Were you ever in a presentation and thought “What the **** is this person talking about?” That this person is doing a monologue on something completely not of interest for you?
In order to create an effective and stimulating presentation, it’s important that you create a dialogue with your audience. That you ask questions during the presentation. That you get feedback from the audience. That you include the audience in the presentation. This is a great thing to do in order to keep the audience involved and active. This will also increase the effectiveness of your presentation. When creating a dialogue with your presentation, here are 3 tips you should consider
1. Start Small
When you want to include your audience in the presentation and you want to ask questions, start with easy questions. For example, when you are doing a presentation on marketing, you could ask them “Have you ever noticed bad advertising that did the opposite of what it was supposed to do? What are examples you have seen?” As the presentation progresses you can ask the audience more difficult and personal questions, such as “What was your biggest challenge in getting through to the customer in your last campaign?”
2. Be genuinely interested
Don’t just ask questions so you can ask questions. You should actually be interested in the answers and perhaps even comment on them a bit. Sometimes the answers might not fit what you have thought of before – but that’s ok. Don’t just go dismissing the answer – maybe other people think the same thing and you might upset many of them.
3. Use the answers for your next presentation
The answers given to you in this presentation are valuable. Perhaps they gave you insight on something you didn’t know before, maybe they gave you a new perspective on something. You can work these answers into your next presentation. Maybe just as a sidenote “An audience member in one of my previous presentations said that…” or even as an anecdote “Someone once told me that… And yes – I never thought about that before in that way!” and so on…
The next video isn’t directly about presenting, but it is very closely related, it is about advertising and consumers. And in this case, the advertiser is failing to create a dialogue between him and the consumer. This applies directly also for the presentation. Failing to create a dialogue between the presenter and the audience can reduce the effectiveness of your presentation significantly.
