Why Your Presentation Needs to Flow: The Secret to Keeping Your Audience Engaged”
2 reasons why your presentation needs to flow
- Flow keeps your audience with you: A presentation that flows smoothly is more likely to keep your audience interested and engaged. When there are abrupt transitions or disjointed sections, the audience may lose focus or become lost and confused.
- Flow enhances credibility: A presentation that flows well demonstrates that the presenter has put effort into organizing and structuring their ideas. This communicates credibility and professionalism. It’s one way of saying “you are important to me” in a presentation. When your audience feels your commitment to them, they will want to stay engaged with you.
3 things you need to do to make sure your presentation flows
- Have a clear structure: A planned opening, message delivery, content chunks (3 or 4 maximum) and an obvious closing gives you and your audience a path to follow. It gives the whole presentation experience a clear beginning, steps to follow and a destination.
- Work on your verbal transitions. These are the things you say that link and synchronize your narrative with your visuals (slides). Your transition is spoken just before you advance to the next slide or next animation. You want your audience to experience the presentation, both verbal and visual components, as one thing.
- Make sure that there is one consistent visual theme. Make your audience’s visual experience one thing. Using mismatching images and illustrations, and inconsistent fonts and colors across slides gives a “thrown together last night look”. A pleasant visual experience is another way of saying “you are important to me”.
Presentations without good transitions and mismatched messy visuals can appear to be a series of single slides and disconnected ideas. You want the whole thing to be a single experience.
All the great presentations have a flow. Your audience won’t necessarily comment on a good flow but will notice and disengage from a jerky, disconnected, disjointed experience. It’s challenging to maintain an audience’s connection throughout a presentation. Keeping that connection is much more difficult in online presentations.
Having a good flow will help keep your audiences connected and engaged.