Top 5 Ways To Make An Impact With Your Work Speech Or Presentation
If you have an important, lengthy and complicated work speech or presentation coming up in the next few weeks or months, or else have arranged a meeting of potential investors or clients where you are solely tasked with convincing them to invest in your company, then you will naturally want the presentation to go as smoothly as possible.
With this in mind, continue reading to learn of the top five ways to make an impact with your work speech or presentation.
1. Engage Your Audience
One of the easiest changes to make to your presentation style is to practice engaging the audience when you are speaking, instead of staring out into the middle distance like a performer on stage.
Eye contact is one of the quickest ways to involve individual people in a group and be sure not just to look at people in the eyes who are sitting in the front row and to cast your eyes across the entirety of the group at regular intervals.
2. Start As You Mean To Go On
Starting a speech in the right way will set the tone for the entirety of the presentation, so be sure to begin confidently and loudly with some ‘ear-catching’ sentences to instantly ensure focus and attention from everyone listening.
Stand in the center of the space and not to the side and ensure your body language is open and relaxed, always looking out into the audience rather than at notes in your hand or the screen on the wall.
3. Work With A Clear & Concise Structure
Just as a scriptwriter begins setting out their story by dividing the tale into a beginning, middle and end, incorporating points in the journey such as a story catalyst and a crescendo, so should you plan and organize your presentation using a clear and concise structure.
Immediately after your engaging introduction, it is important to reveal the upcoming structure of your presentation, mainly by stating the key points you intend to cover within your speech. Within the main body of your presentation, move smoothly from point to point, and try not to refer back to an earlier point as this may ‘muddy’ the clarity.
4. Work On Meaningful Headlines
Instead of giving your key points within your presentation simple and practical headlines when introducing each topic, make them snappier and enticing by using words which catch the attention of the people listening.
Ensure your headlines are both concise and enticing and don’t use formal business language. Remember to accompany each headline with an eye-catching relevant visual image.
5. Ensure There Is Relevancy To Your Audience
The final, but just as important, way to infinitely improve the impact of your work presentation is to tailor-make the way you reiterate the information to suit the people who are going to be listening.
Important considerations when working on molding your speech to suit the attendees include analyzing their motivations for attending and what they are hoping to learn from your presentation and including elements to reflect this within the body of your speech.