’t overwhelmed.
Wrap Up with Clear, Actionable Next Steps
Don’t finish your presentation and just walk off stage. Take a minute to recap your main ideas and close by giving your audience clear guidance on what you want them to do next.
- Visit a certain web page to download additional resources.
- Sign up for a free trial of your product.
- Schedule a consult with your team to discuss solutions.
- Share feedback through a survey on what resonated most.
- Commit to making one small change in their workflow based on your talk.
- Stop by your booth or connect with you afterwards.
Spelling out action steps reinforces what you want people to take away and implement from your presentation. It also gives them a sense of moving forward into applying your ideas, not just passively listening.
After they leave the room, email a thank you note recapping the next steps as well to aid retention. The more you can amplify the impact of your talk, the better.
Giving presentations that inspire audiences, spark meaningful action, and deliver lasting value is a learnable skill. By researching your listeners’ needs, crafting simple but compelling content, and practicing smooth delivery, you can captivate any room.
Just remember that an impactful presentation succeeds both in the moment during delivery and long after when people recall your message and act on it. Keep your audience enthralled during the live event. Then give them the tools and motivation to carry your words with them.