Your audience defines your presentation. It determines your presentation’s tone, style, content and
delivery. For this reason, you’ll want to consider your specific audience before putting together a slide deck.
For example, a pitch deck is often presented to a potential client or investor to sell a brand. A presentation reporting on data, on the other hand, is typically given to a department or a CEO to convey data findings clearly.
That said, there are certain questions you need to ask yourself about your audience before you put together a presentation:
- Who is your audience?
- What is their role?
- Why are they listening to you?
- What do they need to know?
- What do you need from your audience?
Fortunately, you can utilize PowerPoint presentation services from Stinson Design or any professional design agency to craft a slide deck that suits your unique needs. This way, all you’ll have to do is concentrate on your speech delivery and connecting with your audience.
Read on to learn about the different types of audiences and how they can impact a presentation’s content, design and delivery:
Co-Workers
According to Entrepreneur, your average business person sits through 23 hours of meetings a week. These meetings typically involve a presentation that is reporting on data or providing an update on findings.
That said, if you are delivering a presentation in a boardroom meeting, you’re going to want to keep it short, concise and to the point. You don’t want the information you are presenting to blend in with all the other content that was presented to your boss or co-workers that same week.
When creating a slide deck for your in-office audience, you will likely also want to include a re-cap slide reiterating findings, successes or losses from last month. It’s a good idea to jog your audience’s memory because, again, they’ve sat through a lot of these meetings.
These types of regular reporting-based presentations can be made that much more streamlined with the help of a custom template made by a professional PowerPoint design agency. With a custom template, you can swap out data and information on a regular basis as new findings are logged and interpreted. After all, it’s essential that your information is organized when you share it with your audience.
Investor
Presenting a pitch deck to a potential investor? Your presentation will need to succinctly convey all essential information about your company. Unlike with coworkers, you likely won’t see this investor again — unless you truly sell them on your brand.
While co-workers may have knowledge of data findings from months prior, an investor knows little (or nothing) about your brand. For this reason, you need to make sure no questions are left unanswered in your pitch deck.
It’s important that you align your pitch deck with your branding guide, so that your colour scheme and other stylistic elements are a consistent reminder of your company, and the services or concept you are selling.
Event Goers
If you are preparing for a keynote speech, you are going to want to keep your slides concise and image heavy. Let’s be honest — no one from the back will be able to see a block of text.
Anything you put on your slides for this type of presentation should be visible from the back of the room. In these cases, you are going to want to make sure core information is conveyed in your speech and that your slides are complimenting your point.
If you want to display data to back up a point, however, use visually engaging images and easy to understand graphs that are clearly visible.
Work with a professional PowerPoint presentation design company with specific experience designing slides for keynote speeches to make sure you are giving this particular audience exactly what they need. When you have a room of people ready to listen to you, you want to deliver a presentation that keeps them listening.